by Ian Barclay
Ahmed Hasan looked after them as they left his office, mildly amused that he had to rely on “reformed” street criminals for highly delicate matters of state. They could be relied on to deliver exactly what had been requested, whereas intelligence officers and military men were so blinded by their own ambitions they were apt to bungle anything which involved judgment. Not Awad and Zaid. They knew for certain that they would never sit in parliament or be appointed an ambassador in London.
All the middle-level administrators in the military and security forces in Cairo knew Awad and Zaid, just as they made it their business to know everyone local with direct access to President Ahmed Hasan. So the two had no problem in getting immediate cooperation from the Tourist Police.
The Tourist Police knew where to find Omar Zekri. They picked him up at Giza, among the souvenir shops, papyrus museums, alabaster factories, camel and Arabian horse rentals, and the other stalls littered all around the pyramids. Zekri was one of the great horde of hustlers working the tourists—he was selling what he called “genuine Pharaonic artifacts” at the north side of the Cheops Pyramid.
He was still arguing with the officers who had arrested him when Awad and Zaid arrived, telling them that no charge against him for selling real antiquities would stick because everything he had for sale was fake, and that a fraud charge wouldn’t work either because everyone knew that trinkets sold for a few Egyptian pounds, as his did, could not be genuine. Zekri was getting more indignant by the minute, even dismissing one officer’s bribery charge with the claim that everyone in Egypt accepts a little baksheesh, including the police—until he saw Zaid and Awad. Then he grew pale and stopped talking.
Awad asked him quietly, “Where is Ali?”
Omar hesitated and then said, “I don’t know.”
Awad nodded to Zaid.
Zaid pushed the lighted top of his cigarette into Omar Zekri’s smooth cheek. Omar slapped his hand to his face and howled in pain.
“Where’s Ali?” Awad asked again, as quietly as before.
“At the Chephren Pyramid,” Omar sobbed.
Awad turned to the Tourist Police. “Take him with you so he can point out Ali, then bring both of them back to us. We’ll wait for you a little way out on the Abu Roash road.”
Abu Roash was a village about seven kilometers north of Giza. It had a little pyramid of its own, but the tourist mobs did not swarm out that way. When the Tourist Police returned almost an hour later, Awad leisurely checked both their prisoners against photos he took from a back pocket of his baggy pants. Omar Zekri had once been a handsome man, but now he was puffy eyed and bloated, obviously a heavy drinker. He was in his early fifties. Ali was in his early twenties, a pretty boy, probably not too bright or too honest.
Awad took the Tourist Police aside. “You never saw these two men today, no matter what witnesses say. You never saw us. You were never here. There’s no paperwork or any record of this. Orders from higher up.”
The Tourist Police didn’t look too happy about this, being used to a softer line of work, but they had half expected something like this and had families to feed. They avoided everyone’s eyes and drove quickly away.
Awad and Zaid frisked them. Ali had a knife. The Tourist Police had missed it or hadn’t bothered to search him. Awad threw their “Pharaonic” artifacts in the back seat of the Ford, climbed in, and slammed the door.
“You two sit on the front seat with me,” Zaid told Omar and Ali.
The two men exchanged a fearful glance and did as they were told.
Zaid turned off the road onto a winding track that became, in time, simply a double line of tire tracks across the desert. No one in the car spoke. Terrified, Ali and Omar held hands in the front seat.
Zaid pulled up at the ruins of an ancient tomb, which had probably been robbed thousands of years ago and had lain like this, half buried in sand, from before the time of the Prophet. The low swells of sand rose and fell all around them as far as the eye could see, their surfaces speckled with boulders and stones and occasional brown-leaved, stunted plants.
“Get out,” Zaid said.
The two men did not dare look behind them at Awad in case he was pointing a gun at their heads.
As they climbed out, Omar asked, “Do you mind if we smoke?”
“Go ahead,” Zaid said in a friendly voice, taking the car keys and going back to unlock the trunk.
The match held in Omar’s hand shook so badly, Ali had difficulty in lighting his cigarette.
Awad opened the rear door of the car but stayed inside in the shade, although the October sun was not unpleasantly hot, even out here in the desert where the bare ground reflected the heat.
Zaid slammed the trunk door and came around the side of the car, carrying a Black & Decker power saw.
“Omar,” Awad said from inside the car, “tell us what you do with your life.”
“Well, I have no children and no wife.” Omar smirked at Ali.
“Go on,” Awad said patiently.
“I live just off the Sharia El Muizz and I do what I can to make a living. I used to be a schoolteacher, but no more. I have a degree in history from the American University in Cairo. What else?” He gestured into the car at the merchandise he had been selling. “You can see for yourself what I am doing these days. I buy for next to nothing and sell for what I can persuade them to pay. I speak excellent English and French and give friendly advice along with my sales talk. There’s no harm in that.”
“Go on,” Awad murmured, still inside the car.
Omar glanced at Zaid, standing motionless with the power saw and staring at him with his deathbed eyes.
“I do anything for money,” Omar said hurriedly. “You tell me what to do or not to do, and I will obey you.”
A long silence followed this. Omar looked over at Ali and they smiled at each other. Zaid started the motor of the power saw. The sound bounced off the stones and naked sand.
Holding the moving blade of the saw in front of him, Zaid charged Ali.
“No! No! Not me!” Ali screamed, staggering backward across the sand. “Him! He knows! Not me!”
But Zaid paid no attention to Omar and kept after Ali. The young man seemed to lack enough common sense to take to his heels and run—he seemed too morbidly fascinated by the whirring blade being thrust at him. He put up his right hand to protect his face, and the saw sheared the fingers from his hand.
Ali looked for one horrified moment at his bleeding, digitless limb, then down at the fingers lying like fat worms on the sand. He began to howl piteously and to pray between his agonized, inarticulate cries, clutching his damaged hand to his stomach.
Zaid switched off the power saw and suddenly Ali’s screaming and pleas to Allah were amplified in the still, desert air.
Awad spoke calmly from inside the car. “Tell us what we want to know, Omar.”
“There’s nothing more,” Omar croaked.
Zaid started the motor of the saw. Omar stood petrified, staring with rounded eyes at the deadly implement. Doubled over and rocking back and forth, Ali seemed too far gone with pain to even notice that the power saw had been started again.
Zaid stepped quickly to Ali and began chopping on his stooped shoulders with the moving saw blade. The metal teeth ripped chunks of cloth and flesh out of the defenseless man. Ali staggered, raised his arms to protect his head, and was cut to the bone across both forearms.
Zaid kept chopping down at him, ripping globs of flesh from his body with every touch of the power saw. Ali rushed about, blindly trying to escape, somehow managing to stay on his feet, instinctively knowing that once he fell nothing could save him. Zaid was methodical, avoiding his victim’s head while delivering quick chops that would maim but not quickly kill.
This was finally too much for Omar Zekri. He attacked Zaid by jumping on his back. The weight of the bloated man nearly knocked the cadaverous Zaid off his feet on top of the running power saw. Zaid regained his balance and flipped Omar over his shou
lder so that he crashed to the ground on his side. Zaid then thrust down at Omar’s face with the saw blade.
Zaid was too fast. There was no way Omar could escape. He cringed from the descending blade of devouring teeth.
Just as the metal spurs seemed about to rip open his face, Zaid turned the motor off. As the teeth came to a stop, they scratched Omar’s cheek near the red welt left by the earlier cigarette burn.
“You know that you will have to tell us what we want to know,” Awad pointed out in kindly tones from the backseat of the car.
Omar agreed. He rattled on about gathering information for an American at the embassy. He named names. He gave dates and times. He made promises. He was hard to stop.
Awad smiled in a pleased way at Zaid. Omar Zekri was coming along very nicely. Awad got out of the car and stretched lazily in the sun.
“Time to take Omar to visit the colonel,” he said and got behind the wheel.
Omar climbed to his feet and looked across at Ali, bent over on his knees on the bloodstained sand, raw wedges hacked all over his body.
“What about Ali?” Omar asked. “We must rush him to the Anglo-American Hospital at Gezira-Zamalek.”
“Forget your Yankee friends,” Zaid spat.
“Well, then, the Cairo Medical Centre or El Salam Hospital.”
Zaid laughed. “He can stay here and feed the vultures.”
“Omar, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” Ali was lamenting, amazingly still conscious enough to know what was going on.
Omar made a decision. “Shoot him. Don’t leave him to die slowly. Put him out of his pain.”
Zaid shrugged and handed Omar the power saw.
“With this?” Omar asked, appalled.
“Sure,” Zaid said. “You just press this here.”
The power saw started in Omar’s hands.
Zaid stepped back, well out of his reach.
Omar walked unsteadily over to Ali, who was now moaning and uttering incomprehensible words.
Omar hovered the power saw blade over the back of Ali’s neck, tightly shut his eyes and pressed down.
As soon as the blade hit bone and the saw kicked in Omar’s grasp, he opened his eyes and stared in disbelief at what he was doing.
Then he vomited over the butchered body of his companion.
Awad held tightly onto the steering wheel, and the massive rolls of fat around his middle shivered with his laughter.
Chapter
3
For Richard Dartley, it was always either feast or famine. At times he rushed from one mission to another, wary that the success he achieved on one assignment might affect his judgment on the next through overconfidence, or he went for seemingly long periods when no one apparently knew of his existence. Of course, he could not complain of that, since he had painstakingly set things up so that he had disappeared off the face of the earth. There was no such person as Richard Dartley—there was only someone living under the name of Richard Dartley, which was merely an assumed name at first. Then it grew to an assumed identity, and this assumed identity and name had in turn to be protected from the merely curious and others whose inquisitiveness was not so idle or so innocent.
Boredom was his greatest threat. So long as Dartley never knew where he would be from one month to the next, not even whether he would be dead or alive, boredom had no chance to wrap its scaly coils around his mind.
When he had long waits between missions, he ran, he exercised, he practiced with weapons on different targets, he looked up girlfriends, he waited, he waited, waited… Dartley did not regard the rescue of the senator’s daughter as a full-blown mission. He had only taken it on because he knew he could not do what he did without the tolerance of Washington, D.C. They denied officially that he existed and condemned his actions in diplomatically phrased apologies when they had to, but they did not mess with him. And they did not mess with him only because he often was of use to them, directly or inadvertently. Now he had another senator in his corner, should he need him. Tears had welled into the senator’s eyes when Dartley had returned his daughter to him. The girl was still claiming that Dartley was more dangerous than either of her kidnappers, which of course was the reason the senator had sought him out in the first place.
Getting back the senator’s daughter had been too easy. Dartley did not feel like returning to a regimen of lifting weights, target shooting, running, reading—Southern California laid back, easy living was a pleasant change from the rigorous training he was accustomed to putting himself through between missions. Charley Woodgate was surprised to hear of this and wondered how long it would last. As it turned out, he never found out because he himself made the phone call that disturbed Richard Dartley’s new, easygoing existence.
“His name is Jacques Laforque,” Woodgate told Dartley. “I’ve checked him out. As he says, he is a lieutenant with the French Gendarmerie Nationale—he was one of the star members of their SWAT team till he got hurt and was moved upstairs to a desk job. He came to me on the recommendation of one of our ex-ambassadors to France.”
“What does he want?”
“Damned if I know,” Woodgate said. “I just checked on his credentials. Whatever he wants, it’s been ordered at the highest levels in France. I don’t think I want to know. When can we expect you back?”
“He can come to me.”
Charley laughed. “I suppose if he’s crossed the Atlantic to see you, he won’t refuse to cross the continent in addition. How do you want me to set up the meet?”
“There’s a place on the north side of the channel into Marina del Rey—the Venice side—with seats, palm trees and guys fishing. I’ll find him there tomorrow at four in the afternoon. I’ll recognize a Frenchman.”
Dartley spotted him there with no trouble. Laforque had the typical, fastidious mannerisms of a Frenchman abroad, looking about him with a curious yet disapproving air. The bony-faced Frenchman spotted Dartley almost as quickly as Dartley had identified him. Laforque strode without hesitation toward him and shook his hand.
“Mr. Dartley, it’s an honor and a pleasure to meet you,” Laforque said in strongly accented English.
“I’m Paul Savage,” Richard Dartley said. “Dartley told me to deal with you.”
“Impossible!”
Dartley shrugged. “That’s what Dartley said I was to do. He said you were to deal through me.”
“This is very frustrating!”
“Listen, I’m going to be the one who does whatever job you want done, so you got to talk with me sooner or later. That’s how it works. I do the job, Dartley gets the credit.”
“All right, Mr. Savage, I will explain my problem to you. First, however, I wish to register my protest at how this is being handled, and I insist that Mr. Dartley be made aware of this displeasure.”
Richard Dartley shrugged and left the Frenchman wondering if he even fully understood what had been said. They walked by the edge of the channel for a while in the October sunshine. Small sailboats were tacking this way and that in the channel, while bigger boats left their masts bare and ran on their engines. Fishermen sitting on rocks watched their lines placed at the outflow of dirty water from pipes. Both Dartley and Laforque scanned the faces of people sitting on benches, standing next to parked cars, walking on the embankment.
Laforque stroked his bony jaw and began to talk in a disillusioned way, like someone who knows he must live with some disappointment.
“Mr. Savage, you probably love your American homeland as I do mine. Some of the things I feel called upon to do for love of my country you may judge improper—perhaps only because your country has not the same needs as France. France has no fuel. Winters are cold and most of the people depend on industry. We found that we were becoming hostages of some of the same countries who had once been our colonies. And those people had not forgotten us from those times—or I should say that they had not forgotten the wrongs we did them and had completely forgotten the benefits we brought them. France was h
it much harder than America by the OPEC oil embargo. Our answer was to build nuclear reactors all over the country so that we would be less dependent on oil for electric power. And that led to unexpected developments.”
He walked along with Dartley for a while, and both of them watched two pretty blondes in bikinis expertly handle a small sailboat.
Dartley said, “I don’t think we’re going to get a chance to rescue them.”
“More likely they could rescue us,” Laforque said dryly, then went on. “France found herself in a new position with nuclear technology. Countries which had been refusing her oil at bargain prices were practically willing to give it away for nothing if France would build a nuclear reactor for them or one of their allies. When Ahmed Hasan overthrew Mubarak in Egypt, the Iranians committed enormous oil supplies to us at low cost if we built Hasan several reactors and supplied fuel. They guaranteed us that they would use nuclear power only for peaceful purposes.”
“Like the Iraqis and Pakistanis,” Dartley said sarcastically.
Laforque shrugged. “The Israelis and South Africans seem to have gotten nuclear weapons from someone also. I wonder who. Certainly not France. Anyway, the Arabs can see no justifiable reason why they too shouldn’t have nuclear weapons.”
“Perhaps because they would be only too willing to use them if they had them.”
“That’s what the Israelis say.” Laforque grinned. “The Western nations blame France and say we will cause the end of the world by giving nuclear capability to desert sheiks. Typical imperialist racism.”
“Not even the Russians are dumb enough to give nuclear equipment to that part of the world,” Dartley pointed out
“Ah, yes, they are, Mr. Savage. They sell off any outdated equipment they can get them to take. However, the Arabs don’t want that stuff. They have the money to buy the newest and best, which happens to be French these days.”
“What do you want me to do?” Dartley asked.
“Mr. Savage, we want Richard Dartley to save France’s good name by going into Egypt to discover if Ahmed Hasan is really making an atom bomb with French technology.”
