by Ian Barclay
They picked Omar up in their black van an hour later. To Omar’s surprise, they did not balk at his demand for two hundred pounds. Zaid drove. Omar sat between them and told them about Pritchett and the masked Lebanese Christian, and about Laforque and France’s interest in this American. Omar could sense that this came as a total surprise to them.
“Anything else?” Awad asked.
“That’s it,” Omar answered.
Awad grabbed him by the back of his jacket collar, yanked him off the bench seat, and threw him against the vehicle’s firewall at his feet. Omar began to grovel and Awad’s shoe descended on his neck.
Awad pressed the side of Omar’s face down on the metal floor and held it there with his foot while Zaid bounced the van into potholes and over bumps as fast as he could go in the traffic.
No one said a word.
After a few minutes of this, Omar’s hand raised up with the two hundred pounds they had given him. Awad took it and lifted his foot from Omar’s neck.
“You whore’s scum,” Awad said, “we pay you every day by letting you live.”
Awad slid back the side door and kicked Omar out of the slowly moving van onto the roadway in front of a small Renault, which screeched to a stop inches away from the man cowering on the asphalt.
Richard Dartley saw clearly that things were not going to work out for him if Ahmed Hasan simply continued to shuttle back and forth under armed guard between the presidential palace and the Citadel. Hasan took a dozen routes in random order, and Dartley never knew whether he would be in a Jaguar, in a crowded Range Rover or Jeep or invisible inside a military truck. The presidential palace was heavily guarded and the Citadel was literally a high-walled fortress. So long as the president kept to this way of life, he would be safe from Richard Dartley. But only so long as he kept doing what he was doing. Dartley could wait…
Dartley was sitting in a cafe after his morning walk, taking refuge from the crowds, leaking sewage pipes, traffic jams and construction sites. He was reading the daily English-language newspaper, The Egyptian Gazette, which was mostly a guide to movies, shows, fancy restaurants and late-night places, all of which Dartley was careful to avoid. One news item struck him forcibly. President Ahmed Hasan was about to pay a short state visit to King Hussein of Jordan. Hasan would spend the first day in the capital, Amman, and the second day at the Red Sea resort of Aqaba, from where he would fly back to Cairo that night. At last Ahmed Hasan might be where Dartley could get at him.
At first Dartley planned the hit for Cairo. The airport would be no good, because an airport is designed with no-go areas and security in mind and thus is easy to seal off. Even if Dartley infiltrated to make the hit, he would never get out alive. Hasan’s armored cavalcade to and from the airport would only turn out to be a variant of the one he used every day, and he would be safe in that too, since Dartley could not tell which route he would take. Even if he could, laying a mine or radio-activated bomb or setting up an ambush would be extremely difficult to do unobserved in the teeming hordes of the city.
The president would travel by special plane. Perhaps Dartley could bring the aircraft down if the arms dealer Yahya Waheed could get him a Redeye or Stinger antiaircraft guided missile and launcher. Even if Waheed could supply him and even if Dartley was able to position himself by the fact that the aircraft would take off into the wind direction, he would still have to move around crowded Cairo with a four- or five-foot-long missile under his arm.
Jordan might be good, if Dartley could get there undetected. The Jordanians would have ultra-tight security, but at least they wouldn’t be looking for someone of his description, like the Cairo secret police were. The capital city of Amman was not the place to go. Everything would be well organized there. Things might be looser in a resort town.
How could he get there? He could try disguise and go by commercial airliner from Cairo to Amman. An American doing this at any other time might not arouse suspicion. An American doing it now, to coincide with Ahmed Hasan’s visit to Jordan, would be carefully checked out. An overland journey by bus or car had to clear military checkpoints in the Sinai and enter and leave the southern tip of Israel. He had almost settled on taking a bus to Suez and an Egyptian Navigation Company ship from there for a nine-hour voyage to Aqaba when he remembered Aaron Gottlieb. Surely the Israelis would be pleased to get rid of Hasan. He would level with Gottlieb and see what suggestions he came up with.
Dartley had assured Gottlieb at their last meeting that his mission was complete and that he was leaving Egypt right away. Gottlieb’s response had been to give him a phone number to call if he needed further help. Perhaps Gottlieb had already returned to Israel.
It was while Dartley was telephoning that Omar Zekri spotted him. This hadn’t taken Omar long to do. He had said to himself, where would a Westerner consider the best places to hide in the city? The man whom Omar knew as Thomas Lewis was tanned and he wore an Egyptian cotton suit. He certainly did not look like an Egyptian, but he no longer stuck out in a crowd as a newly arrived American. That was good—Omar was all for this man retaining his freedom while he sold his whereabouts to the interested parties.
First Omar would call Laforque, since he had paid the most money. He would give Laforque an hour and then phone Pritchett. Then he would speak to both these parties to see if they wished to make further investments in Thomas Lewis. If they did, good. If not, Omar would phone Awad and Zaid and they could dispose of him as they saw fit.
Dartley was having trouble with the phone. At last he got through but could hardly hear the person at the other end because of shouting and what sounded like plates crashing together.
“I want to speak to the boss’s nephew,” Dartley shouted in his rudimentary Arabic.
“Maalesh” came the agreed upon reply. “Don’t bother.”
The line went dead. Dartley was now to proceed to a cafe in the New City and wait there, according to Gottlieb’s instructions. He took his time getting there, and when he did he didn’t sit in the cafe as arranged, but in one across the street which gave him a view of it without being observed. Aaron Gottlieb was already at a table here.
They laughed at how this coincidence in the way their minds worked had thrown them together, instead of achieving each one’s intention of observing the other carefully before approaching him.
Omar Zekri phoned Jacques Laforque and told him to hurry.
Dartley—or Thomas Lewis, as he was known to Gottlieb—wasted no time in presenting his case. Would the Israelis help?
“Who the hell are you working for? Don’t tell me CIA.”
“A private foundation.”
Gottlieb stared him in the eyes. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“I can’t. Tell your people whatever they want to hear. All I want is a plane into the place. A plane out would be nice also, but not essential. Get me in, that’s my minimum demand.”
“No problem if the people at home agree to it,” Gottlieb said. “This will be top priority, so I will have an answer for you quickly. The only delay will be the coding and intermediary involved, since I can’t send messages direct.”
“Understood. Here then, tomorrow at noon?”
“Make it eleven tonight,” Gottlieb said.
“You Israelis are very efficient at this game.”
“We try harder.”
* * *
Dartley waited five minutes after Gottlieb had gone, then paid for their coffees and stood up to go. Before he could leave, Omar Zekri came barreling into the cafe.
“Mr. Lewis, what a pleasant surprise. Sit down. You are my guest.” He switched to Arabic to order more coffee from the waiter.
Dartley reluctantly resumed his seat. He was already familiar with the Egyptian people’s wonderful sense of hospitality, and it would have almost amounted to an insult if he had refused Omar’s offer. Not that Dartley minded insulting Omar, but he was curious to know if their meeting like this was merely a coincidence, which he found h
ard to believe. If it was not, he would never find out Omar’s purpose by refusing his hospitality, and Omar had enough deviousness and knowledge of Cairo to make him a dangerous man to ignore.
It soon became obvious to Dartley that Omar was trying to keep him where he was with some purpose in mind.
“Sit closer to me,” Dartley said to him.
Omar rolled his eyes. “Mr. Lewis, what a pleasure.”
“Even closer,” Dartley said. Omar shifted his chair again so that they were shoulder to shoulder at the little cafe table. Dartley said, “That’s fine. I just need you this close to be sure of killing you first as soon as I see trouble walk in that door.”
Omar tensed. “I don’t say it’s trouble, but I will tell you, just in case it is. A French gentleman wishes to speak with you. He paid me to find you.”
“Name?”
“Laforque.”
The idiot, Dartley thought. At one time Laforque wants to keep France’s name out of this at all costs, then he gives his whole game away by contacting Cairo’s best known information broker and stool pigeon.
“Stay where you are at this table,” Dartley told Omar. “When Laforque comes in, tell him to sit at that table in the corner. You remain here after I join him and stay on here after I leave. If you move, send the waiter somewhere, or try to make a phone call, I will kill you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Omar said. “There’s no need for any of this—”
“I’ll be watching.”
Dartley left the cafe and stood looking in a store window where he could see Omar and Omar could see him. The Egyptian had set him up once before, on Zamalek Island, and he was not going to do it again.
In a short while Dartley saw Laforque walk along the opposite side of the street and try to peer into the interior of the cafe. Laforque passed by, then crossed the street and walked a couple of feet behind Dartley’s back without noticing him until the very last moment.
They shook hands.
“Let’s take a taxi,” Dartley said, wishing to leave Omar and anything else the wily Egyptian might have plotted far behind him.
They left the cab and walked in the crowded streets without saying much until Dartley lost his patience.
“Is it off or on?” he asked.
“Everything’s still go,” Laforque said to the man he knew as Paul Savage. “My superiors grow nervous easily. They asked me to say hello to you. That’s all.”
“So you use Cairo’s greatest gossipmonger to contact me.”
Laforque shrugged. “A mistake perhaps. I had no other way.”
“I’m thinking of an attempt on Hasan when he’s in Aqaba.”
Laforque thought about that for a moment. “Why not? It might work very well. How will you arrange things from here?”
“I hope the Israelis will help me fly in.”
“The Israelis! Do they know about us French being involved in this?”
“Not unless Omar Zekri tells them,” Dartley snapped back.
“The Israelis will fit in nicely, but don’t let them get too close to your operation or you’ll find them using you for their own ends. I can see why they might want to help you, because if you escape clear they’re going to be blamed for Hasan’s assassination anyway. They might as well have a hand in it. They would prefer to be involved, I think, so as to have some control over anything this big happening so close to home. They’d see Israeli involvement in this as a warning to other Arab states. No doubt the Arabs would too.”
“Nothing is fixed yet,” Dartley cautioned.
“What do you have on the ground at the other end?”
“Nothing.”
“The Hotel Jarnac, on the beach at Aqaba, is French-owned Michelle Perret is manager there. I’ll send word on. She will supply you with weapons and local information, whatever you need. But don’t stay at the Jarnac. You can rely on Michelle more than you can on your Israeli friends.”
Dartley wondered if he would have been offered French help if he had not raised the possibility of the Israelis offering theirs.
The Lear jet took off from Cairo airport. Gottlieb had arranged the charter of the plane from the Jordanian company Arab Wings, based in Amman, and it flew to Cairo to pick them up. Dartley had paid for the plane by phone through a Swiss bank account. They watched the fertile valley of the Nile slip away beneath them to be replaced by the sandy wastes between Cairo and the Gulf of Suez.
The British pilot was courteous, asked no questions and busied himself with his instruments and navigation.
“You’ll see the Gulf of Suez beneath us very soon, gentlemen,” the pilot told them. “After that we cross the Sinai desert in an east by east-southeasterly direction, then swing south to give Israel’s southern extremity wide clearance—the plane has Jordanian registration numbers and since this is a jet, we would be forced down by fighters and held for hours if we strayed over their territory. So we’ll swing south and cross the Gulf of Aqaba, north of the Sinai town of Nuweiba, enter Saudi air space and then swing north to Jordan. Cairo to Aqaba in a straight line is about two hundred fifty ground miles, a little over three hundred miles by our route. Sit back and relax, gentlemen. You’ll be there in no time.”
Dartley sat back, but he did not relax. He looked through his new U.S. passport and press pass in the name of Fairbairn Draper, correspondent with Associated Press. Gottlieb supplied the documents, after Dartley supplied him with a photo. Gottlieb, also with a new name and now a U.S. citizen born in Chicago according to his passport, was credited as a photographer. Naturally they were coming to Aqaba to cover Ahmed Hasan’s trip to the beach. They had been given no trouble at Cairo airport—where Dartley had a few moments of bad doubt—and expected none at Aqaba.
The Lear jet swooped down over crystalline blue water, and they could see the waterside strip of luxury hotels that made up the Jordanian resort of Aqaba almost next to the similar strip of hotels that made up the Israeli resort of Eilat.
The pilot said in an amused way, “In all their Arab-Israeli wars, not a shot was fired down here, not a single window broken. You’ll see King Hussein’s villa—it’s almost right next to the Israeli border. Damn expensive place, Aqaba.”
The tall white buildings shone in the sun between the brown hills and blue water. Big ships were anchored off a port area at the eastern end of the resort, and beyond the port a dazzling white beach stretched away toward Saudi Arabia.
The Egyptian president was due in Amman the next day and in Aqaba the day after that. He would arrive in Aqaba early in the morning and leave before nightfall.
While their plane taxied to the terminal after landing, Dartley told the pilot, “You’re free until the day after tomorrow. That day we may leave at any time—as soon as we get our story and photos. So be here early and have the plane fueled and ready to go. We’ll head for either Athens or Rome.”
Dartley figured that in a place like Aqaba an American would be less conspicuous in a luxury hotel than in a budget place back from the beach. A newsman on an expense account didn’t bother to compare prices. He registered as Fairbairn Draper at the Aquamarina Hotel and Club, with its waterfront dining and water sports. The place swarmed with Arab tourists, obviously having a hell of a time away from the mullahs and the baked desert.
He had no idea where Gottlieb took himself off to. They had arranged to meet the next day at the beach, and the Israeli gave him an emergency phone number before he left. Dartley liked to work alone. If he could, he would cut Gottlieb out of the operation from now on and handle it himself.
The Hotel Jarnac was farther along the beach, a smaller place than the Aquamarina, with French cuisine and European haughtiness. Dartley ordered a Martell cognac at the bar and asked for the manager rather than for Michelle Perret by name. A wimpy Frenchman introduced himself as the assistant manager and said that the manager was off-duty. Dartley said he’d come back. He had another cognac and then drifted out into the blazing heat.
He had only walked down t
he steps in front of the hotel when a porter caught up with him and handed him a folded slip of paper. Dartley opened it and read: Room 202.^ No signature. He tipped the porter a dinar and retraced his steps inside the hotel.
Room 202 was opposite the elevator. He knocked on the door.
It was opened by a tall, pretty woman with green eyes and straight black hair to her shoulders. She had full breasts and she thrust one thigh forward provocatively beneath her pink silk peignoir. “Mr. Draper?”
“Right.”
“Come in.” She stood to one side to let him in the room. “What is your first name?”
“Fairbairn.”
“Middle initial?”
“I don’t believe I was given one.”
“You weren’t,” she said. “And I don’t know who the hell thought up ‘Fairbairn.’ I’m Michelle. What was it you were drinking? Martell, wasn’t it?”
She was letting him know she knew her stuff, not to try to take advantage of her because she was a pretty woman. Dartley had been thinking it would be mighty pleasurable to have her around. She spoke colloquial English with a strong French accent.
They touched glasses. “Success,” she toasted him. “What will you need?”
“I don’t know yet. I won’t until I get some idea of what itinerary is planned.”
Michelle said, “Hasan is due in Amman tomorrow morning. His plane will land at a military airport outside the capital. He’ll review an honor guard there and be given a big motorcade with soldiers of the Arab Legion. He’ll water an olive tree from a silver urn on the Martyr’s Monument and then have a private lunch with King Hussein and Queen Noor. After that, more speeches and visits. Tomorrow night there will be a big state dinner and Hasan will stay at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Amman. The day after tomorrow he comes here by air in the morning. He will have lunch with the king—who will arrive separately by air also—on the king’s yacht. Other than the fact that President Hasan departs for Cairo before dark, no one seems to know what he will be doing here before or after the lunch.”
