“Yes.”
Slade shook his head. “This message is a fake. He’d have used a code if it was from him.” For a moment Mel thought he was going to be sick, but Slade was already on his way out of the room. “There mightn’t be a lot of time.”
Mel kicked himself into motion and followed, catching Slade by the sleeve just before he reached the door. “If we re going after her, I’d feel a lot better if I was able to protect myself,” he muttered. “Henry Newell said you’d be able to fix me up.”
Slade’s eyebrows knotted. “I thought you couldn’t use a gun.”
“Ron Bassen put me through the range. I know which end to point now.”
Slade held his eye searchingly for a split second, then gave a brief nod. “Mike can handle it. I’m going back down to the lobby to try and find out if anyone saw her.” They went out into the corridor. Slade took Mike aside and murmured a few words in his ear. Mike looked across at Mel and nodded faintly. While Slade and the security manager hastened away toward the elevators, Mike led Mel to another door a short distance away, opened it, and ushered him through. Inside, he took a sturdy leather case from one of the closets, unlocked it, and produced a Walther .32 PP, shoulder harness, and an ammunition clip and several spares from a compartment inside. Mel took off his jacket and Mike helped him secure the harness. He watched as Mel pushed a clip into the butt, and slid the weapon into the holster. As Mel adjusted the straps for comfort, he found to his mild embarrassment that he couldn’t hide the shaking of his hands.
“New to this, eh?” Mike remarked.
“Don’t ask.”
They went back into the corridor and found McCormick looking along from the doorway of his suite to see what was going on. “I’ll take care of it,” Mike said to Mel.“You get downstairs after George. Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
Mel arrived in the lobby to find a general confusion of jabbering and waving of arms going on, as doormen and bellhops were located and quizzed, making guests coming and going turn their heads curiously. The assistant manager reappeared and joined in the throng to say that Eva wasn’t in the pool area and hadn’t been seen there. Others poured in their contributions: yes, she had caught a cab from the side door; no, the doorman didn’t know where she’d gone in it.
“Which cab company was it from?” Slade demanded. “They can put out a radio call.”
The security manager translated the question. The doorman couldn’t remember.
“How many cab companies serve this place?” Slade asked.
To one side of the confusion, the hotel concierge stood, wrestling with his dilemma. The attractive American girl had been drinking tea earlier in the evening with Mehemet Kabuzak. Later, she had slipped out the side entrance and left in a cab that had been sent for her. It was quite obvious where she had gone… But there was such a thing as professional discretion to be considered… On the other hand, the situation did seem to be serious.
In the end he stepped forward and drew Slade to one side, just as Mel arrived from the elevator and came within earshot. “The young lady whom you seek went to the Omar Khayyam Hotel,” he murmured. That was where Kabuzak always stayed.
“How do you know?” Slade asked.
“It is my job to know everything, sir.”
At that moment a couple of the local secret-service men appeared to see what was happening. A detachment of them was stationed in the hotel, under orders to keep a low profile. It was all turning into a circus, with everyone in charge. But nobody as yet had made any connection between Mel, who had drawn back from the commotion, and Slade, who was trapped in the center of it. Slade looked across at him, and in the brief instant that their gazes met, he motioned in the direction of the hotel entrance with his eyes. It was a signal for Mel to go on ahead and do what he could.
Everything had taken on a strange quality of unreality. Responding like a zombie in some kind of trance, Mel returned a faint nod and moved away across the lobby to the doors. A cab was already at the curbside, with an elderly man in evening dress and a heavily bejeweled woman about to climb in. Mel darted around to the front and slipped in beside the driver. “Omar Khayyam Hotel!” he snapped.
“Hey you, what do you think you’re doing?” an indignant voice shouted from behind.
The cabbie shook his head protestingly. “Sir, you can’t—”
Mel reached over the seat and slammed the rear door. “Triple fare. Make it fast.”
“Yessir!”
The cab was already up to forty when it reached the end of the drive and cut across three lanes of highway. It U-tumed amid blasts of horns and swerving vehicles into the traffic going the other way and accelerated again, heading south. Inside, Mel slumped against the back of the seat and felt his chest pounding and his shirt sticking to his body. For a moment his mind flashed back to the quiet, sedentary, lawyer’s life that he’d known in Boston. Then he looked out at the lights of Cairo streaming by as the cab wove in and out through the traffic, and became conscious of the solid, unfamiliar bulge underneath his left arm. He’d been off the plane less than two hours.
Welcome to fucking Egypt, he thought resignedly.
• • •
Stephanie had tried to find out from the driver where they were going, but his incomprehension of English was total—or else he had been told to make it appear so. They arrived at a huge, splendidly ornate building, floodlit from the grounds and looking magnificent against its setting of tall palm trees. Stephanie presumed it to be a hotel, but to her surprise, instead of continuing to the front entrance, the cab swung off the main driveway and took her to a smaller, side door. Her confusion increased when she climbed out and recognized the man waiting for her there as Talaat Ali, Kabuzak’s private secretary, whom she knew from his comings and goings at the talks of the past few days. Then her confusion turned to alarm. Perhaps she had misjudged Kabuzak completely after all—and he, even more completely, her!
Ali read the look on her face and raised a hand reassuringly. “Please, it is not as you imagine. There is much that you don’t know. We are working with Fenner. Come this way.” He opened the door and-gestured. Stephanie hesitated, but the cab had disappeared by now anyway. They went in.
Ali led her to an elevator at the rear of the building that required a special key to enter. It went directly to the top floor, without provision for making intermediate stops. “For the special guests who stay on the penthouse level,” he explained. “There is a security check where you get off the regular elevators on the top floor. So demeaning.” From the elevator they entered a corridor. The fittings and furnishings were luxurious with an elegance of days long gone, but Stephanie’s mind was in too much of a whirl to take much notice of the details. Ali stopped at one of the doors, opened it, and let them in. Inside was an L-shaped room of a large suite, with the section at the rear leading around a corner to another room. There were bottles and glasses, bowls of fruit and candies, a desk with papers strewn on top and a man’s briefcase beside.
“May I take your coat?” Ali asked.
“Thanks. I’ll keep it on.”
“Something to drink, perhaps?”
“I don’t think so.”
“There might be a short wait. Lots of things are happening.”
“Very well. Just a grapefruit juice.” Stephanie sat down on one of the chairs and put her purse on the table.
“Ice?”
“Please.”
Ali half filled a glass with ice, topped it with juice from a pitcher, and handed it to her. “Now, you must excuse me,” he said. “There are things I have to attend to.” He seemed tense, and had crossed back to the door before Stephanie could reply. His departure, she thought, seemed unduly hasty.
• • •
“An American girl. She has long, fair,hair, almost blond, down to here. About this high, probably wearing a green coat. She came here by cab… it must have been within the last fifteen minutes. You’re sure you haven’t seen anyone like that
at all?” Mel looked from one to another of the clerks behind the front desk of the Omar Khayyam Hotel. They looked at each other and shook their heads.
“Nobody like that has been through here,” one of them said. He called the bell captain over from the desk across the hall. A two-way torrent of words ensued, ending with the bell captain shaking his head, shrugging, and going back to his desk. “I’m sorry,” the clerk said again.
Mel stared across the desk helplessly, hoping for some advice or suggestion, but the clerk had already returned his attention to the chart he had been filling in. “Look, could you—”
At that instant a hand with a grip that felt like a bear trap clamped itself around his upper arm, and he was propelled like a toy out through the door into the night again. For an instant the thought flashed through his mind that hotel security was throwing him out, and then he found himself staring up at a round-bellied giant of a figure with a dark face, light-colored jacket, and a fez on its head, red in the light from the floodlamps. His face was smiling broadly, showing white, even teeth; but it was the kind of smile that said its owner could kill you quite cheerfully and not mind a bit. “What are you to do with the American girl?” he asked.
There wasn’t time for verbal dueling. And if this guy turned out to be on the wrong side, he was dead anyway, Mel told himself. “She’s in danger. I’m here to help,” he said.
“Who are you?”
Stephanie had told him the details of her conversation with Dave Fenner in Washington. Mel tried the only line he could. “A friend of Benjamin.”
“Who are you with?”
How could he say, a law-firm in Boston? What was he here for in the middle of the night—to serve a writ? He replied, “U.S. intelligence.” And then, “Who the hell are you?”
The giant released his grip, and his manner changed. “Mossad asked me to keep an eye on her. She went upstairs with Kabuzak’s secretary. I didn’t know if the arrangement was… agreeable.”
“I don’t understand.”
The big man shrugged. “Many beautiful women visit Kabuzak.”
Mel shook his head. “She’s in trouble.”
“Bad enough to warrant intruding?”
“They’ve already tried to kill her once.”
The other nodded. “There is another door around the side. Come this way.”
• • •
Stephanie’s nervousness had been increasing ever since the party left the United States. All day long, alone with her secret, she had been feeling more unsure of herself and isolated. So when the message turned up unexpectedly with its promise of a chance to talk to Dave, she had pushed everything else out of her mind. Now, as she sat thinking back over it, she was growing uneasy. Why was it signed with Dave’s own name, and not his code, Benjamin? She had registered the fact fleetingly even as she read the message, but her need just at that time had been such that she had forced the thought aside. And now that one simple irregularity was taking on steadily larger significance in her mind.
She got up and walked nervously to the far end of the room. The door around the corner was open and led to what was presumably the bedroom of the suite. She went over and peeked inside, but there was nobody there. A door on the opposite side looked like the communicating door to the adjoining suite. She went back into the lounge. Her impulse was to leave now, go down to the lobby, and get a cab back to Shepheard’s. Then she tried to control her fears. How could the Opposition have known of her connection with Dave? Only he and Eva had known of that, surely. Maybe “Benjamin” only applied after they got to Israel. She pictured herself fleeing like a rabbit, and then Dave appearing in the next few minutes. She stood in the lounge of the suite, torn by indecision… But after the dinner, followed by drinks with Kabuzak, there was one thing she had to do first, whatever she decided afterward. She put down her glass and went into the bathroom.
Next door in the bedroom of Kabuzak’s suite, the Lynx finished dressing and tidying herself up. She collected together the things she needed and checked Kabuzak, snoring soundly in the bed. No problem there. Just then the phone rang, right on time. She reached out to the end table by the bed and picked it up.
“Ja?”
“She is next door, alone,” Talaat Ali’s voice said, and he hung up.
The Lynx replaced the receiver, smiled to herself, and rose to her feet. She crossed to the communicating door into Ali’s suite, turned the key, and let herself through. “Hello?” she called sofly. “Eva, are you there?” No reply. She went on through into the lounge. There was a woman’s purse on the table, and a three-quarters-full glass of juice. “Eva?” she called again.
“I’m in the bathroom,” a voice said through the door. “Who’s this?”
“Oh, a friend of Dave’s.” The Lynx looked at the glass again and smiled to herself. This was going to be much easier than she’d thought. She took a phial from a pocket inside the shoulder cape she was wearing, unscrewed the cap, and tipped three drops into the glass. “Sleep well, sweetheart,” she murmured, then replaced the cap and put the phial away again.
“Is Dave there?” the voice asked from the bathroom.
“On his way. He’ll be another couple of minutes.”
“Just tidying my hair.”
“That’s all right. There’s plenty of time.”
• • •
Downstairs, Talaat Ali put down the house phone and came out of the alcove, turning to head in the direction of the side door. He had made other arrangements to keep himself away for the rest of the night, with plenty of witnesses. When he returned to the hotel in the morning, he would call security and let them find the bodies when Kabuzak failed to answer his wake-up call or open the door.
A man-mountain wearing a broad smile and a red fez stepped in front of him from nowhere and slammed him back into the alcove again, cracking the back of his head against the wall and knocking all the wind out of him.
“The American girl. Where is she?”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
Ali’s arm was being pushed up to somewhere near the back of his head by a force that could have snapped it off like a dry twig. “Is she upstairs with Kabuzak?”
“No! I don’t know what you’re talking about… Stop it… Arghh!”
“Then let’s go and see, shall we?” Ali was bundled along a short corridor to the private elevator like a sack, his toes barely touching the floor. There was a second man there, younger, a Caucasian. They obviously knew the hotel layout. “Your elevator key,” the big man said. Ali groped frantically at his pocket with his free hand. The younger man fished out the key and unlocked the door. They pushed Ali inside.
“How many others are in there?” the big man with the fez demanded.
“Nobody. I told you, I don’t know—”
“How many?” The big man scraped the edge of the sole of his shoe hard down Ali’s shin and stamped on the instep. Ali screamed. “Kabuzak—he’s there, right?”
“Arghh! Yes… Stop, please! He’s unconscious… Just one other. A woman.”
“Which suite, yours or Kabuzak’s?”
“Mine.”
“Give him the key.”
They knew which suite was Ali’s. The big man grabbed the back of Ali’s collar and pushed him ahead, at the same time drawing a gun from inside his jacket and nodding at Mel to open the door. Mel swallowed a lump in his throat and took the Walther from its holster. He thumbed off the safety, turned the key quickly in the lock, and threw the door open. The big man shoved Ali through and went in after him like a charging boar.
The woman who had been standing inside whirled around, her eyes wide with shock. She had long platinum hair and a short shoulder-wrap cape. “You see, I told you there is no American.” Ali cried. The big man stopped and looked around.
Mel saw the purse on the table. He would have recognized it anywhere. “That’s hers,” he said.
The woman was unarmed. “Keep an eye on her,” the big man said to Mel. And t
hen, urging Ali forward again, “Let’s look around, shall we?” He yanked him away around the corner and into the bedroom. Mel’s gaze followed after them unthinkingly as the sounds receded farther, through the communicating door and into the next suite.
He didn’t realize his mistake until he caught the movement from the corner of his eye, and suddenly found himself staring into a gun that had appeared magically in the woman’s hand from under her cape. “Not one movement,” she hissed. Mel had let his aim drift with his attention, and she had the edge. He froze, helpless. She moved back to get the wall behind her and edged toward the door. He could read her mind, assessing the odds. Should she kill him there and then and reduce the opposition, which would bring the big man back and probably wake up the whole hotel? Or disarm him and make a quiet getaway, playing for the extra time? At that instant, a door to one side opened and Stephanie appeared. She saw Mel with a gun, the woman covering him, and stood paralyzed.
But she was not the only one to be transfixed by shock.
The Lynx never forgot a face. Remembering faces was part of her profession. It was one of the things that made her good. Another was the iron control she had over her concentration. Never once had she allowed it to slip or waver at a crucial moment… until now. It was just for the briefest instant, when she saw the girl who came out of the bathroom. Because she knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that she had killed that girl ten weeks previously in Denver.
And that was when Mel shot her.
He did it instinctively, unconsciously. Some automatic self-preservation mechanism, from deep below the thinking processes that had seized up, took control, and he had fired before he knew it. The bullet hit her in the chest and threw her back against the wall. She wasn’t dead, but the impact had made her drop her arm.
Everything then seemed to happen in a strange, hypnotic slow motion, even though Mel was aware somewhere in a part of his mind that his sense of time was distorted. He watched himself watching her in numb fascination as she struggled to bring her gun up to bear on him again, while blood spread into the fabric of her sweater, trickled down over her skirt, and splattered on the floor. Reflexively he fired again. This time her arm fell limply. Mel could see her hand clutching to keep its hold on the gun, but getting feeble; but still her eyes were blazing hatred at him, the eyes of a trapped, wounded, wild animal.
The Mirror Maze Page 42