out the scene at the Juma Mosque… Tell me, Tinker Bell, did you ever make a mistake?'
'I think I made one coming to Bahrain—’
The answer was lost on Emmanuel Weingrass. The old man was doubled over in a coughing seizure against the wall of the dark alleyway.
Stunned, Kendrick stared at the phone in his hand, then in anger slammed it down—anger and frustration and fear. You leave that royal house before morning and you are a dead man… Go quietly back to where you came from, where you belong. If he needed any final confirmation that he was closing in on the Mahdi, he had it, for all the good it did him. He was virtually a prisoner; one step outside the elegant town house and he would be shot on sight by men waiting for him to appear. Even his 'fumigated, laundered, and pressed' clothes would not be mistaken for anything but what they were: cleaned-up terrorist apparel. And the order for him to go back where he came from could hardly be taken seriously. He accepted the fact that there would be reluctance to kill an American congressman, even one whose presence in Bahrain could easily be traced to the horrors in Masqat, where he had once worked. An obliterated, bombed-out Oman as demanded by a large segment of the American people would not be in the Mahdi's interests—but neither could the Mahdi permit that congressman to return to Washington. The absence of hard evidence notwithstanding, he knew too much that others far more experienced in the black arts could put to advantage; the Mahdi's solution was all too obvious. The curious, interfering American would be one more victim of these terrible times—along with others, of course. A massacre at an airport terminal; a plane blown out of the sky; a bomb in a coffee shop—so many possibilities, as long as among those killed was a man who had learned too much.
At the end it was as he had conceived it in the beginning. Himself and the Mahdi. Himself or the Mahdi. Now he had lost, as surely as if he were in the shell of a building with a thousand tons of concrete and steel crashing down on him.
There was a sharp tapping at the door. ‘Odkluil,' he said in Arabic, telling the visitor to come in, instinctively picking up his weapon from the white rug. The guard walked in, expertly balancing a large tray in the palm of his left hand. Evan shoved the gun under a pillow and stood up as the soldier carried his food to the white desk.
'All is in readiness, sir!' exclaimed the guard, no little triumph in his voice. 'I personally selected each item for its proper deliciousness. My wife tells me I should have been a chef rather than a warrior—’
Kendrick did not actually hear the rest of this warrior's paean to himself. Instead, he was suddenly mesmerized by the sight of the man. He was about six feet tall, give or take an inch, with respectable shoulders and an enviably trim waist. Except for that irritating waist, he was Evan's size or close to it. Kendrick glanced over at the clean, starched clothes on the chaise-lounge and then back at the colourful red and blue uniform of the frustrated chef-warrior. Without really thinking, Evan reached down for the hidden weapon as the soldier, humming like an Italian cudniere supremo, placed the steaming plates on the desk. The only thought that kept racing through Kendrick's mind was that a cleaned-up terrorist's outfit would be a target for a salvo of bullets, but not the uniform of a Bahrainian Royal Guard, especially one walking out of a royal house. Actually, there was no alternative. If he did nothing, he was dead in the morning—somewhere, somehow. He had to do something, so he did it. He walked around the outsized bed, stood behind the guard, and with all his strength smashed the handle of the gun into the soldier's bobbing, humming head.
The guard fell to the floor, unconscious, and again without really thinking, Evan sat down at the desk and ate faster than he had ever eaten in his life. Twelve minutes later, the soldier was bound and gagged on the bed as Kendrick studied himself in front of a closet mirror. The creased red and blue uniform might have been improved by the experienced fingers of a tailor, but withal and in the shadows of the evening streets, it was acceptable.
He ransacked the row of cupboards until he found a plastic shopping bag and stuffed his Masqat clothing into it. He looked at the telephone. He knew he would not use that phone, could not use it. If he survived the street outside, he would call Azra from another.
His jacket off, the shoulder holster in place, Azra angrily paced the room at the Aradous Hotel consumed by thoughts of betrayal. Where was Amal Bahrudi— the man with blue eyes who called himself Bahrudi? Was he in reality someone else, someone the foolish, bloated Englishman called 'Kendrick'? Was everything a trap, a trap to capture a member of Masqat's organization council, a trap to take the terrorist known as the Arabic Blue?… Terrorist? How typical of the Zionist killers from the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Haganah! How easily they erase the massacres of 'Jepthah' and Deir Yasin, to say nothing of their surrogate executioners at Sabra and Shatila! They steal a homeland and sell what is not theirs to
