by Ian Barclay
“Do nothing,” Dartley told him firmly, “unless I tell you to. Stay fairly close to me if you can, close enough to follow the action and so I can find you. But remember, I’m the one who will do the job.”
“In sha ‘allah.”
“God willing,” Dartley confirmed.
Dartley eased away from a group discussing Heket, a frog-headed goddess who, as a midwife, assisted every morning in the birth of the sun. He figured he had enough things on his mind already without confusing himself further with this kind of talk. He avoided the groups talking with Egyptians, in case some word or look might arouse their suspicions. And he kept away from Emily and Harry, who were creating a ruckus about something at the other end of the big hall. He was relieved to find two guys with paunches and bloodshot eyes talking about the Forty-Niners and the Rams. They hadn’t heard any game scores since they’d arrived in Egypt and it was killing them. Mustafa trailed him at a distance and set about charming some sprightly matrons.
A short time later, the president made his entrance with fifteen or so armed teenage bodyguards who ran before and after him like hounds around the foxhunt whip. The military men snapped to attention and saluted. The diplomats bowed and scraped. The American gaped. Ahmed Hasan, in a freshly pressed khaki uniform with lots of ribbons and medals and a cap heavy with brass, clasped the right hand of random, startled archeologists in fervent handshakes.
He gestured to his bodyguards, and they slunk off in twos and threes to lean against walls and leer at the guests. Dartley guessed they reminded many of the Americans of urban punks back home, except these carried automatic rifles. Anyway, the initial fright apparently felt by some of the guests soon evaporated and they were flocking around the smiling, talking president to hear what he had to say.
Dartley kept his distance. He checked out the bodyguards. They should prove no problem—at the beginning, anyway—since it was clear by their attitude that they had sunk into bored apathy at the sight of all these harmless old farts. Five of the bodyguards were girls, all very pretty, with full bodies. They had tailored their combat fatigues to fit their bodies tightly, especially over the ass and legs, and the tops of their breasts showed in their open-necked shirts. Each wore a bush hat, set at her personal choice of angle, on a cloud of black hair. Obviously the mullahs didn’t mess with these babies.
One sultry beauty saw Dartley eyeing her, thrust out a hip and parted her lips. Dartley had to admit that if he was president, he too would make her his bodyguard.…
Ahmed Hasan clapped his hands like a sultan, and immediately long tables displaying plates of all kinds of foods were wheeled into the hall by white-tuniced waiters. Dartley’s eyes may have been the only ones in the place which did not go to the food; he searched for forks. They were there—heavy, silverplate, of old-fashioned design, ideal for his purpose. Dartley felt the blood pump faster in his veins.
He lined up with others to get a plate, napkin, and fork, then to pass along the table and select what he wished. Mustafa Bakkush was ahead of him in the line. He passed Dartley a piece of folded paper and said, “In case you need to hide…” Dartley nodded, hoping it would not come to that. He picked up his plate and napkin, put one fork on the plate and slipped another into his left hand out of sight beneath the plate. He would need only two forks—one to throw, the other to have on his plate to show he hadn’t thrown it. He would get only one throw, only one chance to bury the fork deep in Ahmed Hasan’s throat, rupturing the blood vessels there and ending the tyrant’s life. He had already selected his escape route with the aid of the memorized floor plan of the palace.
All he needed now were one or more small groups between him and Hasan, a fairly crowded location to block the bodyguards’ view, a lightning flick of the wrist, and it would be all over. He would walk away before anyone fully realized what had happened.
He maneuvered closer to Hasan. Finally, he positioned himself in a suitable place. The president was less than fifteen feet from him, where Dartley stood eating lamb kebab and rice from his plate. He put down his fork in the food and reached under the plate for the second fork. A woman moved out of the way, giving him a clear view of Hasan, directly facing him and talking animatedly to several people. Dartley readied the fork…
A loud shout caused everyone to look down the hall. Some of the bodyguards were running and yelling at those nearer the president to protect him. Dartley looked at Hasan. There were three or four people in the way now. Seconds later, the bodyguards surrounded their leader and ran him from the hall in their midst, their automatic rifles pointed at the stunned Americans.
Dartley put down his plate on the table and headed for a door. He saw Mustafa Bakkush on the way and gave him a dirty look. Had the scientist had a last-moment change of heart and raised the alarm? Bakkush saw his look of anger, quickly approached, and caught him by the arm.
“I saw who raised the alarm,” he whispered. “Quick. Out this door.”
Dartley suspected a trap for a moment, until he reasoned that Bukkush needn’t do this to entrap him. All the Egyptian had to do was yell.
A long corridor ran parallel to the hall on the other side of the door.
“Stop,” Bakkush said. “He’s standing in the next doorway up that way. He can’t see us here. Wait until he moves and you will see his face. I saw him look at you and then warn Hasan’s guards.”
Dartley saw a tall figure in a business suit partially concealed as he stood in the doorway along the corridor. The man turned to move into the corridor, away from the hall. Dartley shrank back, lingering only for a glimpse of his face. It was Jacques Laforque. The same man who had hired him to kill Ahmed Hasan had now saved the president from him!
Dartley squeezed Mustafa’s arm, exited from the opposite corner of the hall, descended a staircase, opened French windows into a garden and walked beneath a row of chestnut trees. He nodded to the two armed soldiers at the barred gate which led to the street and disappeared into the city crowds.
One thing only was on his mind.
He had failed again.
Chapter
12
Richard Dartley sat on a tombstone in the City of the Dead and watched the dawn break. He ran his hand over the bristles on his chin and cheeks, smoothed the moustache he had recently grown and wondered whether he should now grow a beard. Having a beard would help him blend in more, but he would never pass as an Egyptian. Time was running out. He had failed twice to assassinate Ahmed Hasan. Dartley now had a feeling that this whole matter was going to be settled one way or the other long before his beard got a chance to grow.
He could only hope to keep out of the clutches of government agents a short while more, if that. He could not easily hide out other than as a tourist or foreign businessman, unless he buried himself here on the outskirts of Cairo in this shantytown grown up around and within the vast graveyard.
After he slipped away from the presidential palace the previous day, Dartley considered returning to his hotel, but thought better of it. Presumably Laforque would have provided a description of him, so that agents could comb every hotel in the city overnight to find someone who answered this description. May-, be not, but Dartley could not take the chance. Had the alert at the palace been dismissed as a false alarm? No, Hasan would take Laforque’s word that an American assassin was present there, if Laforque told him that the American was an assassin. Laforque might not have said that, since it could implicate his own government. He might have simply said that a foreign spy or agent was present. Yet this would hardly have resulted in the bodyguards hustling the president to safety. No, Laforque had said a threat was present. Even if the radio last night said nothing about it, Hasan himself knew he had survived another attempt on his life and his men would be hunting down the would-be assassin.
Dartley had looked at the slip of paper Dr. Mustafa Bakkush had given him at the reception. It was an address farther along the street on which he walked. He found a tailor’s shop, and the tailor told him to stay
out of sight at the back of the shop until it was nearly dusk. Then they took a taxi to Salah Al Din Square, southeast of the Citadel. From the square they walked south past the Manshiya Prison to Sharia Al Imam Al Shaf’i. They entered Al Khalifa, or the Southern Cemetery, the older of the two Mameluke cemeteries, so vast they were known as the Cities of the Dead.
The Mamelukes were originally slaves brought to Egypt from the tenth century on. They became a soldier caste and were so fierce at their job, they took over the country in the thirteenth century. For the next two hundred fifty years they ruled Egypt as savage autocrats. They held onto a lot of their power after the Turkish conquest of Egypt in 1517 and fought Napoleon in 1798. Dartley had read much about them and their military exploits, and he knew that the Southern Cemetery held mostly twelfth to fourteenth century Mameluke tombs. What he hadn’t known was how much this City of the Dead had become one of the living.
As he and the tailor walked in the gathering dusk along the edge of the huge cemetery, which had its own streets, boulevards and squares with fancy stonework mausoleums, cenotaphs and walled enclosures, he saw how Cairo’s poor had moved in among the marble tombs, often using a grave marker as part of the construction of their homes. Clothes dried on lines strung between two memorials, and a pair of dignified sculptures served as goalposts for a boys’ soccer game. Children swarmed everywhere, and the smoke of cooking fires blackened tomb walls next to crowded shanties. Women bustled about their work. Men sat smoking on tombs and they gave Dartley and the tailor curious looks. Dartley reckoned they didn’t see too many foreigners around here with night approaching.
The tailor departed hurriedly after he had introduced Dartley as Terry Hunter to a hollow-eyed, starved looking man called Abdel Ibrahim. The Ibrahim clan seemed to control all the surrounding area of cemetery, and Dartley met a rapid succession of brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews, but not one woman, although they came to peep at him from a distance and whispered among themselves. He ate rice and beans with the men, was treated courteously, asked no questions, and was shown a bed of clean, dry rushes beneath a plywood tent. Depressed by his failures rather than physically tired, Dartley excused himself and crept into his bed of dry rushes early. He escaped into a deep, soothing sleep.
At dawn he was up, sitting on a tombstone, scratching the bristles on his cheeks and chin, thinking. Time was running out on him.
Abdel Ibrahim appeared from one of the shacks, stretched, rubbed his eyes, then suddenly noticed Dartley and immediately became a gracious Arab host. He inquired how his guest had slept, whether he had been comfortable, if he had any immediate needs. Dartley praised Ibrahim’s hospitality and continued the polite formal exchanges which he knew were essential in opening a conversation with an Arab.
“Terry, I must tell you this: I love Egypt.” Dartley grew uneasy as the man went on describing how much he cared for his country—it began to sound like an elaborate apology for turning Dartley in to the authorities. Then Ibrahim’s train of thought took a sudden turn. “Why then, you might ask me, am I willing to help you if I am a patriot? Yes, I am willing to help you—to hide you like a deadly asp in the breast of the mother country. Who are you? What have you come here to do?”
“To kill Ahmed Hasan,” Dartley interrupted in a casual tone.
The Arab stopped and looked at him. He had not expected his rhetorical question to be answered. His gaunt, starved face cracked in a huge smile. “That is what I hoped you had come to do. You are a foreign infidel, yet it is the duty of devout Muslims and loyal Egyptians to aid you in ridding us of Ahmed Hasan. He uses Egypt and Egyptians like a child plays with flies. Two of my brothers were arrested, jailed in the Citadel. They have never been heard of again. I know they are dead.” He waved his hand. “Their widows and orphans live here with us, and no day passes in which we do not mourn their loss. No day passes when my family does not look to me to seek vengeance in their name. I have spoken to men I trust about this. Now Allah has delivered you to us!”
This was the first time Dartley had ever heard himself described as a godsend and he was not sure how to react. It was clear that Ibrahim was demanding a role for himself in whatever was to happen, that personal revenge and shoring up his position as family head were his motivations in wanting to help rid Egypt of Hasan. But Dartley was a lone wolf. He worked alone.
Already on this job, he had sacrificed this principle and it had cost an Israeli agent his life. Dartley blamed himself for Aaron Gottlieb’s death, since Dartley’s mode of operation was to set up situations that were high-risk to no one but himself.
“I’m not sure about Allah sending me to you,” Dartley said with a smile. “I don’t think you should depend on that. Fact is, I like to work on my own. But I need help, I don’t deny that. Any members of your family who work with me must be told they are putting their lives in danger.”
“Agreed.”
Dartley saw that the Egyptian was maneuvering him into making conditions, to all of which Ibrahim would agree, so that Dartley, before he knew what was happening, would find himself with a not entirely welcome new set of partners in the Ibrahim clan.
“Before we agree to anything,” Dartley said, “I have some questions I must ask.”
“Terry, you are my friend. No question is too intimate for me.”
“How come you speak such good English?”
The Egyptian beamed, complimented. “I am fifty-eight years old. When I was young, the Union Jack flew over Egypt. The teachers in my school came mostly from England. Some of them had spent fifteen years here without learning more than fifteen words of Arabic. They thought they were civilizing us—I think they genuinely believed that—and of course the first step to civilization in their eyes was to speak English. My family were simple fellahin, as we still are, as nearly everyone in Egypt is.” He waved his hand at the shacks and tombstones. “But now we are fellahin without land. My father toiled from sunrise to sunset on his small plot, and for him English words were almost magic talismans. He spoke Arabic, but for everything we were too poor to own, he used its English name. He sent all his children to an English-language school and was proud that we spoke English well. He thought that we would have all those things he could never afford to buy, all those things he called by their English names.”
“Things didn’t work out that way?”
Abdel Ibrahim gestured elaborately. “We—my brothers and sisters and I—all had government jobs when President Mubarak was overthrown. We were not rich, but we owned our own houses. My oldest brother was accused of helping some of the president’s aides escape to the American Embassy. When they tried to arrest him, he resisted with the help of another brother. So they took them both away. That was the last we ever saw or heard of them. When I demanded to know what had happened to them, I lost my government job. Then anyone who was a family member was expelled from government-subsidized housing and their jobs.”
“Do you know anyone on the American staff?”
“We get money to keep us alive.”
“Who gives it to you?”
“I cannot remember his name,” Abdel said with a polite shrug.
“Pritchett?”
“It is a name very like that.”
“I know Pritchett,” Dartley said. “Don’t tell him or anyone else at the embassy that I am here.”
“Agreed.”
Back to conditions, Dartley saw. “What about this place? Won’t someone inform the police that an American is with you here?”
“Hasan’s friends around here have all died or moved away.”
Dartley was impressed with the sinister tone in Ibrahim’s voice.
Abdel went on, “When you come and go, take different routes. There are many tourists here and the devout pass through on their way to various tombs.”
Dartley was aware of the Arabic custom of picnicking at the family burial ground, and he knew that pilgrims flocked to the mausoleum of Al Imam Al Shaf’i not far away. Some of the mausoleums even charged
tourists admission, so he would not be out of place as an American during daylight hours in the City of the Dead.
“Do you know Omar Zekri?” Dartley asked.
Ibrahim scowled and spat on the ground.
“Find out what he is doing,” Dartley said.
Omar Zekri sat beside Awad in a battered, brown Saab. They paused outside the huge doors of the Citadel. Awad displayed his pass, the guard signaled and a door swung inward to admit the car. Awad was cleared by two more separate sets of soldiers before they were allowed to enter a building after leaving the Saab in a courtyard.
Omar was terrified. He had always been convinced that if he ever entered the Citadel, he would not leave it alive. They walked down a long hallway and into a large, bare, high-ceilinged room with no windows, badly lit by a single naked bulb suspended on a wire at the center of the room. Awad just stood there, letting his big belly relax and hang out over his belt. Omar moved restlessly about, fretting, worrying. Awad seemed to have forgotten him.
“I already explained that you can’t blame me for what happened to Zaid,” he whined. “I only telephoned information, like both of you told me to. Zaid knew that man was dangerous. You can’t blame me because he went alone and got himself killed.”
“No one is blaming you, Omar,” Awad said soothingly.
“Then why am I in the Citadel?”
“Maybe I just want to torture you.” Awad laughed at his own little joke.
Omar was reassured. This was the predictable Awad that he knew. He did not dare ask any more questions, knowing anyway that he would receive no straight answers until Awad felt like telling him why they were here.
Awad never did. They spent more than an hour in the empty room, Awad just standing in one place and hardly moving, Omar pacing up and down and from time to time starting up conversations that took him nowhere.
