movements, in a sense, of his life. The communications equipment came later, quite a bit later, the delay due to Khalehla's obstinacy. She had resisted the idea of moving into Kendrick's house, but after eighteen days of hotel living and numerous, awkward out-of-the-way meetings with Evan and her 'Uncle Mitch', the latter had put his foot down.
'Damn it, my dear, there's no way I can justify the cost of a safe house solely for one of my people, nor would I list the reason if I could, and I certainly can't install the equipment we need in a hotel. Also, I've passed the official word from Cairo to DC that you've resigned from the Agency. We can't afford you in the sector any longer. So I really don't think you have a choice.'
'I've been trying to convince her,' Kendrick had interrupted in the private room of a restaurant across the Maryland border. 'If she's worried about appearances I'll put it in the Congressional Record that my aunt's in town. How about an older aunt with a face lift?'
'Oh, you bloody fool. All right, I'll do it.'
'What equipment?' Evan asked, turning to Payton. 'What do you need?'
'Nothing you can buy,' answered the CIA director. 'And items only we can install.'
The next morning a telephone repair truck had drawn up at the house. It was waved on to the grounds by the Agency patrols, and men in telephone company uniforms went to work while over twenty stonemasons were completing the wall and ten others finishing the impenetrable fence. Linemen climbed successive poles from a junction box, pulling wires from one to another and sending a separate cable to Kendrick's roof. Still others drove a second truck around the rear drive and into the attached garage where they uncrated the computer console and carried it into the downstairs study. Three hours and twenty minutes later, Mitchell Payton's equipment was in place and functioning. That afternoon Evan had picked up Khalehla in front of her hotel on Nebraska Avenue.
'Hello there, Auntie?'
'I want a dead bolt on the guest room door,' she had replied, laughing as she threw her soft nylon bag into the rack behind the seat and climbed in.
'Don't bother, I never mess with older relatives.'
'You already have, but not now.' She had turned to him, adding with gentle yet firm sincerity, 'I mean that, Evan. This isn't Bahrain; we're in business together, not bed. Okay?'
'That's why you wouldn't move in before?'
'Of course.'
'You don't know me very well,' Kendrick had said after a few moments of silence in the traffic.
‘That's part of it.'
'Which leads me to a question I've wanted to ask you but I thought you might take it the wrong way.'
'Go ahead.'
'When you walked into that house in Maryland last month, among the first things you mentioned was Bahrain. Yet later you told me the house was wired, that anything we said would be heard. Why did you say it then?'
'Because I wanted the subject dispensed with as rapidly and as thoroughly as possible.'
'Meaning that others—people cleared to read the transcripts—would assume or suspect what happened.'
'Yes, and I wanted my position clear, which was not supine. My following statements were consistent.'
'Case closed,' said Evan, heading into the Beltway towards Virginia.
'Thanks.'
'By the way, I've told the Hassans all about you—sorry, not all, of course. They can't wait to meet you.'
'They're your couple from Dubai, aren't they?'
'Far more than a “couple”. Old friends from long ago.'
'I didn't mean it in a belittling sense. He's a professor, isn't he?'
'With luck he'll have a post at either Georgetown or Princeton next spring; there was a little matter of papers which we've managed to clear up. Incidentally, “small world” department, he
