He leaned back in his seat, having cheated the Grim Reaper once more, and told her, “In the last twenty-four hours, I can say I owe my life to the former Shakira Sabah, and Jacques reckons he owes his to E. M. Forster.”
“Who’s Eeyem Forster?” demanded Shakira. “I never even heard that name Eeyem before?”
“He’s not Eeyem,” said Rashood carefully. “He’s E. M. Letters. The initials of his Christian names.”
Shakira thought about that for a moment, smiled, and said, “You mean like G. A. Nasser, or O. B. Laden?” knowing full well it sounded ridiculous. “Anyway, you still haven’t told me. Who is he?”
“He’s a very famous English novelist. My school insisted we read a couple of his books for A levels.”
“What books did he write?”
“Well, I suppose his best-known one is
“I’ve seen the movie,” cried Shakira in triumph.
“So you have,” replied her husband, chuckling gently. “Forster had a very sensitive touch with subjects like loyalty, treatment of those less fortunate, and, I suppose most of all, friendship.”
“Yes, but…” said Shakira, employing her most reliable form of questioning, when she was starting to dig deeply into a subject. “How did he save Jacques’s life? Does he live in Saudi Arabia?”
“No, he’s been dead for forty years,” said Rashood. “But his words inspired a colleague of Jacques’s to treat their friendship more seriously than he treated a government order.”
“Was he ordered to kill you, Jacques?”
“Yes, Shakira. Yes, he was.”
“And he didn’t because he remembered the words of Eeyem?”
“Yes, that’s what he said,” replied Gamoudi.
“Hmm,” said Shakira. “You too have read his books?”
“No, I have never read them. But I think I will now.”
“Then I think you’d better get started,” said Shakira gravely.
“This Eeyem, he’s a very influential man.”
By this time they were within a couple of miles of Beirut International Airport. The traffic was terrible, and General Rashood again called the pilot on his cell phone and told him to be ready.
The embassy driver turned in through the cargo area and made straight for the runway where private aircraft were parked. The car pulled right up to the waiting Saudi Boeing 737, and the three of them rushed up the stairway.
The flight attendants, who had been hanging around all night, not disembarking, greeted them cheerfully. “Marrakesh, nonstop?” one of them said.
“If you would,” replied General Rashood.
“It’s almost twenty-three hundred miles,” the flight attendant replied. “And that’ll take us almost five hours. But we pick up three hours on the time difference. We should be there around five-thirty in the evening.”
By now the aircraft was rolling, thundering down the runway. The flight attendant, a young Arabian would-be pilot, hastily sat down and clipped on a safety belt, which was not a complication since there were close to 200 spare seats.
The Boeing screamed up into the blue skies above the eastern Mediterranean and set a westerly course. And as it did so, the CIA agent in the airport, the one who had arrived too late in the small hours of the morning, reached for his cell phone and hit the buttons to Beirut flight control.
He spoke to his airport contact. Twenty seconds later he knew the Saudi King’s aircraft was heading to Marrakesh, with three passengers who had arrived in a Saudi embassy car.
There was one difference between the two latest departures of the Boeing. In King Khalid Airport, Riyadh, the captain had not been obliged to file a flight plan. Here in Beirut, he was. And that put the Americans ahead of the game, because the six French agents in Lebanon were temporarily stymied. Four of them were dead inside the Crusaders’ Castle. The other two were still parked outside the Saudi embassy.
The U.S. field agent dialed Langley direct, and reported that the King’s Boeing had just taken off, heading directly for Marrakesh, no stops. Langley moved swiftly. They immediately contacted Lt. Commander Ramshawe and asked him for a degree of certainty on his report that Col. Jack Gamoudi had been born in the tiny village of Asni.
Lt. Commander Ramshawe, who had spent days searching through computerized French military data, had managed to file away a copy of Jacques Gamoudi’s birth certificate, courtesy of Andy Campese in Toulouse and a Foreign Legion filing clerk in Aubagne, who had reacted favorably to Campese’s five-hundred-dollar bribe.
Ramshawe pulled up the photocopy of Colonel Gamoudi’s birth certificate and read off: “Born Asni, Morocco, June twelve, 1964…Father Abdul Gamoudi, mountain guide…”
“Beautiful,” said the voice from Langley.
“You guys got a lead?” asked the Lt. Commander.
“Sure have. The Colonel’s right now in a Boeing 737 owned by the King of Saudi Arabia, and he’s heading for Marrakesh, non-stop.”
“My boss will want to alert the Navy about that, but…wait just a minute. I have some extra data on Asni that may help.”
Jimmy Ramshawe’s fingers hit the computer keyboard like shafts of light, until Jacques Gamoudi’s early military record came up: “He worked as a mountain guide with his father in the High Atlas Range around his home village…He also worked in the local hotel and…this is interesting…the owner of that hotel, a former Major in the French Parachute Regiment named Laforge, sponsored him in his application to join the Foreign Legion…”
“Hey, that’s great, Lt. Commander.”
“Guess you guys think Jacques Gamoudi’s going home, right?”
“We’re thinking if the French Secret Service are trying to kill him, the Atlas Mountains are not a bad place to take cover. Christ, you’d never find him up there, not in those high peaks, where he knows the territory backward, and where he probably still has friends.”
“That’d be a tough one,” replied Ramshawe. “But we’re not trying to kill him, and we’ve got two damn good leads in Asni — his dad and his old boss at the hotel. If one of them’s still there, we might be in good shape.”
He rang off and headed immediately to see Admiral Morris, who listened to the latest twist in the saga of Le Chasseur. When Ramshawe was through, Admiral Morris pulled up Morocco on a computerized wall map, four feet wide.
“Let me just get my bearings, Jimmy,” he said. “Right, now here’s Marrakesh. Where the hell’s Asni? Is it close?”
“Yeah, right here, sir.”
“Ah, yes. Right astride the old mountain road between Marrakesh and Agadir, on the Atlantic coast…see this place here…where it says Toubkal? That’s one of the highest mountains in Africa. Guess that’s why Asni became a major mountaineering village. That’s where Jacques Gamoudi’s dad made his living.”
“So did Jacques, for a while.”
“Hell, those French killers have their work cut out. Can you imagine chasing a professional mountain guide through that range? You’d never find him.”
“You been there, sir?”
“I’ve been to Agadir. That’s how I remember Mount Toubkal. A bunch of our guys had shore leave for a week and they were going to climb it. It’s damned high and extremely steep — something like thirteen thousand feet.”
“You didn’t go yourself, sir?”
“Jimmy,” said George Morris. “I might look kinda stupid, but I’ve never been crazy.”
Ramshawe laughed. “So what do we tell the Big Man?”
“We tell him both the CIA and the NSA consider Le Chasseur is going home to the Atlas Mountains, to hide out from the French assassins. And we tell him it’s going to happen fast, and it looks like our best bet to grab him might be off the dock in Agadir.”
“We’re assuming he wants to be grabbed.”
“Jimmy, we’ve rescued his wife and family, his money’s safe in the U.S.A., and the French are trying to kill him. He’ll come, and he’ll do as we ask. He has no choice. Because if we don’t get him, the French will eventually take him out.”
