'This call will be accepted, I assure you, operator,' said Khalehla, having given the numbers she had been instructed to give in an extreme emergency.
'Yes?' The voice five thousand miles away was harsh, abrupt.
'My name is Khalehla. You're the one I was to reach, I believe.'
'No one else. The operator said Bahrain. Do you confirm it?'
'Yes. He's here. I've been with him for several hours.'
'What's going down?'
'There's a meeting between eleven-thirty and midnight near the Juma Mosque and the Al Halifax Road. I should be there, sir. He's not equipped; he can't handle it.'
'No way, lady!'
'He's a child where these people are concerned! I can help!'
'You can also involve us, which is out of the question and you know it as well as I do! Now, get out of there!'
'I thought you'd say that… sir. But may I please explain what I consider to be the negative odds of the equation in this particular operation?'
'I don't want to hear any of that spook bullshit! Get out of there!'
Khalehla winced as Frank Swann slammed down the telephone in Washington DC.
'The Aradous and the Tylos, I know them both,' said Emmanuel Weingrass into the phone in the small, secure office at the airport in Muharraq. T. Farouk and Strickland—good God, I can't believe it! That daffodil drunk from Cairo?… Oh, sorry, Stinker, I forgot. I mean that French lilac from Algiers, that's what I meant to say. Go on.' Weingrass wrote down the information from Masqat, given by a young man for whom he was beginning to have enormous respect. He knew men twice Ahmat's age and with three times his experience who would have buckled under the stress the sultan of Oman was enduring, not excluding the outrageous Western press that had no concept of his courage. The courage for risks that could bring about his downfall and his death. 'Okay, I've got it all… Hey, Stinker, you're quite a guy. You grew up to be a real mensch. Of course, you probably learned it all from me.'
'I learned one thing from you, Manny, a very important truth. That was to face things as they were and not to make excuses. Whether it was for fun or in pain, you said. You told me a person could live with failure but not with the excuses that took away his right to fail. It took me a long time to understand that.'
'That's very nice of you, young fellow. Pass it on to the kid I read you're expecting. Call it the Weingrass addendum to the Ten Commandments.'
'But, Manny—’
'Yes?'
'Please don't wear one of those yellow or red polka-dotted bow ties in Bahrain. They kind of mark you, you know what I mean?'
'Now you're my tailor… I'll be in touch, mensch. Wish us all good hunting.'
'I do, my friend. Above all, I wish I could be with you.'
'I know that. I wouldn't be here if I didn't know it—if our friend didn't know it.' Weingrass hung up the phone and turned to the six men behind him. They were perched on tables and chairs, several holding their small secondary side arms, others checking the battery charges in their hand-held radios, all watching and listening intently to the old man.
'We split up,' he said. 'Ben-Ami and Grey will come with me to the Tylos. Blue, you take the others to the Aradous Hotel—' Manny stopped, gripped by a sudden coughing seizure; his face reddened and his slender frame shook violently. Ben-Ami and the members of the Masada unit glanced at one another; none moved, each knowing instinctively that Weingrass would rebuff any assistance. But one thing was clear to all of them. They were looking at a dying man.
'Water?' asked Ben-Ami.
'No,' replied Manny curtly, the coughing seizure subsiding. 'Lousy chest cold, lousy weather in France… All right, where were we?'
