The Icarus Agenda

by Ludlum, Robert

'Of course not. Neither of us wants the blood of American hostages on our hands.'

  I'll need papers for myself and probably lists of air and sea shippers from areas I'll pinpoint.'

  'Spoken, nothing written down, except for the papers. A name and an address will be delivered to you; pick up the papers from that man.'

  'Thank you. Incidentally, the State Department said the same thing. Nothing they gave me could be written down.'

  'For the same reasons.'

  'Don't worry about it. Everything coincides with what I've got in mind. You see, Ahmat, I don't want to know you either.'

  'Really?'

  'That's the deal I've cut with State. I'm a non person in their books and I want to be the same in yours.'

  The young sultan frowned pensively, his eyes locked with Evan's. 'I accept what you say but I can't pretend to understand. You lose your life, that's one thing, but if you have any measure of success, that's another. Why? I'm told you're a politician now. A congressman.'

  'Because I'm getting out of politics and coming back here, Ahmat. I'm picking up the pieces and going back to work where I worked best, but I don't want any excess baggage with me that might make me a target. Or anyone with me.'

  'All right, I'll accept that, gratefully on both counts. My father claimed that you and your people were the best. I remember, he once said to me, “Those retarded camels never over-run on cost.” He meant it kindly, of course.'

  'And, of course, we usually got the next project, so we weren't so retarded, were we? Our idea was to work on reasonable margins, and we were pretty good at controlling costs… Ahmat, we have only four days left before the executions start again. I had to know that if I needed help I could go to you, and now I do know it. I accept your conditions and you accept mine. Now, please, I haven't an hour to waste. What's the number where I can reach you?'

  'It can't be written down.'

  'Understood.'

  The sultan gave Kendrick the number. Instead of the usual Masqat prefix of 745, it was 555, followed by three zeros and a fourth five. 'Can you remember that?'

  'It's not difficult,' answered Kendrick. 'Is it routed through a palace switchboard?'

  'No. It's a direct line to two telephones, both locked in steel drawers, one in my office, the other in the bedroom. Instead of ringing, small red lights flash on; in the office the light is built into the right rear leg of my desk, and in the bedroom it's recessed in the bedside table. Both phones become answering machines after the tenth ring.'

  'The tenth?'

  'To give me the time to get rid of people and talk privately. When I travel outside the palace, I carry a beeper that tells me when that phone has been called. At an appropriate time, I use the remote control and hear the message—over a scrambler, of course.'

  'You mentioned that only two other people had the number. Should I know who they are or isn't it any of my business?'

  'It doesn't matter,' replied Ahmat, his dark brown eyes riveted on the American. 'One is my minister of security, and the other is my wife.'

  Thanks for that kind of trust.'

  His gaze still rigid on Kendrick, the young sultan continued. 'A terrible thing happened to you here in our part of the world, Evan. So many dead, so many close friends, a horrible senseless tragedy, far more so for the greed that was behind it. I must ask you. Has this madness in Masqat dredged up such painful memories that you delude yourself, reaching for implausible theories if only to strike out at phantoms?'

  'No phantoms, Ahmat. I hope to prove that to you.'

  'Perhaps you will—if you live.'

  "I'll tell you what I told the State Department. I have no intention of mounting a one-man assault on the embassy.'

  'If you did something like that you could be considered enough of a lunatic to be spared. Lunacy recognizes its own.'

  'Now you're the one being implausible.'

  'Undoubtedly,' agreed the sultan of Oman, his eyes still levelled at the congressman from Colorado. 'Have you considered what might happen—not if you're discovered and taken by the terrorists; you wouldn't live long enough to speculate—but if the very people you say you wanted to meet with actually confronted you and demanded to know your purpose here? What would you tell them?'

  'Essentially the truth—as close to it as possible. I'm acting on my own, as a private citizen, with no connection to my government, which can be substantiated. I made a great deal of money over here and I'm coming back. If I can help in any way, it's in my own best interests.'

  'So the bottom line is self-serving. You intend to return here and if this insane killing can be stopped, it will be infinitely more profitable for you. Also, if it isn't stopped, you have no business to return to.'

  'That's about it.'

  'Be careful, Evan. Few people will believe you, and if the fear you spoke of is as pervasive among your friends as you say, it may not be the enemy who tries to kill you.'

  I've already been warned,' said Kendrick.

  'What?'

  'A man in a truck, a sahbee who helped me.'

  Kendrick lay on the bed, his eyes wide, his thoughts churning, turning from one possibility to another, one vaguely remembered name to another, a face, another face, an office, a street… the harbour, the waterfront. He kept going back to the waterfront, to the docks—from Masqat south to Al Qurayyat and Ra's al Hadd. Why?

  Then his memory was jogged and he knew why. How many times had he and Manny Weingrass made arrangements for equipment to be brought in by purchasable surplus space on freighters from Bahrain and the Emirates in the north? So many they were uncountable. That hundred-mile stretch of coastline south of Masqat and its sister port of Matrah was open territory, even more so beyond Ra's al Hadd. But from there until one reached the short Strait of Masirah, the roads were worse than primitive, and travellers heading into the interior risked being attacked by haraamiya on horseback—mounted thieves looking for prey… usually other thieves transporting contraband. Still, considering the numbers and depth of the combined intelligence efforts of at least six Western nations concentrating on Masqat, the southern coastline of Oman was a logical area to examine intensively. This was not to say that the Americans, British, French, Italians, West Germans and whoever else were co-operating in the effort to analyze and resolve the hostage crisis in Masqat had overlooked that stretch of Oman's coast, but the reality was that few American patrol boats, those swift, penetrating bullets on the water, were in the Gulf. Those which were there would not shirk their duties, but they did not possess that certain fury that grips men in the heat of the search when they know their own are being slaughtered. There might even be a degree of reluctance to engage terrorists for fear of being held responsible for additional executions. The southern coast of Oman could bear some scrutiny.

  The sound erupted as harshly as if a siren had split the hot, dry air of the hotel room. The telephone screamed; he picked it up. 'Yes?'

  'Get out of your hotel,' said the quiet, strained voice on the line.

  'Ahmat?' Evan swung his legs on to the floor.

  'Yes! We're on a direct scrambler. If you're bugged, all they'll hear me say is gibberish.'

  'I just said your name.'

  'There are thousands like it.'

  'What's happened?'

  'Mustapha. Because of the children you spoke of, I called him and ordered him to come immediately to the palace. Unfortunately in my anger I mentioned my concern. He must have phoned someone, said something to someone else.'

  'Why do you say that?'

  'On his way here he was gunned down in his car.'

  'My God!'

  'If I'm wrong, the only other reason for killing him was his meeting with you.'

  'Oh, Christ—’

  'Leave the hotel right away and don't leave any identification behind. It could be dangerous to you. You'll see two policemen; they'll follow you, protect you, and somewhere in the street one of them will give you the name of the man who will provide you with papers.'
>
  I'm on my way,' said Kendrick, getting to his feet, focusing his mind on removing such items as his passport, money belt, airline tickets and whatever articles of clothing might be traced to an American on a plane from Riyadh.

  'Evan Shaikh,' Ahmat's voice over the line was low, firm. 'I'm convinced now. Your Mahdi exists. His people exist. Go after them. Go after him.'

  The Icarus Agenda

  Chapter 5

  'Hasib!' The warning came from behind, telling him to watch out! He spun around only to be pressed into the wall of a building in the crowded narrow street by one of the two policemen following him. His face against the stone, the ghotra protecting his flesh, he turned his head to see two bearded, dishevelled youths in paramilitary fatigues striding through the bazaarlike thoroughfare, waving heavy, ugly, black repeating weapons in their hands, kicking out at merchants' stalls and rubbing their heavy boots on the surfaces of the squatting streetsellers' woven rugs.

  'Look, sir!' whispered the policeman in English, his voice harsh, angry yet somehow elated. 'They do not see us!'

  'I don't understand.'

  The arrogant young terrorists approached.

  'Stay against the wall!' commanded the Arab, now hammering Kendrick back into the shadows, shielding the American's body with his own.

  'Why—’ The armed hoodlums passed, thrusting the barrels of their guns menacingly into the robed figures in front of them.

  'Be still, sir! They are drunk either with the forbidden spirits or on the blood they have shed. But thanks be to Allah, they are outside the embassy.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Those of us in uniform are not permitted within sight of the embassy, but if they come outside, it is another matter. Our hands are untied.'

  'What happens?'

  Up ahead, one of the terrorists smashed the butt of his weapon into the head of an offending Omani; his companion swung his rifle around at the crowd, warning it.

  They face either the wrath of the Allah they spit on,' replied the policeman, whispering, his eyes filled with rage at the scene, 'or they join the other reckless, filthy pigs! Stay here, ya Shaikh, sir! Stay in this small bazaar. I will be back, I have a name to give you.'

  'The other—What other filthy pigs?' Evan's words were lost; the sultan's police officer sprang away from the wall, joining his partner, now surging through the shadowed, turbulent, frightened sea of abas. Kendrick pulled the ghotra around his face and ran after them.

  What followed was as baffling and as swift to the untrained eye as a surgeon's scalpel plunging into a haemorrhaging organ. The second policeman glanced back at his companion. They nodded to each other; both sprang forward closing in on the two swaggering terrorists. Ahead, on the right, was an intersecting alleyway, and as if an unheard signal had pierced the narrow bazaar, the crowds of sellers and buyers dispersed in various directions. Almost instantly the alleyway was empty, a dark, deserted tunnel.

  The policemen's two knives were suddenly plunged into the upper right arms of the two arrogant killers. Screams, covered by the intense, growing babble of the moving crowds, followed the involuntary release of weapons as blood spewed out of torn flesh and arrogance turned into infuriated weakness, death perhaps preferable to disgrace, eyes bulging in disbelief.

  The terrorists were rushed into the dark alley by Ahmat's two trusted police; unseen hands threw the huge, lethal weapons after them. Kendrick parted the bodies in front of him and raced into the deserted tunnel. Twenty feet inside, the youthful, wild-eyed killers were supine on the stone pavement, the policemen's knives above their throats.

  'La!' shouted Evan's protector, telling him No! 'Turn away!' he continued in English, for fear Kendrick might misunderstand. 'Hide your face and say nothing!'

  'I must ask you!' cried Kendrick, turning but disobeying the second command. 'They probably don't speak English, anyway—’

  'They probably do, ya Shaikh, sir," broke in the other policeman. 'Whatever you have to say, say later! As spokesman, my instructions are to be obeyed without question. Is that understood, sir?'

  'Understood.' Evan nodded quickly and walked back towards the arched entrance to the bazaar.

  'I will come back, ya Shaikh,' said Kendrick's protector, hovering over his prisoner. 'We will take these pigs out the other end and I will be back for you—’

  The man's words were interrupted by a violent, shattering scream of defiance. Without thinking, Evan whipped his head around, suddenly wishing he hadn't, wondering instantly if the image would ever leave him. The terrorist on the left had grabbed the policeman's long-bladed knife above and yanked it down, slicing it into his own throat. The sight turned Kendrick's stomach; he thought he would vomit.

  'Fool!' roared the second policeman, not so much in rage as in anguish. 'Child! Pig! Why do you do this to yourself? Why to me?' The protest was in vain; the terrorist was dead, blood covering his bearded young face. Somehow, thought Evan, he had witnessed a microcosm of the violence, the pain and the futility that was the world of the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

  'All is changed,' said the first officer, his knife held up, rising above his open-mouthed, incredulous prisoner and touching his comrade's shoulder. The latter shook his head as if trying to rid his eyes and his mind of the youthful, bloody corpse beneath him, then nodded rapidly, telling his companion he understood. The first officer approached Kendrick. 'There will be a delay now. This incident must not reach the other streets so we must move quickly. The man you seek, the man who is waiting for you, is known as El-Baz. You will find him in the market beyond the old south fortress in the harbour. There is a bakery selling orange baklava. Ask inside.'

  'The south fortress… in the harbour?'

  'There are two stone fortresses built by the Portuguese many centuries ago. The Mirani and the jalili—'

  'I remember, of course,' interrupted Evan, rambling, finding part of his sanity, his eyes avoiding the death-wound of the mutilated body on the floor of the dark alleyway. 'Two forts built to protect the harbour from raiding pirates. They're ruins now—a bakery selling orange baklava.'

  'There is no time, sir. Go! Run out the other side. You cannot be seen here any longer. Quickly!'

  'First answer my question,' shot back Kendrick, angering the police officer by not moving. 'Or I stay here and you can answer to your sultan.'

  'What question? Leave!'

  'You said these two might join “other reckless… pigs” –those were your words. What other pigs? Where?'

  'There is no time!'

  'Answer me!'

  The policeman inhaled deeply through his nostrils, trembling with frustration. 'Very well. Incidents like tonight have happened before. We have taken a number of prisoners who are questioned by many people. Nothing must be said—'

  'How many?'

  'Thirty, forty, perhaps fifty by now. They disappear from the embassy, and others, always others, take their places!'

  'Where?'

  The officer stared at Evan and shook his head. 'No, ya Shaikh, sir, that I will not tell you. Go!'

  'I understand. Thanks.' The congressman from Colorado gripped the cloth of his aba and raced down the alley towards the exit, turning his face away as he ran past the dead terrorist whose streaming blood now filled the crevices between the cobblestones.

  He emerged on the street, looked up at the sky and determined his direction. To the sea, to the ruins of the ancient fortress on the south shore of the harbour. He would find the man named El-Baz and arrange for the proper papers, but his mind was not on that negotiation. Instead, he was consumed by information he had heard only moments ago: thirty, forty, perhaps fifty by now. Between thirty and fifty terrorists were being held in some isolated compound in or outside the city, being interrogated with varying degrees of force by combined intelligence units. Yet if his theory was correct, that these child-butchers were the maniacal dregs of Islam, manipulated by an overlord of financial crime in Bahrain, all the interrogation techniques from the pharaohs
to the Inquisition to the camps in Hoa Binh would be useless.

  Unless—unless—a name that conjured up a zealot's most fanatical passions was delivered to one of the prisoners, persuading him to divulge what he would normally take his own life before revealing. It would mean finding a very special fanatic, of course, but it was possible. Evan had said to Frank Swann that perhaps one in twenty of the terrorists might be intelligent enough to fit this description—one out of twenty, roughly ten or twelve in the entire contingent of killers at the embassy—if he was right. Could one of them be among the thirty to fifty prisoners in that isolated, secret compound? The odds were slim but a few hours inside, at most a night, would tell him. The time was worth spending if he could be allowed to spend it. To begin his hunt he needed a few words; a name, a place—a location on the coastline, an access code that led back to Bahrain. Something! He had to get inside that compound tonight. The executions were to be resumed three days from tomorrow at ten o'clock in the morning.

  First the papers from a man called El-Baz.

  The ruins of the old Portuguese fortress rose eerily into the dark sky, a jagged silhouette that bespoke the strength and resolve of sea-going adventurers of centuries past. Evan walked rapidly through the area of the city known as Harat Waljat towards the market of Sabat Aynub, the name translated freely as the basket of grapes, a marketplace far more structured than a bazaar, with well-kept shops lining the square, the architecture bewildering for it was an amalgam of early Arabic, Persian, Indian and the most modern of Western influences. All these, thought Kendrick, would fade one day; an Omani presence to be restored, once again confirming the impermanence of conquerors—military, political or terrorist. It was the last that concerned him now. The Mahdi.

  He entered the large square. A Roman fountain was sending sprays of water above a dark, circular pool in whose centre stood a statue of some Italian sculptor's concept of a desert sheik striding forward, robes flowing, going nowhere. But it was the crowds that stole Evan's attention. Most were male Arabs, merchants catering for the rich and foolhardy Europeans, tourists indifferent to the chaos at the embassy, marked by their Western clothes and profusion of gold bracelets and chains, glistening symbols of defiance in a city gone mad. The Omanis, however, were like animated robots, forcing themselves to concentrate on the inconsequential, their ears blocking out the constant gunfire from the American Embassy less than a half-mile away. Everywhere, their eyes blinked and squinted incessantly, brows frowning in disbelief and disassociation. What was happening in their peaceful Masqat was beyond their understanding; they were no part of the madness, no part at all, so they did their best to shut it out.