And that was when he knew. Possibly it was from some subconscious reading of the recognition that showed in her eyes when she saw Stephanie, but in an indefinable flash of certainty that he would never be able to explain, he knew then that it was she who had killed Eva.
He stared deep into those eyes, prolonging the moment until he saw the flicker of disbelief that came with the realization that she was about to die. Dispassionately, with no feeling of emotion, he fired once more. On the fringes of his perceptions, he was aware of the big man coming back around the corner, and of the man they had intercepted downstairs raising his hands to his face.
The gun fell from the Lynx’s hand as she leaned there against the wall. Her legs buckled and she slid slowly down into a grotesque sitting position, leaving a smear of blood down the wall where two of the bullets had exited and lodged in the paneling. Still she was looking at him, still hating. Mel raised the gun and aimed deliberately between her eyes… But before he could squeeze the trigger, her eyes glazed emptily, and her head lolled over onto her shoulder. Her mouth fell open, and a trickle of blood ran down the side of her chin.
Mel lowered the gun and returned it to the holster. Stephanie was standing petrified, and Ali was on the verge of hysteria. It could only be a matter of moments before the security people appeared, but Mel was spent, for the moment past caring what happened next. Only the big man was on top of the situation. He thrust Ali back against the wall and pushed the barrel of his gun up under his chin. “Listen to me and hear what I say,” he muttered. “Nobody saw Eva Carne come in, and nobody will see her go out. You haven’t seen her here at all. Is that clear? One squeak out of you, and you’re as dead as that one over there. Do you understand?” Ali nodded his head violently, gibbering in terror. The big man tossed him down on the couch. “This way,” he said to the other two. Mel grabbed Stephanie’s arm, but she stood rooted. The big man turned back, looked at her, and then slapped her sharply across the face.
Her eyes cleared. She shook her head, gulped, and then nodded. “I’ll be all right.”
They went out into the corridor and ran to the private elevator. Just as the doors were closing, the sounds of excited voices and hurrying footsteps came from the stairway at the other end of the building. They descended and came out of the elevator on the ground floor. As they were leaving the building by the side door, the wails of approaching sirens came from the direction of the front, and moments later police cars with flashing lights began arriving at the main entrance. The big man bundled them into the back of a white Fiat van—looking ridiculously small for somebody of his stature—hurried around and climbed in the front, and drove out through a rear gate from the parking lot while Mel and Stephanie made room for themselves among a litter of boxes full of books, vases, framed pictures, and oddments of furniture.
Meanwhile, back in the front lobby, where Slade had just arrived with the police, another scene of pandemonium was being enacted. City police and secret-service guards were milling around, and within minutes staff and security personnel from the hotel were getting involved, too. There had been a shooting upstairs… Somebody had been killed… A woman, Caucasian, with long fair hair… A matter of minutes ago.
Slade closed his eyes and released a shaky breath. Along with it went the hope he had been nursing through the wild ride from Shepheard’s. They were too late. “Okay,” he murmured to the police inspector who had brought him. “Let’s get it over with.” Steeling himself, with a feeling in his chest as if there were a cannonball lodged there, he went with the others to an elevator. The doors closed, and he felt the car move. Oblivious to the chattering that continued around him, he thought of the sister who had been killed in November… and now the one they had put in her place. The one he was supposed to have been protecting. When they got home, he decided, he was through with this whole lousy business.
They emerged on the top floor of the building. There were more security men up there, more shouting and gesticulating, guests being ushered back into their rooms, police radios squawking. Somebody was tracking bloody footprints off his shoes. They took Slade along the corridor and into one of the suites—Kabuzak’s secretary’s suite, somebody said. What in God’s name had Stephanie been doing here?… And then he stopped, staring in total bewilderment suddenly. The-body hadn’t been moved. It was a gruesome sight, certainly, but…
The inspector turned to him gravely. “Is this her, Mr. Slade?”
Slade could only shake his head, still staring disbelievingly. “No, Inspector… No it isn’t. That’s not her.”
“I’m sorry… I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.” Slade’s relief at that moment was such that he was beyond understanding anything.
“Mr. Kabuzak is asleep next door,” someone reported. “We can’t wake him, but he appears unharmed.”
Talaat Ali, Kabuzak’s secretary, had been sick in the bathroom and was now sitting on a couch with his head in his hands. “And there was no other woman here at all tonight?” a police detective was asking.
“No, none. Just her… I heard the shots and ran back, but whoever it was had already gone. That was how I found her.”
“You didn’t see anyone else—a large man in a red fez, for instance?”
Ali shook his head adamantly. “No. I saw nobody.”
Slade had no idea what had been going on, and if he was honest with himself, he no longer cared all that much. There was nothing more for him to do here. His main concern now was to extricate himself as quickly as possible and avoid any risk of the American delegation becoming publicly linked to what had all the signs of becoming an ugly affair. He looked back at the policeman. “I’m sorry, but it looks as if I might have been wasting your time, Inspector. Obviously it wasn’t our woman who came here at all. The concierge at Shepheard’s must have been mistaken.”
The inspector looked down at the corpse. White woman, slim, long hair, fair… Yes, it was understandable. “Well, we have a problem on our hands,” he said. “But at least I’m glad that it hasn’t turned out to be your problem. Don’t apologize, Mr. Slade. I appreciate that you have your job to do, also. One can’t be too careful. Let’s go downstairs. I’ll find a driver to take you back to Shepheard’s.”
CHAPTER 56
The big man drove at a leisurely pace, like a tourist seeing the sights or a family man out on a Sunday afternoon cruise. His name was Hamdi Kemmel, Mel learned. Stephanie had already met him, briefly. He was her Mossad contact, and had passed her the code phrase for McCormick’s speech earlier that day. It was fortunate that his duties hadn’t ended with that.
“Who was she, do you know?” Kemmel asked over his shoulder as he drove.
Mel could only answer from his conviction that it was the same woman who had killed Eva in mistake for Stephanie. “She worked for the Soviets back in the States,” he said:
“A professional?”
“Yes.”
Kemmel nodded. “Well, it’s one less to worry about. You were absolutely right, of course. We couldn’t have left her as a witness.”
“No,” Mel said.
In the intermittent lights of passing vehicles, he saw Stephanie’s face staring at him from the shadows opposite with a mixture of incredulity and lingering shock. He smiled tiredly at her, but was too exhausted to want to talk any more just then, and the conversation petered out.
They crossed to the east side of the river and took the corniche northward to an older part of the city that lay below the heights dominated by the immense fortification known as the Citadel, built by Saladin. Here they entered a maze of narrow streets and arched alleyways, with dimly lit coffee shops and dingy restaurants huddled around mosques thrusting up their domes and minarets. Finally the van came to a street of buildings of assorted shapes and sizes with wooden balconies and outside stairs, backing onto the riverfront itself.
Kemmel parked outside one of the shops, unlocked the door, and led them inside. The interior was one huge clutter, pil
ed high to the ceiling with antique furnishings, good, bad, and indifferent, innumerable clocks, display cases containing jewelry, chinaware, stamps, and coins, shelves of dusty books, copperware, brassware, old guns, sword, hats, helmets, and a real sarcophagus. Mel thought that some of the things must have been there for years.
Behind the shop was a small, carelessly littered office with a roll-top bureau, and some rickety stairs going up. Kemmel led them on through and showed them into a parlor at the rear, where he turned on a small electric heater. It was a small, overfurnished room, with heavy drapes and tapestries; solidly built wooden dresser, cabinets, and sideboard of massive proportions; and a table in the center, covered with a richly embroidered cloth. There was a basket containing a sleepy cat and three small kittens on the bracing bars under the sideboard. Kemmel spread his hands to indicate two of the chairs. As Mel and Stephanie sat down, the sound of a door opening came from upstairs, and a woman’s voice called down. Kemmel called something back in a jovial tone and smiled at them. “My wife, Sarah. She is very competent. You need have no worries about her. Excuse me for one minute, and I’ll get some coffee started.” He went back out and into the kitchen.
It was the first time that Mel and Stephanie had been alone. She stared at him, still with bewilderment on her face. “Would you tell me what’s going on? When did you get here?”
“About three hours ago… less than that.”
“What on earth are you doing?”
“I came to tell you to warn Dave that he might be compromised. Then on the way over, I realized that they know about you, too…” He couldn’t help adding, “in case you didn’t know.” Stephanie’s expression did all the questioning necessary. Mel went on, “Quintz wasn’t the informant. That was a wrong lead. It was Martha Brodstein all the time.”
It took a while for Stephanie to register what that meant. “Oh my God,” she breathed as it sank in. She shook her head dazedly. “Where did you get that gun?”
“George Slade… as a precaution. It’s lucky for us that these people are all paranoid.”
“So you’ve been to the hotel.”
Mel nodded. “I must have missed you by minutes. We found the message from Dave. It was a fake. You should have spotted it.”
Stephanie nodded bitterly. “I know. I realized afterwards. How did you know where I’d gone?”
“One of the staff at the hotel knew.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
They heard the door upstairs open again, and footsteps descended. Kemmel came out of the kitchen in time to conduct her into the parlor. She was a tall, dark-skinned woman with handsome features and hair coming down over her shoulders. She carried herself with a quiet dignity that projected itself even in a dark blue nightgown, minutes after being woken up in the middle of the night. “This is Sarah,” Kemmel said. “Eva, the American woman we saw on television yesterday… And someone whose name I don’t even know yet.”
Mel didn’t know whether he should give his own name or not. Deciding that it was something that he could always correct later if he was being to melodramatic, he replied on impulse, “Mohican.” Stephanie raised her eyebrows for an instant, but said nothing.
“Welcome to our house,” Sarah said. She inclined her head and permitted a shadow of a smile. Mel got the impression that she had long ago come to accept strange goings-on, such as unexpected visitors showing up in the middle of the night, as something that happened all the time.
“I’ve started some coffee,” Kemmel said.
“You sit down, then. I’ll see to it,” Sarah said, and went back out.
Kemmel took a box of cheroots off the sideboard and sat down on one of the empty chairs. He smiled broadly at the other two, offered the box, and when they shook their heads, took one himself and settled comfortably. “It was a good thing that you turned up when you did,” he said to Mel.
“I could say the same about you.”
There was a pause. “You said you were with Benjamin,” Kemmel said, rummaging in a jar for some matches. “How is he connected with what happened tonight?”
“We found out after Eva left the States that one of the people involved in arranging Benjamin’s contact was an informant, which is why I was sent over,” Mel replied. He indicated Stephanie with a motion of his head. “It also turns out that the same informant has certain information about Eva… which we don’t need to talk about.”
Kemmel struck a match, drew on his cheroot, and nodded. “I understand.”
Mel looked down at the tablecloth and sighed. He had been trying to fit Seybelman and the people who had given Stephanie the drugs-plant story with the ring that had killed Eva, but he still couldn’t see how they connected. True, they came together at the worldwide commonality of superwealth interests that Newell and Landis had talked about, but that was up in the stratosphere; it didn’t extend down to the operational levels of recruiting programmers to pass on defense secrets, or promoting socialist politics in California.
He went on. “The job that Eva is doing for Benjamin and for your people is just one of several tasks. Her work with the Constitutional party goes beyond her official public duties. She’s infiltrated one of the party’s opposition groups back in the States, but they believe that she’s turned, and is really working for them, against us.”
“You live a complicated life,” Kemmel remarked, glancing at Stephanie.
“You don’t know the half of it,” she couldn’t help muttering.
Mel continued, “We knew they were setting her up for something when she got over here, but it wasn’t supposed to be until she got to Jerusalem. What happened tonight must have had something to do with it.”
Kemmel puffed smoke contentedly for a few seconds. “So you really don’t know what the purpose of that was?”
“I’ve only just arrived here. All I know is I got off the plane, McCormick’s security man—”
Kemmel nodded. “George Slade. Yes, I know.”
“He pointed me to the Omar Khayyam, you grabbed me at the desk there, and the next thing we’re up at the room, Eva’s there, and a woman who’s about to kill both of us. There wasn’t time to ask questions.”
“I think I can answer that now,” Stephanie said. They looked at her. “It was a scheme to discredit the new administration—even to bring it down completely, maybe. Kabuzak has been getting a lot of distorted press in the States, saying he was going to take Egypt back to the Soviets, which would have been a disaster for Newell. I think they were going to kill him and pin it on me somehow: a political assassination by no less than one of the future vice president’s personal staff. I’m not sure what the repercussions might have been. Maybe they’d have had to call off the inauguration, somehow. Can they do that?”
Kemmel nodded that he followed her reasoning and looked at Mel. “What do you think?”
“Well, I have to take Eva’s word on that for now, because I don’t have enough background yet,” Mel said. He stared hard at the table, going over what she had said and trying to fit it into some kind of perspective with the other thoughts that had been going through his mind. Kemmel said nothing, but watched him with a steady, unblinking stare.
If the intention had been to rig a political assassination in the way that Stephanie was saying, then presumably she would have been eliminated, too. Anything the Constitutionals might have claimed about nonexistent drug-scams to try and clear themselves afterward would easily have been dismissed as fabrication. And it wouldn’t have mattered whether she had really been Eva or not. So that explained quite a lot.
What didn’t fit was that Martha hadn’t worked for that side of the operation. And Eva’s murder in mistake for Stephanie hadn’t been arranged by that side either. Both those factors were linked in with the Oberwald operation, and that connected to the Soviets. Would the Soviets have wanted to assassinate a pro-Soviet minister? Mel asked himself. Yes, conceivably—if undermining the Constitutionals was considered more important. I
n fact it could work to their advantage by directing the world’s suspicions away from themselves. But if the Soviets were behind it, then the overall direction must have come from the upper levels of the global tie-in after all. And the more Mel thought about that, the less he could accept that something as elaborate and involved as this was turning out to be could all have been merely to engineer the discrediting of a political party. When all was said and done, Kabuzak was a relatively junior figure on the international scene, and the repercussions could only go so far. There had to be, Mel was convinced, another layer to the onion yet. And the remaining loose ends all seemed to be converging on one place.
He looked back up at Kemmel and shook his head. “Even if what you say is true, I’m still not comfortable about it. It’s not total enough. I think that what they tried to pull off tonight was a diversion.”
Stephanie was looking amazed—but then she hadn’t been there to hear Newell and Landis. “Not total enough?” she repeated. “They wanted to kill a foreign minister, kill me, pin it all on the party? You don’t think that would have caused enough trouble?”
“Oh, it would have caused trouble, all right,” Mel said. “Imagine the consternation everywhere in the next few days if it had succeeded. It would have occupied everyone’s attention, distracted us all from everything else. And I think that was precisely the idea.”
“What is their real intention, then?” Kemmel asked, puffing his cheroot.
“I don’t know,” Mel replied. “But it’s something that ties in with Mustapha and whatever’s going on in Syria. And it’ll happen in the next week or so, maybe in the next few days.”
The Mirror Maze Page 43
