by Ian Barclay
“Those Secret Service guys are giving us a good looking over, mate,” the attaché remarked cheerfully. “Where’s your car parked?”
Dartley directed him. He did not open the thick envelope the Australian handed him. The money would be there to the last dollar.
Dartley had left his car on a ghetto street a few blocks from the White House. As they approached, Dartley spotted three figures in a doorway near the car.
“Drive on slowly,” he said to the attaché, who had also seen them.
Dartley got a close look as they passed by. The three black youths in the doorway were about twenty years old. They were making no effort to conceal themselves, and obviously had not, as Dartley first thought, put his car under surveillance.
“They’re okay,” Dartley said. “Probably local guys. Park here and walk back with me. I’ll cover you on your way back to the car.”
The pickup went off without incident. The three men in the doorway watched curiously as the two white men opened the trunk of the car. One threw a thick envelope in and pulled out a long cardboard box, which he gave to the other and slammed the trunk down. Then the dude with the box walked back to his car, while the other one watched his back. The one with the box drove away.
“Hey, you,” one of the three shouted to Dartley, “why don’t you mess with that shit on your own streets, ‘stead of bringing it down here?”
“We don’t need your fucking garbage, man.”
“You dumping enough shit on us as it is.”
They were moving from the doorway toward him, fanning out, looking for action.
“It’s not what you think,” Dartley said in a calm voice, making no effort to dash inside the car.
“Hah, man, you come down here to deal your dope and piss on us ‘cause you think nothing matters down here.”
“You’re right, bro.”
“This muffa think he something.”
Dartley wasn’t armed, if it could be said that a man with Dartley’s skills in the martial arts was unarmed, simply because he was not carrying conventional hardware.
The first of them came at Dartley, assumed an exaggerated stance, and kicked sideways at his head. The guy was all show and had about as much speed as a slow-motion demonstration film. Dartley stepped barely out of range of the kick, clamped his right hand on the upper side of the man’s shoe and pressed his left hand powerfully upward on the inside of his heel. The anklebones shattered and the foot hung, loose and floppy.
The guy whimpered as he fell, and scratched the sidewalk with his fingernails to ease the pain.
Dartley moved from his first to his second assailant in a blur of continuous motion. He dodged the long narrow screwdriver the man tried to sink into his stomach, grabbed the steel shaft of the screwdriver and bent it back into the V formed by the man’s thumb and index finger, thus twisting the tool out of his grasp.
At that moment Dartley took a heavy body punch or kick—he couldn’t tell which—from the third man, and then a sharp rap across the forehead from his fist. Dartley felt the stone in the man’s ring tear his skin, and warm blood leaked into his left eye.
He had seen this blow to his forehead as it was coming and rode with the punch. He couldn’t have avoided it and also have sidestepped the far more deadly rabbit punch being delivered by the man he had just disarmed of the screwdriver.
Dartley stood apart from the two men for an instant, brandished the screwdriver and then drove its long steel stem into the ribcage of the man he had taken it from. He thrust the screwdriver upward at a forty-five degree angle, to fit between the slats of the ribs. He left it buried to the handle in the man’s left side.
The third man stood and stared, transfixed with shock. Dartley let him be. He knew the fight had gone out of this one and he bore him no personal grudge. As the body of the stabbed man crumpled to the sidewalk, his uninjured companion felt an instinctual urge of self-preservation and took off down the street.
Dartley made sure the fleeing man did not turn to look at the number on his car’s registration plate. Then, using the victim’s own shirt, he wiped his prints off the handle of the screwdriver still buried in the dying man’s side.
The one with the broken ankle still lay groaning, too immersed in his own problems to have noticed what went on around him.
Dartley looked up and down the empty street. He got in his car, started the engine, and drove away, waiting a couple of blocks before he flicked the lights on.
He had arranged to meet Sylvia Marton at National. She was taking the shuttle in from New York and so couldn’t be sure exactly which plane she would be on. She had been there since early morning, making a TV commercial for a pantyhose company. This was a bit of a step down for a movie star—but then she had been a star only in Yugoslav films, never on this side of the Atlantic.
“Every twenty-nine-year-old woman needs an ego boost regularly,” she had told Dartley a few days previously. “If the ad agency for the pantyhose company thinks my legs are more shapely than those of all the young bimbos they’ve got in New York City, who am I to argue with them? Of course I couldn’t refuse them!”
While he waited, Dartley mopped the blood from his forehead with Kleenexes and covered the red furrow gouged by the ring’s stone with a Band-Aid. He knew Sylvia wouldn’t ask questions. She would merely raise her eyebrows to let him know she had noticed.
She was not averse to excitement herself. To his amazement, Dartley discovered she was a crack shot, and on several occasions she had been his getaway driver. She knew nothing, asked no questions, wanted no money—she just went along for kicks. Which made her Dartley’s kind of woman.
“Darling, I’m exhausted,” she cried when she saw him at the airport. “Those brutes made me pose nearly nude all day in all sorts of lurid positions. My little tush is numb from the effort.”
Several men who had been eyeing this blonde, blue-eyed, sexy lady smiled when they heard this. It was plain that any one of them would have given a lot to trade places with Richard Dartley as she threw her arms about his neck and kissed him full on the mouth.
The taping may have been exhausting, as Sylvia claimed, but it sure had acted as a turn on for her also. As Dartley drove to her Georgetown apartment, he felt her undo his belt buckle and unzip his pants. Next he felt her soft palm caress his lower belly until he got a monstrous hard-on.
She massaged his dick and gave him some tender strokes that made the car fishtail. Then she went down on him, and he felt her moist lips and tongue on the head of his cock. This wasn’t making the car any easier to steer.
Finally, he pulled into the parking lot of her apartment building and eased into a remote corner beneath a tree. He turned the car engine off and let his body’s motor run at full throttle in Sylvia’s throat.
Chapter
4
Omar Zekri was having bad dreams. They’d start out good, with Ali smiling and everybody happy. Then Ali’s face would begin to disintegrate, in the middle of a smile, and the contents of his skull would leak like those of an overripe melon. Or worse would happen. Omar had taken to staying awake, sitting up all night in an old armchair, taking cat naps, trying never to allow himself to become immersed in deep sleep and those horrible dreams.
He even eased up on booze and coasted all day on beer, to calm his nerves. With the lack of sleep, he hardly had enough energy to be nervous anyway. He just went from place to place, doing what he had to do, too sick to sorrow, too tired to think.
Awad and Zaid came around every day. Sometimes several times. He would bump into them in unexpected places. Sometimes they would greet him and shake hands, as if they were very old friends or even cousins who had not seen each other for a long time. Other times they would pretend not to know him. He could never tell what they would do. The only thing he could be sure of was that no day would pass without his seeing them. Deep in his mind, he knew they were a more immediate threat to him than his scary apparitions of Ali. The dead did not harm the living.
Omar kept telling himself that. It was the living he had to fear more than the dead. He was not afraid of Ali. The dreams were what he was afraid of….
He could not sleep.
Omar had expected to be tortured and killed when he admitted to Zaid and Awad that he collected information for the Americans. Instead, the two men had given him three bottles of Scotch and a hundred Egyptian pounds. All he had to do in the future was to pass the information from some of his contacts through Egyptian military clearance before he gave it to his American contact. As they explained, he was now working with his own government instead of against it. He had nothing to fear now about getting caught for treason. Why then did Awad and Zaid keep circling him like two sharks? Did they think he might be tempted, for more money, to tell the Americans how some of the information was now being monitored by the Egyptians? Of course, Omar had considered this opportunity. He had dismissed it as being too risky, considering what would happen to him if he disobeyed Zaid and Awad.
He wondered what Pritchett would do to him if he found out what was going on. Pritchett seemed pleasant enough, but so were all American Embassy spies—or at least the two who had been his contacts before Pritchett. They were trained to be pleasant and inconspicuous. No doubt they were trained also to deal with Egyptian informants who double-crossed them. Pritchett would shoot him and push his body in the Nile. Which was not so bad, really, when he thought about what Zaid and Awad said they would do to him.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” John Keegan said to the assembled reporters from the dais with the State Department seal, signaling that the news conference was over. “I only have time for one or two questions.”
He pointed to a black woman.
“Sir, can you tell us why Defense seems to be going along with State these days on President Ahmed Hasan? Has President Reagan told them to shape up?”
“Not to my knowledge, Charlayne. I think I am free to say that we are beginning to hear some heartening things from Egypt. That is not to say that everything has changed overnight for the better, but there are definite, encouraging signs… that is all I can say. I think that everybody sees now that we must be patient—that we must give President Hasan a chance. It would be tragic if we prematurely withdrew our support for him and by so doing denied him the opportunity to return Egypt to a more democratic society. Thank you.”
“Sir!”
“Sir!”
“What about Israel’s claim that—”
John Keegan smiled and quickly walked away.
* * *
Dartley had no trouble at Cairo International Airport. He was required to change $150 into Egyptian currency at the official rate, since he did not have a visa (Malleson hadn’t wanted to stretch things by applying for a genuine visa with Dartley’s fake credentials in the name of Thomas Lewis). As Dartley passed out of customs, he picked up a map to the city at the Tourist Office desk. He was not being observed. Then he took a black-and-white cab to the Nile Hilton, where a room had been reserved for Mr. Lewis.
So far he hadn’t noticed any anti-American displays, and certainly the Hilton, Sheraton and other American investments had not been seized like they had in Iran. Dartley’s problem was that he now had to make a move, but in what direction he couldn’t tell. There was no reason why doing one thing was better than another, so far as he could see.
Egypt was a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and thus was open to the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ body charged with halting the spread of nuclear weapons. The inspectors checked nuclear inventories, affixed seals to prevent diversion of material for unauthorized use and scanned millions of photos taken by sealed automatic cameras they installed in the plants.
But there were ways around these inspectors. For example, Iraq was thought to have made plutonium for bombs secretly from its big stockpile of natural uranium. Natural uranium in the form of yellowcake was not something the agency inspectors kept track of. The yellowcake had been secretly refined in a hot-cell laboratory that Iraq had bought from Italy. The refined uranium was then irradiated in the reactor, between agency inspections, to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Israeli warplanes interrupted that project. France had supplied the reactor and fuel to the Iraqis, and they were supposed to have technicians on the spot to stop all irregularities. Dartley could sympathize with the French. They had been made to look like fools on two scores—first, the Iraqis had apparently tricked them, and then the Israelis had showed themselves to be more alert and more decisive.
Since those times Iraq had gotten bogged down financially in its war with Iran; the revolution in Iran had more or less put an end to nuclear research there; and Libya was still unsuccessful in its attempts to buy readymade atom bombs. Dartley could see the Egyptian point of view. There were no longer ties between Egypt and Israel, and if Egypt could develop a nuclear capability, the country would regain its leadership of the Arab world. That was an understandable aim, and even an acceptable one had it not been for the fact that this would put the near-ultimate weapon of destruction in the hands of Ahmed Hasan and the Light of Islam mullahs.
The Viscount had done his homework all right. Dartley’s head was now filled with facts, but facts were one thing and what to do with them was another. He had been immediately attracted by the list of Egyptian scientists who had recently returned from abroad. Malleson identified one among them as by far the most important, a Mustafa Bakkush. If he could be located, the bomb would not be far away. He was an internationally famous man and would not be so easy to hide. There would be talk. Certainly, asking around for a man would be easier than for a bomb.
Dartley lay back on the bed in his luxury room at the Nile Hilton and wondered how to start. It had been easy to use his bogus identity as a wheat expert at the airport, but it might be quite difficult with knowledgeable people. His best bet would probably be to pass as a tourist, keep his mouth shut, and hope people wouldn’t spot him as an American—a wild hope, he knew.
The phone rang.
It was a Mr. Pritchett to see him. Dartley knew no one by that name, yet had him sent up to his room. Whoever this turned out to be, Dartley wanted to face him behind a closed door.
“Pritchett, from the embassy.” The stout, red-faced man with blue eyes shook Dartley’s hand and flopped into a chair. “Got anything to drink?”
“No,” Dartley said in an even voice to the sweating man. “You didn’t say which embassy.”
In reply, Pritchett produced a plastic-encased ID card.
“I’m not here on American business,” Dartley snapped.
Pritchett shrugged. “You know, before Hasan kicked out Mubarak, the U.S. was making long-term, low-interest loans to Egypt to buy American wheat. Two hundred and seventy-five million bucks’ worth.”
“You afraid I’ll teach them how to grow their own so they won’t want any more from the Middle West?”
“Naw. I was just showing off my knowledge. I couldn’t give a shit about wheat.” Pritchett mopped his brow with a large red handkerchief. When he saw that his host still was not going to offer him a drink, he went on, “Mr. Lewis, I want you to keep your eyes and ears open wherever you go and report anything unusual to us at the embassy.”
Dartley cursed silently. Contact with the American Embassy was the last thing he wanted. He said, “I’d certainly be pleased to help any way I can. However, I can’t jeopardize my work for the United Nations by seeming to be an… agent or whatever for the American Embassy. Even talking to you here would probably be enough to have me expelled from the country.”
“You don’t have to approach me directly,” Pritchett said hurriedly. “We needn’t ever talk again. It would be better that way. Here, memorize the name of this Egyptian. You will find him at that location at that time every day of the week. He is very dependable. Write what you wish me to know. Verbal messages become confused. Sign it with a code name. How about N. Hilton?”
“Great,” Dartley
said. After some small talk, he eased him out the door.
Pritchett wasn’t such a fool as he pretended to be. After all he had known of Dartley’s arrival in Egypt within three hours. Somehow he had learned that his name was Thomas Lewis and that he worked for CIMMYT. Obviously Pritchett had an informant in Immigration, and obviously Pritchett was CIA. He hadn’t pressed Dartley to collection information, just left it to his patriotic duty. CIA method of operation. Dartley made up his mind. Thomas Lewis was going to disappear from the Nile Hilton that very night.
He would get moving right away. That Egyptian would be a start. He looked at the piece of paper Pritchett had given him. The Egyptian would be there in about an hour. Outside the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, opposite the exit gate of the Gezira Sporting and Racing Club, on Zamalek Island in the Nile. The man’s name was Omar Zekri.
“No, no, it is enough that I pick up messages for Mr. Pritchett,” Omar Zekri was saying in his high-pitched voice and unusually accented English as he and Dartley walked along a dusty residential street. “I see no reason for me to have talks with people. It is not expected of me. You give me your message. No more. It is not reasonable.”
Dartley let him go on complaining so long as he kept moving. The big houses along this stretch of the roadway were behind walls, and they walked beneath fragrant trees which leaned out from behind the walls, giving shade. They were alone.
Dartley interrupted the Egyptian’s complaints. “I want to know where the scientist Mustafa Bakkush is located.”
Omar paused and looked at him in surprise. “At Cambridge University in England. That gentleman considers himself too important to stay among us humble Egyptians.”
Dartley shook his head. “He’s been back now for a while. That’s common knowledge. You make money from knowing what’s going on. I’ll pay.”
Omar began uncertainly, “I will make enquiries—”
“No, you won’t,” Dartley barked.
“Why not?”
