'You must never tell!' pleaded the young Egyptian girl. 'You don't understand!’
'Don't you worry about that, honey. In Boston we have a phrase that means the same thing from Southie to Beacon Hill. “Them that gives, gets!” And those motherfuckers will get, take my word!'
'No! They'll come after me—they won't understand, either! I don't hate Jews… my dearest friend since childhood is the daughter of a rabbi, one of my father's closest colleagues. I don't hate Jews. They'll say I do because to them I'm just a dirty Arab, but I don't! My family's not like that. We don't hate.'
'Hold it, kid. I didn't say anything about Jews, you did. I said motherfuckers, which is an all-inclusive term, so to speak.'
'It's finished here. I'm finished. I'll leave.'
'The hell you will! You're seeing my doctor, who'd better know his marbles, and then you move in with me. Christ, I haven't had a cause in almost two years!'
Praise God and Allah, and all those other deities above. I have a friend. And somehow, within the pain and the hatred of those days, an idea was born that grew into a commitment. An eighteen-year-old girl knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
The telephone rang. The past was finished, over, the present was everything! She ran to the bedside phone, yanking it out of its cradle. 'Yes?'
'He's here.'
'Where?'
'The embassy.'
'Oh, my God! What's happening? What's he doing?'
'He's with two others—’
'There are three, not four?'
'We have only seen three. One is at the gate among the beggars. He's been talking to the terrorists inside.'
'The American! Where is he?'
'With the third man. The two of them stay in the shadows, only the first man shows himself. He is the one who makes the decisions, not the American.'
'What do you mean?'
'We think he's making arrangements for them to go inside.'
'No!' screamed Khalehla. 'They can't—he can't, he mustn't! Stop them, stop him!'
'Such orders should come from the palace, madame—’
'Such orders come from me! You've been told! The prisoner compound was one thing, but not the embassy, never the embassy, not for him! Go out and take them, stop them, kill them if you have to! Kill him!'
'Hurry!' cried the robed Arab running to his colleague in the front of the boarded-up restaurant and cracking the bolt of his machine gun into the firing position. 'Our orders are to take them now, stop them, stop the American. Kill him, if we must.'
'Kill him?' asked the astonished official from the palace.
'Those are the orders. Kill him!'
'The orders have come too late. They're gone.'
Ultra Maximum Secure
No Existing Intercepts
Proceed
The figure in the dark sterile room touched the letters of the keyboard with angry precision.
I've broken the Langley access codes and it's madness! Not the CIA, for the liaison is withholding nothing. Instead, the insanity is with the subject. He has gone into the embassy! He can't survive. He'll be found out—in the toilet, at a meal with or without utensils, with a single reaction to a phrase. He's been
