Guerrero insisted, 'The record will vindicate me,' and Hakim knew that Guerrero too was posturing for the benefit of the camera pickup. His own effectiveness contaminated by haste, Guerrero would be forced to return—to kill Charlie George himself. And Everett as well, eliminating the last witness.
Guerrero approached again with the drycell and locked his gaze to Hakim's for the last time. Torture would prove nothing more, and Guerrero feared what it might seem to prove. The crowning irony was that under further torture, Hakim might only further compromise his torturer. Hakim trembled in tears, but did not drop his eyes. Guerrero laid the drycell on a stone.
Hakim did not recognize the coded sequence from the van but saw Guerrero register relief at a musical signal. In any case, Hakim in his weakness had told the truth. Guerrero was lashing Hakim's feet with wire at the time, and resumed the job until his prisoner was positioned; feet spread, knees bent, face up. Enraged at Hakim's revelation, Guerrero had chosen a vengeance option. He enjoyed that choice but did not realize its full expense to himself as he stalked to his van and returned.
Guerrero tore a strip of tape, placed it dangling from a branch before Hakim's eyes, and stuck a capsule to the tape within range of Hakim's mouth. 'Before I knew you, Arif, I would not do what I do now. Let us say it is for Rashid, whom I hated to sacrifice. Did you think the bomb shackles jammed themselves?' He read the surge of anger that raced across Hakim's face. 'So: no, I will not end your life—but you will. I wonder if you are devout, and if your followers in Damascus are. In any event, the capsule acts quickly. Exercise your control, Hakim; take one last life on television.' With that, he whisked Hakim's van keys away. He brought the drycell near Hakim's side and the Iraqi arched away as well as he might, lashed to bushes by lengths of his garrotte wire.
The drycell went beneath Hakim's naked back, centimeters from contact. Guerrero trotted away with one backward look and Hakim strained fitfully to hold his arch. Weeping, laughing, Hakim knew that Guerrero had left his own van to permit transmission of Hakim's death option. Presumably Guerrero intended to return for his van later.
But Guerrero did not know of the toggle beneath Hakim's dash panel, which reduced the Panamanian's own options to zero.
There was no sound of starter engagement, only the slam of a door before, a moment later, the heavy concussion wave. The earth bucked and Hakim, muscles already past endurance, fell back. He cared nothing for the rain of metal and flesh that showered around him but, deafened and half stunned by the five kilos of explosive he had buried in the van, Hakim could still exult. The drycell had been turned on its side.
Hakim spent many minutes scrabbling at debris before he managed to grasp a stone that would abrade the garrotte wire. He kept enough tension on the wire to satisfy his hunger for torment, all the while glaring at the Soviet camera. He could perhaps make use of the van equipment. He might find most of the money in the wreckage of his own van.
And after that, what? His exploitation of media finally smothered, he had known for weeks that his enemy and erstwhile ally, television, had found an offense that could destroy him. Even before ransacking by the KGB, his coffers were too empty to maintain Fat'ah. The Soviet videotapes would produce hatred and scorn in the people who had previously financed him as easily as they bought English country estates and huge limousines. Hakim would find respect nowhere—not even within himself. There was no more Fat'ah, and Hakim was Fat'ah. Therefore there could be no Hakim.
The wire parted and Hakim rolled away. Eventually he freed his feet, then sat squatting by the drycell. He had triumphed over Guerrero, but that triumph was his last. The proof was that he could not bring himself to touch the drycell.
Hakim took the capsule from the tape with gentle fingers, smashed the camera. 'Forgive, El Aurans,' he whispered, and swallowed.
It was minutes before he realized that the capsule was a harmless antihistamine, Guerrero's malignant joke. And an hour before he found that the injection, as Guerrero had known from the first, was the slow killer. But by that time Hakim had stumbled twitching into a stream far from the smouldering wreckage and was past caring. The body, a source of concern in some shadowy circles, was never found.
Guerrero had been right about Chaim Mardor, in the letter if not in spirit: the wiry Israeli was a compelling entertainment. He had first entertained two field agents of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Besopasnostiy when he went into clinically certifiable shock at the suicide of Leah Talith. In that condition he was so far beyond reach with drugs, they found it necessary to feed him intravenously for two days, locked with his clothes in a windowless room of a safe house in Pasadena. The door was sturdy. No one but the physician, who had a key, could go through it.
Chaim went over it on Thursday morning, battering a hole in the ceiling with his head and shoulders, the minute he returned to his mortal coil and found his clothes. While Maurice Everett had splashed water on his face, fighting his internal panic over Guerrero's broad hints about double identity, the KGB had a full-scale panic in its safe house.
Chaim Mardor stormed out of the attic that morning, dispatched a balding cipher clerk with a hatrack and kicked the perimeter guard into jelly before taking the guard's cash and pocketing his short-barreled .44 magnum revolver. He had walked several blocks to Colorado Boulevard before he thought to set the red-smeared hatrack down.
The mind of Chaim Mardor was aflame with one concept that burned its way down into his belly: Fat'ah was dead. He had seen her self-sacrifice while Bernal Guerrero, the arm of Hakim Arif, stood by to gloat. And Chaim knew where the Iraqi had taken the hostages, to the frame house Chaim himself had furnished in the orchard past Fillmore. Hakim, Guerrero, even the hostages Chaim had never seen, all were culpable. Anyone in the farmhouse or near it would be equally culpable. Chaim Mardor was a death sentence in tennis shoes.
Chaim hitched a ride with a man in a Volkswagen bus who was virtually his external twin, discounting Chaim's abrasions; dark shoulder-length hair, jeans, and pullover. The driver took his passenger's catatonic silence for simple dejection, but his profound mistake was in patting Chaim on the knee. The single .44 slug passed a hand's breadth from the driver's nose, momentarily blinding him, precipitating his exit without even tapping the brakes.
Chaim took the wheel as the little bus sped up the Ventura Freeway. He slid into the vacated driver's seat and took the next turnoff, oblivious to the traffic snarl behind him as cars avoided the man trying to hobble off the freeway with flash burns, lacerations, and a fractured tibia.
Chaim pawed through area maps in the glove compartment, throwing those he did not want over his shoulder into the cargo section. He found the San Fernando Valley map, located his position on it, and drove for his destination at a pace relinquished to the insane. This was perfect camouflage; everybody in Los Angeles drives exactly like that.
Had Chaim found the turnoff toward the orchard ten minutes earlier, he might have passed Hakim and Guerrero driving in the other direction toward mutual destruction. More likely, if at all possible, Chaim would have smashed head-on into whichever of them he saw first. El-Hamma and Hakim had created in Chaim Mardor the ideal arm of Fat'ah; an arm that could reach out even after the head was severed, remorseless, selfless, irrational. But Chaim had the road to himself as he neared the orchard surrounding the frame house that contained Maurice Everett and Charlie George.
Everett had torn at his tape in a frenzy the moment Guerrero kicked the door open to hurl himself cursing after Hakim. The glass fibers in the tape resisted him until he managed to roll to the splintered chair near the comedian. 'Hang on, Charlie,' he said, repeating the recitation like a prayer. He frayed the fibers away, bit by bit, calming his own harsh respiration, listening with hope to the whistled breathing of Charlie George.
Everett did not wait to peel the tape from his wrists when he had separated them. He ignored the tape around his ankles as well, springing up to attack the bindings that held Charlie George.
Charlie's feet were nearest. Everett did not think to rip the plastic bag from Charlie's head; perhaps in some way he was reluctant to spill Charlie's blood. It was an absurdly stupid error with bizarre consequences.
Peeling the tape from Charlie's ankles, Everett spotted the knife Hakim had thrown. It lay open near the doorway and in a moment Everett was slicing through the stuff at his ankles, then at Charlie's. He heard the Volkswagen engine then and rushed to the next room, fearing Hakim's return.
From the window he saw Chaim Mardor stalk from the little bus. He had seen the man some-where, could not place him, but had no difficulty in identifying the snub-nosed handgun. He whirled, struck the stump of his finger
