else.'
'To where? Really, you're not making sense.'
'You're not listening. Somewhere along the way, a back street or a dark road outside the city, we'll overpower the guards and escape.'
'Overpower…? We?'
'I'm part of the group, part of the escape. I'm going back in there.'
'Complete madness!' exclaimed Faisal.
'Complete sanity,' countered Evan. 'There's a man inside who can take me where I want to go. Take us where we have to go! Get me the police photographs and then reach Ahmat on the triple-five number. Tell him what I've told you, he'll understand… Understand, hell! It's what that Ivy League juvenile delinquent had in mind from the beginning!'
'I think perhaps you did also, ya Shaikh ya Amreekdnee.'
'Maybe I did. Maybe I just want to blame it on someone else. I don't fit into this mould.'
'Then something inside is propelling you, re-shaping the man who was. It happens.'
Kendrick looked into the soft brown eyes of the Omani doctor. 'It happens,' agreed Evan. Suddenly his mind was filled with the outlines of a murky silhouette; the figure of a man emerged from the raging fires of an earth-bound hell. Whirlwinds of smoke enveloped the apparition as cascading rubble fell all around it, muting the screams of victims. The Mahdi. Killer of women and children, of friends dear to him, partners in a vision—his family, the only family he ever wanted. All gone, all dead, the vision joining the smoke of destruction, disappearing in the rising vapours until nothing was left but the cold and the darkness. The Mahdi! 'It happens,' repeated Kendrick softly, rubbing his forehead. 'Get me the photographs and call Ahmat. I want to be back in that compound in twenty minutes, and I want to be taken out ten minutes later. For God's sake, move!'
Ahmat, sultan of Oman, still in slacks and his New England Patriots T-shirt, sat in the high-backed chair, the red light of his private, secure telephone glowing below on the right leg of his desk. With the instrument next to his ear he was listening intensely.
'So it happened, Faisal,' he spoke quietly. 'Praise be to Allah, it happened.'
'He told me you expected it,' said the doctor over the line, his tone questioning.
'“Expected” is too strong, old friend. Hoped is more appropriate.'
'I removed your tonsils, great sultan, and I attended you over the years for minor illnesses including a great fear you had that proved groundless.'
Ahmat laughed, more to himself than into the phone. 'A wild week in Los Angeles, Amal. Who knew what I might have contracted?'
'We had a pact. I never told your father.'
'Which means you think I'm not telling you something now.'
'The thought occurred to me.'
'Very well, old friend—' Suddenly, the young sultan snapped his head up as the door of his royal office was opened. Two women entered; the first was obviously pregnant, an Occidental from New Bedford, Massachusetts, blonde and wearing a bathrobe. His wife. Next to appear was an olive-skinned, dark-haired female dressed fashionably in street clothes. She was known to the household simply as Khalehla. 'Apart from common sense, good Doctor,' continued Ahmat into the phone, 'I have certain sources. Our mutual acquaintance needed assistance, and who better to provide it than the ruler of Oman? We leaked information to the animals at the embassy. Prisoners were being held somewhere, subjected to brutal interrogation. Someone had to be sent there to maintain discipline, order—and Kendrick found him… Give our American anything he wants, but delay his schedule by fifteen or twenty minutes, until my two police officers arrive.'
'The Al Kabir? Your cousins?'
'Two special police will suffice, my friend.'
There was a brief silence, a voice searching for words. 'The rumours are true, aren't they, Ahmat?'
