by Buck Sanders
If it hadn’t been for their fear that Ben would return on a stretcher, both Shauna and Wilma might have found the superman image of Slayton returning from the chase, his attacker softened up and draped across his shoulders almost comic. Of course, once off the ground, Wilma had captured everything with her little Minolta, and she stepped forward now to snap a shot of Slayton, carrying Bassam.
“Gotcha, hero,” she said.
“Jesus Christ, Wilma!” he began, and then she hurried forward and said, out of earshot of the group, “Don’t worry, don’t worry, your mug isn’t going to grace our pages. Your anonymity is secure. This is for my scrapbook.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, rolling his eyes and dumping Bassam onto a stretcher rolled up by two paramedics. He walked immediately over to the ambulance unit, peered in, and saw Ahmed Sadi growling at the men attempting to minister to his arm.
“Goddam stupid incompetent camel-shit idiot,” he screamed. “You’re breaking my bleeding arm!”
“The bleeding is from your arm, which is already broken,” murmured the medic, in a tone which suggested he was treating just the disembodied limb, and not the Arab attached to it.
Slayton flashed his credentials brief. It had become a habit around police to save arguing time. “Doc—what’s the story with him?”
Still not looking up from his work, his hands coated with Ahmed’s blood, the man said, “I am not a doctor. Doctors can diagnose and give injections. They also don’t have to put up with as much horseshit as I’m putting up with now.” He leaned across the berth, bracing Ahmed’s unwounded arm, suddenly speaking with his nose an inch away from the Arab’s. “Listen, you. Any more thrashing and you’re gonna mess up this art work I did on your arm. Cuss me to the dogs and back, my man, but do it in Arabic or I’ll break your fucking jaw. Got it?”
Ahmed, just as suddenly, became quite calm. “I like you,” he said in a tone that abruptly denied the pain he was suffering.
“Okay,” the medic said, finishing with the bleeding arm. Then he ducked his way out of the med unit, towelling his hands and arms. “Bullet did some real mean damage,” he said to Slayton. “You know what kind of slug it was? You a cop?”
Slayton grimaced. He knew too well. He kept the .45 as a pay-or-play last resort, with a close-quarters blow-away in mind. It was not a long range weapon. The slugs had been carefully scooped out and crosshatched. Had Bassam been closer, Ahmed’s entire arm would have disappeared at the shoulder.
“Got another one for your services,” he said, indicating Bassam.
“He shot, too? Looks like someone thought he was a steak and tried to tenderize him.”
“He just needs first aid,” Slayton said, as he saw the cops approaching. He’d have to field them, as well.
He remanded custody of Bassam to the cops but left out the details of the gun, which he had ditched in his car on the way back.
“Isolation,” he said, pointing in the cop’s face. “He talks to nobody but me and an interpreter, maybe. This is government business.”
The cop, who did not wish to complicate his day, indicated that it was no problem, and within half an hour everyone had lost their chance at fame.
“I can see you’re going to be in good hands,” Wilma said snidely. “I have to go—you know—” She gestured toward her camera and tape recorder.
Slayton put out a cautionary hand. “Wilma, go slow, okay? You know my usual entreaties, and they all apply right now.” She nodded, against her news judgment. “That’s pretty damn good,” he continued. “Your grace under fire, I mean.”
“What you mean,” she said pointedly, “is that it was good for a girl, right? Save the butter for the bedroom, Ben. Maybe I’ll see you later.” She stalked off.
He made a helpless gesture, but she was gone. He already knew by heart the argument they would move through later.
“It’s safe to assume, I suppose, that somewhere in there is a loving human being,” came Shauna’s voice from behind him.
“Now who’s sounding competitive and threatened?” Slayton said, spinning on her. “Ah, god… don’t start, Shauna, okay? Suddenly I’m getting a real pisser of a headache.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “Willis won’t care what all the hysteria was about, but Maggie will want to know. What should I tell her?”
“No, I’ll deal with it,” he said.
“Brave lady,” she said, looking off in the direction Wilma had gone. “She almost got blown away.”
“Yeah,” Slayton said, leading Shauna back toward the exhibit hall. “Didn’t we all?” His mind was racing furiously through bits and pieces of detail, trying to move, then coalesce into some shape, no matter how undefined.
“I suppose now that you’ve got him—” Shauna hesitated. “No, that’s not right. I was going to say now that you’ve got him, you’re done and you’ll be leaving, and wait for you to snap at it. That’s not fair.” They had stopped in the vestibule of the building. “It’s not true, either.”
“Sounds like you’ve done the entire conversation in advance,” Slayton said. He took up both of her hands. “Look. Now’s not the time, at any rate. Let’s get the opening out of the way—you know how full my hands are going to be in about an hour?”
Her face was fraught with indecision. “Yes, yes… but I just… last night and now this… to think that that was the man who was responsible, and now that you’re done with your—your job, you’ll just—”
“Shh!” went Slayton, loudly. It startled her, and she stopped.
“What?” she said, unconsciously adopting a stage whisper.
“SHH!” Slayton’s eyes bulged with an almost comic anger. Her eyes darted from side to side, seeking potential danger.
“SHH!” he went again, and this time she smiled. “Are you finished?” he said.
Shauna covered her eyes, and then laughed. When she came out from behind the hand her eyes were wet, but she could not keep the smile off her face. “Yes. Okay, I tried to do my speech.” She snickered.
“And you blew it,” Slayton said. “Hold still.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her, long and completely. “Don’t worry about that little terrorist subplot over there. I will see you later, regardless of him.”
“Alright.”
They parted, to take care of separate business.
Slayton did not know exactly what, but something had stopped him from telling Shauna Ramsey that Bassam could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be a terrorist, let alone Rashid Haman. Or that Ahmed was also out, by virtue of the week he would now spend in the hospital. Something had warned him away from telling her.
12
“The results of the interrogations certainly seem odd to me,” Winship said, as he gazed benignly out a floor-to-ceiling window, arms behind his back.
“How so, sir?” Slayton was standing near the desk.
“We should be able to consider this case closed—at least, in terms of safety to the Seth-Olet tour. You deny that this fellow Bassman—”
“Bassam,” said Slayton. “He’s Egyptian.”
“There, you see? He makes you early on in the tour and tries to eliminate you first chance he gets. If he had pegged you in front of the exhibit hall, it certainly would have gotten the opening cancelled. How to get at the President then? How to disrupt the tour in a propaganda-effective fashion?”
“Sir—”
“Diversionary tactic, I say. We were waiting for him to make a move, so he made a purely gratuitous one and got caught.”
“Sir, there’s no way Bassam could be Rashid Haman, if only on the basis of gutlessness. Bassam has no stomach for killing. Haman likes it.”
“I’m tempted, you know, to dismiss this along with the rest,” said Winship, turning now. “It would be a great relief if Haman turned out to be a much more disappointing specimen than we suspected—”
“—if for no other reason than it took me down a few notches,” said Slayton.
“You must admi
t that you’ve been doing some pretty broad propagandizing for the man, yourself,” Winship said academically. “But I’m inclined to agree with you. Rashid Haman wouldn’t blow a setup as perfect as the President and the exhibit together by getting apprehended on the day prior to the opening of the exhibit itself.”
“Unless his job was already done. Yes, sir—I thought of that, too.”
“This man claims that he knows nothing of the Arab terrorists. That, in fact, he fled Egypt to get away from that particular brouhaha. He told us that he was informed that you were an undercover agent for Immigration, and that it was your job to apprehend him by force and deport him to Egypt, since it turns out he has entered the country illegally. He took the place and identity of one of the crew members—his brother. His name is really Nadim.”
“I’d buy everything except the obvious setup—that I was supposed to roust him. That’s obviously designed to get me personally.”
“So the question is: Who primed Bassam?”
“He claims the gun was left for him along with a note, in Arabic, in his room. Since he was already running scared,” Slayton said, thinking of Bassam’s attitude during his questioning, “it only took that much to set him off. He was extremely highstrung, agitated, working on the paranoia of getting caught throughout the whole voyage and setup.”
“Do you think he is the one who attacked you with the forklift in the warehouse?” asked Winship, point-blank.
“No sir.” Slayton considered that. “Possible, yes, but not likely. Why wait so long, when I was around all the time, to try again if he was going to kill me anyway? The expedient thing would have been to get rid of me right away.”
“What about that somewhat fanciful adventure you related about the—that snake coming after you in your bedroom?”
“I think Bassam handled the snake. Whether he planted it, I don’t know. Either way, it would mean he was in on this last night, which means he’s lying about the note.”
Slayton also had a collection of theories about Rashid Haman that he was now keeping strictly to himself. The official opening of the Seth-Olet exhibit was less than twenty-four hours away, which meant, in Haman terms, now was the time to pour on the pressure, now was the time for resolution, the point at which Slayton would either win or lose the game.
He understood Bassam’s role only too well. He played the part of sacrificial lamb. In all probability, the man had been cajoled into actions by threats from Haman directly. Bassam knew the horrible potential penalties for exposing Haman—and at any rate, there was no way they’d get him to crack by tomorrow afternoon. Haman was timing things with his usual care.
Bassam had been thrown to the wolves by Haman as a steam valve, to sate the frustrations of Slayton and others anxious to collar someone, anyone other than Haman. It was time purchased.
What it meant to Slayton, in a nutshell, was that he was getting close enough to the truth to make Haman uncomfortable.
“Make sure the exhibit is secure by tomorrow morning,” said Winship. “Do that, and you’re free to pursue your own course of investigation. God knows we’ll never get anywhere this way.”
“It won’t be any trouble to hold Bassam in custody for the immigration rap, will it?”
Winship shook his head, as though bothered with a triviality.
“Good,” said Slayton. “Slap a guard or two on his ward. Haman will probably try to kill him.”
“What about that other fellow?”
“Ahmed? He was a chief suspect until this mess.” The more Slayton thought about Ahmed’s place in the game, the more he considered the brash play with Bassam a mistake on the part of Rashid Haman. The prime suspect had been accidentally eliminated, a plate of armor had been removed. The idea that it was a goof appealed to Slayton. It made Haman less superhuman.
“I think he’s innocent. But if I may recommend it, sir—”
“Guards for him, too?”
“We should only need them for a day or so,” Slayton countered.
“What about that reporter who was there during the shooting?” said Winship, seemingly endorsing the extra guards for Ahmed in passing.
“We’ve got a very tentative press blackout on this until tomorrow, sir. The items on the Seth-Olet tour itself don’t mention the Department, or any of the details relating to Rashid Haman.”
“Do you know the reporter personally?”
“Ah—yes sir. Ms. Wilma Christian.”
A great volume of information seemed to pass between Slayton and Winship in one nuclear flash of telepathy. Winship moved his head from side to side, slowly, like a bronze statue coming to life, and then his focus returned to the desk to search for the pipe.
“Improper channels, Slayton,” he said at last.
Slayton stifled a grin in his own self-interest. “Improper, sir?”
“Unreliable.” The word hinted that Winship might prefer more concrete methods of assuring cooperation from the press—like leg irons and mouth-blocks. “You have to go,” he said, dismissing the topic of Wilma Christian as well.
The drive back to the domain of Seth-Olet was a short one for Slayton, not nearly time-consuming enough to reconcile the things his mind did not really want to consider.
Shauna had been on tap for the incident with the cobra. It could all have been a bizarre act of some kind.
Shauna was the one who started the wheels in motion—the inquiry on the cobra—that caused the fiasco with Bassam.
Shauna had been in the Triumph. Somehow the gun had gotten from the car—once she knew he kept one, it was easy to assume he hid it in his government-issue vehicle as well—to Bassam’s room.
Shauna seemed determined to bowl him over with affection when he started asking questions. She had been the one who demonstrated—or rather, let Slayton demonstrate for himself—the gimmicked crates. My god, she could have had him in the back of the truck! But it was common practice for victors to show the defeated subjects just how they had been duped, therefore defeated, once the method could not harm anybody. It was a distasteful form of gloating.
Shauna had, in all probability, witnessed the entire shooting incident from a window of the exhibit hall. With a stop watch, perhaps?
And she had—if this line of logic was to be productive at all—infiltrated the enemy camp in the best way possible. She was sleeping with Ben Slayton.
Maggie Leiber had called Shauna the “dragon lady.” She had told Slayton things in conversational passing that hinted at a sort of gruesome composure. Odd for someone with Shauna’s outward persona—wasn’t it Shauna herself who had brought up multiple personae and carped on the equality of females in the Egyptian god-hierarchy?
“Surely you’ve noticed how predatory this job has made her,” Maggie had told him.
Circumstantial evidence rather than logic told him that Shauna Ramsey was a threat; his instinct felt extremely “warm.” Another sensation, twisting with sadistic glee in his gut, said she could not possibly be anything as dangerous as a Rashid Haman—a primal and outmoded feeling, it was true, but jammed in the back of Slayton’s mind nevertheless—a woman could not possibly accomplish the feats attributed to Haman.
But there was just enough doubt.
There was also something like eighteen hours left.
Maggie Leiber was just a little bit surprised at Slayton’s strange offer.
“I hope your schedule is just hectic enough, Doctor, that I might woo you away for a brief cruise of the Potomac. Automobile, of course—I loaned my canoe to some Cherokee tourists who made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. So if you turn me down now, I’ll be crushed. Please come. I have to talk to you, and I promise to have you back before they notice you’ve been kidnapped.”
She was amused by the whole presentation. “High and dry and sans canoe. Good god, it would be an act of samaritanism. Which way to your car?”
Her enthusiasm dulled somewhat when Slayton rather aggressively turned the topic of conversation over to Shauna.
“Just to stay Biblical,” he said, and smiled. “What kind of secrecy? Maggie, believe me please, because we’re running out of time, it’s important. Everything’s important.”
“Well, she apparently knows people in Washington, or somewhere here, because she keeps shooing me out of her room in order to make phone calls. Yesterday, for no reason, she lugged a small carton of artifacts home with her, ostensibly to clean them up. But Ben, the guards would have seizures if they’d known she had removed items from the hall. We all trust her, of course, but why take them back to clean them when that could be done here? That’s the kind of strange I mean.”
Slayton felt a gnawing sense of urgency, but his diplomatic instincts won out, forcing him to slow down and not bulldog Maggie. It would be a vast mistake to do things too fast just because of the time limit he felt looming ahead of him.
“I’ll bet you thought I was trying to coerce you away from ancient Egypt for a drink or something.”
“Well—” she said, drawing the word out. “I’ll admit it crossed my mind. But that’s really the sort of thing that cries out to have more time invested in it, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t want to be the component of what we might, in our less lucid moments, call a ‘quickie.’”
“No indeed,” he said, unconsciously mimicking her speech pattern. “But there’s booze if you’d care to make a libation to the very near future.”
Her direct, gray eyes brightened. “Oh, you’re a saint! Where?” She was looking around the interior of the car with something like childish joy, a new expression to Slayton.
“Glove box,” he said.