South Side Chicago! Here's your Mahdi.'
'Are you certain? asked Hassan, standing in the archway. 'The accusation is inflammatory!'
'I'm certain,' said Weingrass quietly. 'I should have shot the bastard in that tent in Basrah.'
'I beg your pardon?' The Bahrainian official was visibly shaken.
'Never mind—’
'No one has left the Sahalhuddin building!' said code Grey, walking forward into the archway.
'You're sure?'
'I paid a taxi driver who was very willing to accept a considerable sum of money with a great deal more to come if he did my bidding. I call him every few minutes at a public phone. Their two cars are still there.'
'Can you trust him?' asked Yaakov from the chair.
'I have his name and licence number.'
'Doesn't mean a damned thing!' protested Manny.
'I told him that if he lied, I'd find him and kill him.'
'I withdraw the statement, Tinker Bell.'
'Will you--'
'Shut up. What part of the Sahalhuddin does the Zareeba company occupy?'
'The top two floors, if I'm not mistaken. The lower floors are leased by its subsidiaries. Zareeba owns the building.'
'Convenient,' said Weingrass. 'Can you get us the updated structural plans, including the fire and security systems? I read those things pretty well.'
'At this hour?' cried the official. 'It's after three o'clock in the morning! I wouldn't know how—'
'Try a million dollars, American,' broke in Manny softly. ‘I’ll send it from Paris. My word.'
'What?'
'Split it up any way you like. That's my son in there. Get them.'
The small room was dark, the only light the white rays of the moon shining through a window high up on the wall—too high to reach, for there was no furniture except a low-slung cot with ripped canvas. A guard had left him a bottle of seeber-too ahbyahd, a numbing local whisky, suggesting that what faced him was better faced in a drunken stupor. He was tempted; he was frightened, the fear consuming him, causing him to sweat to the point where his shirt was drenched, his hair soaking wet. What stopped him from uncorking the bottle and draining it were the remnants of anger—and one last act he would perform. He would fight with all the violence he could summon, hoping, perhaps, in the back of his mind for a bullet that would end everything quickly.
Christ, why did he ever think he could do it? What possessed him to believe that he was qualified to do what far more experienced people thought was suicidal? Of course, the question was the answer: he was possessed. The hot winds of hate were burning him up; had he not tried they would have burned him out. And he had not failed entirely; he had lost his life but only because he had achieved a measure of success. He had proved the existence of the Mahdi! He had hacked a trail through the dense jungle of deceit and manipulation. Others would follow; there was comfort in that.
He looked at the bottle again, at the white liquid that would put him out of it. Unconsciously, he shook his head slowly back and forth. The Mahdi had said his gestures were as pathetic as his words. Neither would be pathetic on that plane flying over the shoals of Qatar.
Each soldier of the Masada Brigade had understood from the beginning and each checked the plastic tape around his left wrist to make certain the cyanide capsule was in its small, exposed bubble. None carried papers or any traces of identification; their 'working' clothes down to the shoes on their feet and the cheap buttons on their trousers were all purchased by Mossad agents in Benghazi, Libya, the core of terrorist recruitment. In these days of injected chemicals, the amphetamines and the scopolamines, no member of the Masada unit could permit himself to be captured alive where his actions could be even remotely connected to the events in Oman. Israel could not afford to be held responsible for the slaughter of two hundred and thirty-six American hostages, and the
