blood rolling in tiny rivers down his arm.
'Here!' said Ben-Ami, kneeling down and wrapping a towel around the Englishman's blown-apart fingers.
'Don't do that,' ordered code Grey, grabbing the towel and throwing it aside.
'You told me to get it,' protested Ben-Ami, confused.
'I've changed my mind,' said Grey, his voice suddenly cold, holding MacDonald's arm down, the blood now rushing out of his two stumped fingers. 'Blood,' continued the Masada commando speaking calmly to the Englishman, 'especially blood from the right arm—from the aorta expelling it from the heart—will have nowhere to go but on this floor. Do you read me, khanzeer? Do you understand me, pig? Tell us what we must know or be drained of life. Where is this Mahdi? Who is he?'
'I don't know!' shouted Anthony MacDonald coughing, tears rolling down his cheeks and jowls. 'Like everyone else I call telephone numbers—someone gets back to me! That's all I know!'
The commando's head snapped up. He was trained to hear things and sense vibrations others did not hear or sense. 'Get down! he whispered harshly to Ben-Ami and Weingrass. 'Roll to the walls! Behind chairs, anything!'
The hotel door crashed open. Three Arabs in sheer white robes, their faces concealed by cloth, lunged through the open space, their muted machine pistols on open-fire, their targets obvious: MacDonald and the Tylos doorman, whose screaming prostrate bodies thumped like jackhammers under the fusillade of bullets until no sounds came from their bleeding mouths. Suddenly the killers were aware of others in the room; they spun their weapons, slashing the air for new targets but there were none to be had for they were no competition for the lethal code Grey of the Masada Brigade. The commando had raced to the left of the open door, his back pressed into the wall, his Uzi ripped from the Velcro straps under his jacket. With a prolonged burst he cut down the three executioners instantly. There were no death-reflexes. Each skull was blown apart.
'Out!' shouted Grey, lurching to Weingrass and pulling the old man to his feet. 'To the staircase by the elevators!'
'If we're stopped,' added Ben-Ami, racing to the door, 'we're three people panicked by the gunfire.'
Out on Government Road, they rested in an alley that led to the Shaikh Hamad Boulevard, code Grey suddenly swore under his breath, more at himself than at his companions. 'Damn, damn, damn! I had to kill them!'
'You had no choice,' said the Mossad agent. 'One of their fingers on a trigger and we might all be dead, certainly one of us.'
'But with even one of them alive we could have learned so much,' countered the man from the Masada unit.
'We learned something, Tinker Bell,' said Weingrass.
'Will you stop that!'
'Actually, it's a term of affection, young man—’
'What did we learn, Manny?'
'MacDonald talked too much. In his panic the Englishman said things to people over the telephone he shouldn't have said so he had to be killed for a loose mouth.'
'How does that account for the doorman?' asked code Grey.
'Expendable. He got MacDonald's door open for the Mahdi's firing squad. Your gun made the real noise, they didn't… And now that we know about MacDonald's mouth and his execution, we can assume two vital facts—like the stress factors when you're designing an overhanging balcony on a building, one weight perched off centre on another off-centre gravity pitch.'
'What the hell are you talking about, Manny?'
'My boy, Kendrick, did a better job than he probably realizes. The Mahdi's frightened. He really doesn't know what's going on, and by killing the big mouth, now nobody can tell him. He made a mistake, isn't that something? The Mahdi made a mistake.'
'If your architectural schematics are as abstruse as you are, Mr. Weingrass,' said Grey, 'I hope none of your designs will be used for buildings in Israel.'
'Oh, the words that boy has! You sure you didn't go to the High School of Science in the Bronx? Never mind. Let's check
