'There was talk about a man running into the alley after the police,' said the informant, his eyes on the bakery. 'It was contradicted, convincingly, I believe.'
'How? He was seen.'
'But in the excitement he was not seen rushing out, clasping his wallet, which was presumably taken by the pigs. That was the information emphatically exclaimed by our man to the onlookers. Naturally, others emphatically agreed, for hysterical people will always leap on new information unknown to a crowd of strangers. It elevates them.'
'You're very good,' said the woman, laughing softly. 'So are your people.'
'We had better be, ya anisa Khalehla,' responded the Arab, using the Omani title of respect. 'If we are less than that, we face alternatives we'd rather not consider.'
'Why the bakery?' asked Khalehla. 'Any ideas?'
'None whatsoever. I detest baklava. The honey doesn't drip, it pours. The Jews like it, you know.'
'So do I.'
'Then you both forget what the Turks did to you—both.'
'I don't think our subject went into that bakery for either baklava or an historical treatise on the Turks versus the tribes of Egypt and Israel.'
'A daughter of Cleopatra speaks?' The informant smiled.
'This daughter of Cleopatra doesn't know what the hell you're talking about. I'm just trying to learn things.'
'Then start with the military car that picked up your subject several blocks north of his hotel after the praters of el Maghreb. It has considerable significance.'
'He must have friends in the army.'
'There is only the sultan's garrison in Masqat.'
'So?'
'The officers are rotated bi-monthly between the city and the posts at Jiddah and Marmul, as well as a dozen or so garrisons along the borders of South Yemen.'
'What's your point?'
'I present you with two points, Khalehla. The first is that I find it unbelievably coincidental that the subject, after four or five years, would so conveniently know a certain friend in the relatively small rotating officer corps stationed this specific fortnight in Masqat in an officer corps that changes with the years—’
'Unusually coincidental, I agree, but certainly possible. What's your second point?'
'Actually, it negates my mentioning the first. These days no vehicle from the Masqat garrison would pick up a foreigner in the manner he was picked up, in the guise he was picked up, without supreme authority.'
‘The sultan?’
'Who else?'
'He wouldn't dare! He's boxed. A wrong move and he'd be held responsible for whatever executions take place. If that happens, the Americans would level Masqat to the ground. He knows that!'
'Perhaps he also knows that he is held responsible both for what he does do as well as for what he does not. In such a situation it's better to know what others are doing, if only to offer guidance—or to abort some unproductive activity with one more execution.'
Khalehla looked hard at the informant in the dim light of the square's periphery. 'If that military car took the subject to a meeting with the sultan, it also brought him back.'
'Yes, it did,' agreed the middle-aged man, his voice flat, as if he understood the implication.
'Which means that whatever the subject proposed was not rejected out of hand.'
'It would appear so, ya anisa Khalehla.'
'And we have to know what was proposed, don't we?'
'It would be dangerous in the extreme for all of us not to know,' said the Arab, nodding. 'We are dealing with more than
