by Ian Barclay
They went on to talk of other things.
The AirEgypt turboprop cargo plane touched down on the runway at Cairo International Airport. Two army Range Rovers waited at the cargo terminal, and an officer and four soldiers watched the ground crew set up to unload the aircraft. The temperature was in the high sixties, a sunny, pleasant October day, after a scorching summer that had made the asphalt runways and air laced with jet fuel fumes a more hellish place than any to be found in the Libyan Desert.
The officer climbed the ramp and pointed out two plywood crates, each about four feet square, marked London-Cairo/Al-Qahira with red serial numbers. He double-checked the numbers against those on a clipboard and shouted at the workers to handle the crates carefully because they contained sensitive, high explosives. The soldiers laughed and the workers grinned nervously.
They set the crates down gently on a small flatbed wagon attached to a miniature tractor, which towed them into a customs shed cordoned off by ropes. Paper signs dangling from the ropes read in Arabic and English: MILITARY INSTALLATION—KEEP OUT. The soldiers lifted the crates from the wagon and waited for the driver to leave the shed before they set about tearing open the crates. A bald man in civilian clothes took a stethoscope from his jacket pocket.
Inside the first crate were huddled a woman and a boy about five. The soldiers stretched them on their backs on the concrete floor. The doctor kneeled over each of them in turn to listen to their breathing, feel their pulse, lift an eyelid, look inside the mouth and place the stethoscope on the chest. He grunted and moved on to the next pair, two girls about seven and nine, obviously sisters.
When he rose to his feet, the doctor gave the officer a severe look. “I don’t think much of this method. These people are fortunate to be alive. They should come out from under the effects of the drug in five hours or so. They’ll be feeling groggy and nauseous for a while after that. Whose idea was this?”
The officer raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Not the Army’s.”
“I thought not. Well, you can tell whoever did think it up that, in my professional opinion—”
The officer gestured to the doctor to lower his voice and led him out of earshot of the four soldiers.
A cold drizzle fell on Cambridgeshire. The small, spare Egyptian physicist made his way through the centuries-old quadrangles of Cambridge University without a coat, seemingly heedless of the weather. He drew an occasional amused glance from students, who dismissed him as an absentminded prof for whom a raw October day was merely meteorological data.
But Dr. Mustafa Bakkush was not absentminded or eccentric. He was in the middle of an emotional crisis so violent he was oblivious to his rain-soaked shirt, jacket and pants. He walked through deep puddles among the paving stones without seeing them or feeling the water spill into his shoes.
When he reached the research building, he walked past his lab door and on down the corridor to the director’s office. Ponsonby was sitting behind his desk in his white lab coat, shaking his head slowly at a plastic model of a nuclear structure.
“We’ve got it wrong somewhere, Mustafa,” he said without looking up, “and I’m damned if I know where.”
Mustafa Bakkush was not deflected from his purpose. “Gordon, I want to resign. Immediately.”
Gordon Ponsonby’s eyebrows shot up. “Dammit, man, you just got here. You can’t walk out on us like that.”
“I have to.” Mustafa sat on the edge of an upright chair, small, wet, cold, miserable.
Ponsonby stared at him. “Been on a bender, old boy? You look like something the cat brought in.”
“Gordon, they tell me I’ve got to go.”
“For God’s sake, who? Buck up, man. Out with it. Those bloody Americans? They have no money for physics these days—don’t believe a word they tell you. The Germans?”
“Home. Egypt.”
Ponsonby was flabbergasted. “But the mullahs denounced you personally as a decadent Westerner. Who knows what would have happened if you and your family hadn’t reached our embassy in time? And remember the fuss we had to smuggle you all out? Now, hardly a year later, you walk into my office, looking as if you stopped to immerse yourself in the river on the way, and announce you want to go back. Homesick for the pyramids, I suppose.”
“Gordon, I don’t want to go back. I have to. They have Aziza and the children.”
Bakkush told the director of the phone calls he had been receiving, culminating in the disappearance of his wife and children four days previously.
“You didn’t go to the police?”
“The man on the telephone warned me not to. He said they would not be harmed if I kept quiet. I knew he was an Egyptian and not an ordinary criminal. This morning I received a phone call a little after five. He gave me a Cairo number and told me to phone it. It took more than an hour to get through. I asked for Aziza. She came to the phone and told me they were all safe and well. They allowed her to tell me what happened. Men came to the house with two crates. They put them in the garage, saying they were scientific equipment I had ordered. She could see they were Egyptian, and they explained that by saying I had contacted them because they were fellow countrymen and needed the work. They managed to delay until all the children were in the house, then they chloroformed everyone with a cloth over their faces. After that they must have injected them with a powerful drug and put them in the crates. Aziza overheard one man say they had been shipped out of Gatwick on a cargo plane.”
“Gatwick! Good God, what’s Britain coming to!”
“Much as I dread going back there, for Aziza and the children’s sakes I have to.”
“Yes, yes, of course you must. What rotten luck. We’ll keep the journals open to you and expect to see you at conventions and so forth….”
Mustafa shook his head. “I won’t be working on the cutting edge of physics when I go back to Egypt, Gordon. They have a program I suspect they need me for, one that’s become past history in more technically advanced countries.”
Ponsonby averted his eyes. “When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Good luck.”
There was nothing more to say. After Bakkush left his office, Ponsonby pressed the intercom to his secretary in an alcove farther down the corridor. “Mrs. Arthurs, I have to go to London today. What time’s the next train?”
He held the phone in his left hand, and with his right removed a cassette from the tape deck concealed beneath a desk drawer.
John Keegan sat in the office of his State Department superior, F. Conrad Bigglesley. Like Keegan, he was a Princeton man and they got on well.
“Defense has gone too far this time,” Bigglesley expostulated, his eyes bulging with indignation. “That whole department’s developed a complex since Vietnam—it’s like having to work with an emotionally disturbed person.”
Keegan nodded. “They’re always trying to play it too safe or too dangerously, never the happy medium. This time though, I think the CIA may be more to blame than the Department of Defense.”
“It’s Defense, with Treasury doing Defense’s bidding. You don’t see the whole picture, John.”
“Maybe not.”
That pacified Bigglesley enough to acknowledge Keegan’s point. “I grant you this stuff is not coming from military intelligence. But neither is it originating with the CIA. They’re just acting as messengers. And you know who for? Right. God’s chosen people, our friends the Israelis. They and Defense are hand in glove. It’s a known fact. Despite all our diplomatic work to ease tensions in the area, despite our numerous successes, our department gets little credit. You ask why. I answer, because peaceful discussion is less dramatic than violent confrontation. Don’t you agree, John?”
“Absolutely, Conrad.”
“That’s what Defense relies on all the time—good publicity. They have no interest in settling things behind closed doors or in using the diplomatic touch—all they want is some playground stunt that will make them look good on the
tube.”
“You never said a truer word.”
Bigglesley’s indignation had subsided and he was now looking more pleased with himself. “Let me sum up our viewpoint for you. Ahmed Hasan is no angel. We’d prefer to have Mubarak back in power any day, but Hasan is a reality, and we can’t get around that. If Hasan is deposed as president of Egypt, you’ll almost certainly have one of those Light of Islam mullahs replacing him. Our friends in Defense and the CIA claim none of the mullahs could be any worse than Ahmed Hasan—that’s what Israel wants us to believe. That’s the whole ploy, you see?”
Keegan nodded. “If Israel can maneuver another Khomeini into power in Egypt, we will break relations with them and be all the more dependent on Israel.”
Bigglesley looked pleased and surprised. “Very good, John, you hit the nail on the head. Now it’s up to us to back Ahmed Hasan all the way, as the only moderate between us and the Light of Islam. We’ve got to save Egypt.”
Keegan took a deep breath. “The CIA says Egypt’s already lost, Conrad. I’m not saying I agree with that, but let me assume the role of devil’s advocate for a moment. Ahmed Hasan is a butcher. He’s very possibly insane—at the least he can be described as mercurial. And he’s building an atom bomb with France’s help because they are dependent on Arab oil. Defense wants to do something about it before it’s too late—meaning before they put that bomb together. Our position at State is that this is all lies, fed to the CIA by the Israelis in collusion with the Department of Defense.”
“Correct.”
Keegan was a little taken aback by so ready an answer. “In spite of British intelligence’s report that Mustafa Bakkush has gone back to Egypt under duress? I take it you saw the report from that physicist at MIT who said they don’t need anyone else to make an atom bomb once they’ve got Bakkush. The Israelis didn’t invent this.”
“Let me spell it out for you, John. Where do you live and for whom do you work? Simple. Washington, D.C., the Department of State. You do not live in the eastern Mediterranean and you do not work for the Department of Defense. Therefore, you will support Ahmed Hasan until further notice.”
“Clear as glass, Conrad.”
“Great. I hope you and Alice can make it tomorrow night to the reception. Henry Kissinger will be there.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
A sand-yellow Jaguar XJ-S drew up before the huge western gateway of Bab al ’Azab, into the Citadel complex, the high walls of which dominated the Islamic section of Cairo. The car’s V-12 engine purred as it waited for the gates to be unlocked. This was the part of the Citadel which no tourists visited. Its purpose today was the same as it had been for centuries—a dungeon for political prisoners. The gates opened, soldiers with M16 automatic rifles peered into the sleek sportscar, then snapped to attention in a rigid salute. The Jaguar crept inside the walls of the Citadel, followed by a Jeep Cherokee, and the gates closed behind them.
The Jeep Cherokee had inch-thick Plexiglas in its windshield and windows. Heavy steel plates were welded inside the vehicle’s walls, under the roof, and beneath the chassis. Eight men and women, hardly out of their teens, dressed in combat fatigues and toting Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, spilled out of the Cherokee and fanned out about the courtyard. They assumed relaxed crouches, in contrast to the ceremonial bearing of other troops in the courtyard.
The Jaguar also had bulletproof Plexiglas windows, but no sign of armor plating was evident. Presumably, the plates were concealed beneath the fine leather upholstery, wood-trim paneling and plush carpeting.
The color of President Ahmed Hasan’s military uniform exactly matched that of his car. He unfolded his long, lean, angular body out of the bucket seat and looked about him critically at each of the regular soldiers in the courtyard, standing chest out, chin in, eyes front. The president wiped the brass above the peak of his cap on his sleeve before placing the cap on his head. Then he crossed the courtyard and entered the old fortified building through a stone archway, preceded and followed by his bodyguards.
The jailers were expecting him and had the prisoner prepared. This man was flabby, middle-aged, and obviously American. He sat on a hard, upright chair until the army officer next to him poked him. Then he stood to acknowledge the president’s entry into the large, high-ceilinged room.
Ahmed Hasan spoke in Arabic. “So you are the CIA spy.”
The army officer translated this into English.
“Nothing of the kind, sir,” the American responded in English with a strong Alabama accent. “My name is Wendell Ray Oliver and I’m a Baptist preacher come to bring the word of the Lord to sinners the world over. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
The president smiled sardonically and continued in Arabic, plainly having understood the English. “In Egypt, eighty-five percent of the people are Sunni Muslims and most of the rest are Coptic Christians. I am told you speak neither Arabic nor Coptic. How do you hope to bring the word of anybody to them if you do not speak their language?”
“Through the gift of tongues,” the Alabaman said confidently. “When the time is right, the spirit will descend upon me and all men shall understand my words.”
Hasan nodded slowly. “This isn’t much of a cover for an employee of the great CIA. Surely they can do better than ask their agents to pretend to be madmen. You were found in a zone in which foreigners are not permitted to travel without a permit. You made an effort a week ago to get this permit, and when it was denied, you traveled into the forbidden zone anyway. So you cannot plead ignorance. What were you doing there?”
“Bringing the word of the Lord to unworthy sinners.”
A look of irritation flickered across Ahmed Hasan’s face.
The military officer spoke urgently to Wendell Ray Oliver. “You are trying our great leader’s patience. He is a busy man and has taken time away from the affairs of state to deal with your case. If you appreciate his effort and kindness toward you by cooperating immediately, he will be merciful to you. But if you continue to insult him with your lies and trickery, he will stomp on you as he would on a disgusting insect.”
Oliver looked from the military interpreter to the uniformed president and said, “The Lord is my shepherd.”
Hasan scowled. He produced a yellow, unsharpened pencil, tipped by an eraser, from inside his tunic and handed it to the American. “Read aloud what’s on it.”
“Eberhard Faber MONGOL 482.”
“Anything else?”
Oliver looked at the pencil closely. “U.S.A.”
“Precisely. An American pencil for an American confession.” Hasan laughed harshly, and in one fluid, lightning movement whipped out a gravity knife and dropped open its fixed blade close to the throat of the startled American.
“The pencil, please,” Hasan requested in a low, polite voice.
The American handed it to him with a trembling hand, glancing at the gleaming blade before his face.
As the president sharpened the pencil, the honed razor edge shearing away the wood around the lead, he spoke in a cold, commanding tone. “While I wait here to witness your statement, you will write a short summary of your association with the Central Intelligence Agency and the purpose of your mission here—particularly why you were in that zone where you had been denied admission.”
He released the catch, folded the blade, and put the knife away. Then he held the pencil in his right fist, its newly sharpened point upward, and thrust it toward the American.
Wendell Ray Oliver stared back at him fixedly and made no move to take the pencil.
The military interpreter shifted uncomfortably in the silence that followed.
Not a muscle moved on Ahmed Hasan’s face.
He drove the pencil in his fist up through the underside of the American’s jaw, through the soft palate in the roof of his mouth, and deep into his brain.
Wendell Ray Oliver collapsed dead at Hasan’s feet.
The president turned quickly and made for t
he door with his bodyguards scampering around him.
As he went, he shouted a single word in English over and over: “Spies! Spies! Spies! Spies!”
Chapter
2
Richard Dartley checked by phone from his room at the Beverly Wilshire. The TWA flight from Washington, D.C., was due on schedule at LAX, 3:15. Malleson had called previously. He had not been very informative. All he could say was that the man on the TWA flight was alone and presumably unarmed since he had to pass through a metal detector in order to board the plane. He was about twenty-five, athletic build, brown hair, no distinguishing features except for his strikingly fashionable two-piece suit of blue and white vertical stripes. He had no luggage, and so he presumably could not change clothes in midflight, unless this distinctive suit could be turned inside out to another pattern, which Malleson doubted. There was no way Dartley could miss him. One other thing—he had a Hertz car reserved.
A suit as eyecatching as a semaphore signal and a Hertz car reservation! Dartley wondered if any kidnapper could be that dumb. Yet the man had no reason to believe he had been detected and identified.
The victim had been grabbed in the parking lot of a swank shopping mall at Newport Beach, on the southern edge of Los Angeles. She was the daughter of a U.S. senator. The ransom call had come from a Washington, D.C., public phone to her father’s Senate office, and one of his aides had put the caller through to the senator himself. A quarter mil. One week to raise it. Any tricks and the girl was dead.
The FBI, LAPD, California State Police and D.C. cops were all working twenty-four-hour days on the case. They made so little progress, the media never caught on that something had happened.
The second phone call to the senator’s office on the Hill was also labeled a local call. The grab on the West Coast and the ransom demand on the other side of the continent broke all the kidnap patterns on FBI books. The senator was told to be ready to drop the money in L.A. The notes, none new, none over a hundred, were to be in a suitcase. The LAPD figured the senator would be told in some last-minute phone call to drop the suitcase from an overpass to the side of a freeway beneath. No date had been set.
