and his flatulent mouth.'
'Manny…? He kept talking about you, warning us!'
'I silence such mouths with a terribly swift sword! You may interpret that as a bullet in their heads… But when I heard about you, I knew you'd come back because of that first battle five years ago. You led me, as they say, a merry chase until nine hours ago, Amal Bahrudi.'
'Oh?'
'The Soviets are not without men who prefer to be on additional payrolls. Bahrudi, the Euro-Arab, was killed several days ago in East Berlin… Kendrick's name surfaces; a dead Arab with blue eyes and pronounced Occidental features is suddenly in Masqat—the equation was imaginative in the extreme, almost unbelievable, but it balanced. You must have had help, you're not that experienced in these matters.'
Evan stared at the striking face with the high cheekbones and the fired eyes that gazed steadily back at him. 'Your eyes,' said Kendrick, shaking his head, pushing away the last effects of the drug administered to him in the street. 'That flat mask of a face. I've seen you before.'
'Of course you have, Evan. Think,' The Mahdi slowly removed his ghotra, revealing a head of tightly ringleted black hair salted with eruptions of grey. The high, smooth forehead was now emphasized by the dark, arched eyebrows; it was the face of a man easily given to obsession, instantly summoning it for whatever purpose it served. 'Do you find me in an Iraqi tent? Or perhaps on a podium in a certain Midwest armoury?'
'Jesus Christ!' whispered Kendrick, the images coming into focus. 'You came to see us in Basrah seven or eight years ago and told us you'd make us rich if we turned down the job. You said there were plans to break Iran, break the Shah, and you didn't want any updated airfields in Iraq.'
'It happened. A true Islamic society.'
'Bullshit! You must broker their oil fields by now. And you're as Islamic as my Scots grandfather. You're from Chicago—that's the Midwest armoury—and you were thrown out of Chicago twenty years ago because even your own black constituency—which you bled dry—couldn't take your screaming, fascist crap! You took their millions and came over here to spread your garbage and make millions more. My God, Weingrass knew who the hell you were and he told you to shove it! He said you were slime—two-bit slime, if I remember correctly—and if you didn't get the hell out of that tent in Basrah, he'd really lose his temper and throw bleach in your face so he could say he only shot a white Nazi!'
'Weingrass is—or was—a Jew,' said the Mahdi calmly. 'He vilified me because the greatness he expected eluded him, but it had started to flower for me. The Jews hate success in anyone but their own kind. It's why they are the agitators of the world—’
'Who the hell are you kidding? He called you one rotten Shvartzeh and it had nothing to do with whites or blacks or anything else! You're pus and hate, Al Falfa, or whatever you called yourself, and the colour of your skin is irrelevant… After Riyadh—that very important battle—how many others did you kill, did you slaughter?
'Only what was called for in our holy war to maintain the purity of race, culture and belief in this part of the world.' The lips of the Mahdi from Chicago, Illinois, formed a slow, cold smile.
'You goddamned fucking hypocrite!' shouted Kendrick. Unable to control himself, Evan again lunged out of the chair, his hands like two claws flying across the desk towards the robes of the killer-manipulator. Other hands reached him before he could touch the Mahdi; he was hurled to the floor, kicked simultaneously in his stomach and his spine. Coughing, he tried to get up; while on his knees the guard on the left gripped his hair, yanking back his head as the man on the right held a knife laterally across his throat.
'Your gestures are as pathetic as your words,' said the Mahdi, rising from behind the desk. 'We are well on our way to building a kingdom here and there's nothing the paralysed West can do about it. We set people against people with forces they cannot control; we divide thoroughly and conquer completely without ourselves firing a shot. And you, Evan Kendrick, have been of great service to us. We have photographs of you taken at the airport when you flew in from Oman; also of your weapons, your false papers and your money belt, the latter showing what appears to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have documented proof that you, an American congressman using the name of Amal Bahrudi, managed to get inside the embassy in Masqat where you killed an eloquent gentle leader named Nassir and later a young freedom fighter called Azra—all during the days of precious truce agreed by everyone. Were you an agent of your brutal government? How could it
