hours since the attack on the house in Fairfax, Virginia, and close to eighteen hours after the storming of the hated enemy's home in Colorado. Their mission had been conceived as a combined assault that would stun the Western world with blood and death, avenging the brothers who had been killed, proving that the ultimate security ordered by the President of the United States for a single man was no match for the skills and the commitments of a dispossessed people. Operation Azra demanded the life of an ordained American hero, an impostor who had claimed to be one of them, who had broken bread and sorrow with them, and who finally had betrayed them. That man had to die along with all who surrounded him, protected him. A lesson had to be taught!
That most loathsome of enemies had not been found in Fairfax; it was presumed that Yosef's unit would find him and kill him at his house in the western mountains. Yet there was nothing, nothing! The five of them from Command One had waited in their adjoining hotel rooms—waiting, waiting for the telephone to ring and to hear the words spoken: Operation Azra is now complete. The hated pig is dead!… Nothing. And most strange of all, there were no screaming headlines in the newspapers, no shocked, anguished men or women on television revealing yet another triumph for the holy cause. What had happened?
Ahbyahd had gone over every step of the mission and could fault none. Every conceivable problem but one had been anticipated and solutions found in advance, either through the byways of official corruption in Washington or with sophisticated technology and bribed or blackmailed telephone technicians in Virginia and Colorado. The one unforeseen and unforeseeable problem was a suddenly suspicious aide to the despicable politician who quite simply had to be killed quickly. Ahbyahd had sent the one 'priest' of their small brigade who had not been in Oman to Kendrick's office late on Wednesday afternoon before the attack on Fairfax. The purpose was merely to cross-check the latest intelligence that confirmed the American congressman's presence in the capital. The 'priest's' cover was immaculate; his papers—religious and official—were in order and he brought with him 'greetings' from numerous 'old friends', each of them a living person from Kendrick's past.
The 'priest' had been caught reading a secretary's desk diary while waiting for the aide to come out into the deserted office. The aide had promptly gone back inside; their 'priest' had quietly opened the door and heard the young man on the telephone asking for Congressional Security. He had to die. Quickly, efficiently, taken under a gun to the bowels of the massive Capitol building and dispatched swiftly. Yet even that death had not been made public.
What had happened? What was happening? The martyrs of the holy mission would not, could not, return to the Baaka Valley without the trophy of vengeance they so desperately sought and so richly deserved. It was unthinkable! If there was no rendezvous in Cortez, blood would flow over blood at a place called Mesa Verde. The terrorist put the key in his pocket, threw the blank card and the envelope on the terminal floor, and started towards Gate Twelve.
'Sweetie!' shouted Ardis Vanvlanderen, walking into the living room from the office she had made for herself from a guest room in San Diego's Westlake Hotel.
'What is it, babe?' asked her husband, sitting in a velour armchair in front of a television set.
'Your problems are over. Those zillions of millions are safe for the next five years! Keep building your missiles and super-duper sonics until the cows shit uranium… I mean it, lover, your worries are over!'
'I know that, babe,' said Andrew Vanvlanderen without moving, his eyes fixed on the screen. ‘I’ll see it and hear it any time now.'
'What are you talking about?' She stopped and stood motionless, staring down at her husband.
'They've got to release it soon. They can't keep it quiet much longer… Jesus, it's been damn near twenty-four hours.'
'I have no idea what that muddled mind of yours is conjuring, but I can tell you that Emmanuel Weingrass is on his way out. There was a certain doctor for hire. He's been injected—’
'He's out now. So's Kendrick.'
'What?'
'I couldn't wait for you, lover—none of us could. There were better ways, more logical ways—expected ways.'
'What the hell have you done?'
'Given an aggrieved people the opportunity to avenge themselves
