'But I want to come back. I am coming back!'
'Don't, not to this part of the world. We can read and we can hear and we watch television. You did it all by yourself! You stuck it to the Arabs'. Get out of my memory, you son of a bitch!'
'Ahmat!'
'Out, Evan! I would never have believed it of you. Do you become powerful in Washington by calling us all animals and terrorists? Is that the only way?'
'I never did that, I never said it!'
'Your world did! The way it keeps saying it again and again and again, until it's pretty fucking obvious you want us all in chains! And the latest goddamned scenario is yours!'
'No!' protested Kendrick, shouting. 'Not mine!'
'Read your press. Watch it!'
'That's the press, not you and me!'
'You are you—one more arrogant bastard within your blind, holier-than-thou Judaeo-Christian hypocrisies—and I am me, an Islamic Arab. And you won't spit on me any longer!'
'I never would, never could—'
'Nor on my brothers, whose lands you decreed should be stolen from them, forcing whole villages to abandon their homes and their jobs and their insignificantly small businesses—small and insignificant but theirs for generations!'
'For Christ's sake, Ahmat, you're sounding like one of them!'
'No kidding?' said the young sultan, both anger and sarcasm in his words. 'By “them” I assume you mean like a kid from one of those thousands upon thousands of families marched under guns into camps fit for pigs. For pigs, not families! Not for mothers and fathers and children!… Good gracious, Mr. All-knowing, eminently fair American. If I sound like one of them, gosh, I'm sorry! And I'll tell you what else I'm sorry about: I got here so late. I understand so much more today than I did yesterday.'
'What the hell does that mean?'
'I repeat. Read your press, watch your television, listen to your radio. Are you superior people getting ready to nuke all the dirty Arabs so you won't have to contend with us any more? Or are you going to leave it to your cool pals in Israel who tell you what to do anyway? You'll simply give them the bombs.'
'Now, just hold it!' cried Kendrick. 'Those Israelis saved my life!'
'You're damned right they did, but you were incidental! You were just a bridge to what they really flew in here for.'
'What are you talking about?'
'I might as well tell you because no one else will, nobody's going to print that. They didn't give a shit about you, Mr. Hero. That unit came here to get one man out of the embassy, a Mossad agent, a high-ranking strategist posing as a naturalized American under contract to the State Department.'
'Oh, my God,' whispered Evan. 'Did Weingrass know?'
'If he did he kept his mouth shut. He forced them to go after you in Bahrain. That's how they saved your life. It wasn't planned. They don't give a goddamn about anyone or anything but themselves. The Jews! Just like you, Mr. Hero.'
'Damn it, listen to me, Ahmat! I'm not responsible for what's happened here, for what's been printed in the papers or what's on television. It's the last thing I wanted—’
'Bullshit!' broke in the young Harvard alumnus and sultan of Oman. 'None of it could have been reported without you. I learned things I had no idea about. Who are these intelligence agents of yours running around my country? Who are all those contacts you reached?'
'Mustapha, for one!'
'Killed. Who flew you in under cover without apprising
