Reprisal (15 page)

Dartley assumed that, like government agencies everywhere, the Egyptian police forces did not properly communicate with one
another because of rivalries and so forth. While one group was hunting him, others were letting him slip through their fingers
several times a day. He came to depend on such bureaucratic fumbling for his freedom.

In addition to interdepartmental foul-ups, the cop on the street often had no way of knowing the priorities of his superiors.
The man on the street had his own realities and his own problems, which were usually very different from those of highly placed
administrators. A man whose job consisted of watching for pickpockets and motor scooter thieves at the suqs, bazaars and marketplaces
could not readily tell one foreigner from another. He was not about to mess with foreigners in the first place because they
spelled trouble. Their consulates would complain about police brutality, dirty cells, lack of food, demands for bribes—there
was no end to what foreigners thought they could complain about and raise hell to try to change things, sometimes bringing
all sorts of unwelcome attention and pressure from superiors who pretended not to know what went on. A man who brought these
kinds of things down on his colleagues through his mistake of an unwise arrest would be a man without friends. Why take the
chance with these unknown foreigners? Let them be. Pickpockets and motor scooter thieves played by the rules.

So Dartley reckoned he had little to fear from regular cops on the street. Yet his trained eye kept
watch for special squads. His run-ins before had not been with regular cops. These men were secret police or members of an
intelligence group. They looked no more like cops than a CIA operative resembled a cop on a beat. All the same, they shared
one thing with policemen everywhere in the world—the habit of always scanning their surroundings with watchful looks. Every
cop and intelligence operative developed this habit unknown to himself. The really good ones were careful to conceal their
watchfulness.

It was the watchfulness of two men on the street which attracted Dartley’s attention to them. Most passersby gave a foreigner
a look of frank curiosity, then lost interest. These two men each gave him a fast appraising look and then studiously avoided
looking at him again. Danger. At first Dartley could not be sure they were together. They were walking toward him, one maybe
ten paces ahead of the other. They both fixed him for an instant with the same piercing look, followed by studied indifference
as they passed by.

Dartley walked on. He knew that if he looked behind him now, he would see that both of them had reversed direction and were
following him. But to look back at them would be to acknowledge their presence and invite arrest. Were they following him?
Or was he becoming paranoid? Paranoia was a risk for everyone in his line of work. While paranoia was taking suspicions too
far, a hitman who did not take his suspicions far enough would not survive long.

Were they following him? He turned into a narrow side street and followed it across several major streets intersecting with
it, walking purposefully but unhurriedly
and never looking behind him. Three hookers stood in a doorway. As he neared them, they twisted their hips, batted their eyes
and said hello in English.

Dartley pointed at the prettiest one, said, “You,” and pushed her in the door ahead of him. Surprised at his sudden response,
the two left behind made loud remarks in Arabic, which made the girl he was with giggle. Dammit, Dartley thought, I should
have taken all three of them.

He pushed the woman out of his way in the dark, smelly hallway and ran up a flight of stairs to a window looking out on the
front. He waited and watched, ignoring the woman’s demands for money. She grew curious, quieted down and watched also.

Dartley wasn’t getting paranoid. His two tails had worried looks on their faces, looking this way and that, alternately hurrying
and slowing down. They were on opposite sides of the narrow street, on sidewalks so narrow they had to step off when they
met someone else. Occasional cars shot by at sixty miles per hour, grazing the pedestrians’ shoulders in typical Cairo style.

He saw the two women in the doorway withdraw inside. They too knew cops when they saw them, and the law had been hard on female
prostitutes since the Light of Islam mullahs had gained power. Dartley had read about how some mullahs were demanding that
they be stoned to death.

The men stopped outside the door. The near one beckoned the women out. They reluctantly obeyed. Dartley watched the man’s
mouth moving as he spoke to the women and he saw the nodding of their
heads. One pointed farther along the street, and the two men moved on fast.

The woman next to him giggled. Dartley sent her downstairs with a twenty-pound note for each of them, knowing that it wasn’t
him they wished to protect, but their colleague, yet figuring that a bit of generosity hurt no man.

As he waited for her to return, he measured his own reactions to the incident. He felt cold and rational. If the women had
given him away, he would either have escaped or walked away after having left both men dead. He was not sure how he would
have killed them, but he was calmly convinced he could have done so if necessary. Dartley was pleased with his own attitude.
Any man could psyche himself into thinking he was ready to handle any situation; Dartley knew that it took an actual confrontation
for the truth to out. Pressure was the only test. Any wimp could feel he was a hotshot when there was no threat on the horizon.

She was with him again, demanding money. Dartley couldn’t follow her backstreet Arabic, but she made it very clear that if
her two friends got twenty pounds each for not having to move their asses, she expected considerably more if he hoped that
she would move hers.

“May Allah chop off the hands of all those who help the evil foreigners!” Ahmed Hasan shouted in a rage.

Everyone grew quiet in the room at the presidential palace.

“The mullahs are right—a tide of evil sweeps
through our country!” Hasan shouted, beginning to stride up and down now, his hands clasped behind his back, wearing a khaki
military uniform with all his decorations. “The bringers of this scourge upon Egypt must be rooted out. Painfully! They must
atone for what they have done with their blood!”

The people in the room tried not to move and listened urgently for a clue about who or what the president was condemning.

Hasan saw no sign of their puzzlement. He saw the evil right before his face, everywhere he looked, weakening, corrupting,
undermining… He went on shouting, and they listened. His eyes blazed and his pace quickened as he thought about his enemies,
the ones who could not be permitted to exist a day longer in Egypt.

When he ran out of steam, he sat beside a water pipe and lit the hashish in its bowl. He inhaled the tranquilizing smoke deeply
and its sweet smell spread through the room.

As yet no one had figured out what he had been ranting about. They gave him surreptitious looks now to see whether his mood
would improve while he smoked the dope.

Their glances irritated Ahmed Hasan. He cursed them silently for always watching him, for being weak and fearful, too timid
to stand up to him. That was what he needed—someone he could talk to, have reasonable discussions with, use as a sounding
board for his ideas instead of all these cringing toadies who timidly said whatever their tiny brains calculated he wanted
to hear. Either they were like that or they were gun-waving maniacs who had trouble
understanding anything longer than one-word commands. Here he was, a great Arab leader, perhaps the most important Arab of
this century, surrounded by cringers and maniacs. Allah, grant him patience…

Along with the cringers and maniacs came spies. Everywhere! These enemies of Islam insinuated themselves close to him and
his government ministers, watched, listened to everything, then reported back to their foreign masters. These dogs should
be skinned alive. He had already ordered the ears, nose and tongue cut from some of them, intending to set them loose on the
streets as a warning to others. However, they all died on him before he could turn them out. A pity. He would try again, with
medical surgeons next time.

Meanwhile, an American devil was wandering the city streets. This monster had killed four loyal Egyptians on Zamalek Island
and put out the eye of another. A second foreigner with him had killed two more government agents. Hasan had sent a strongly
worded note of protest to the American Embassy, and they, of course, had denied all knowledge of this wrongdoing. So long
as they went on sheltering Mubarak and other ministers of the overthrown government, they were his enemies. Those who were
not his friends were his enemies. They sent spies. Everywhere… Would Reagan bomb him if he stormed the embassy? Yes. It was
unfortunate, but that was the clear answer. If he broke off diplomatic relations with the Americans, they would almost certainly
seize the Suez Canal with active European support. Better to
live on with them as one would with a thorn in one’s flesh, yet ready always for a chance to pluck it out.

But he did not have to live on with the traitorous dogs his men had captured in the act of betraying the Islamic revolution.
And he would not!

Hasan jumped to his feet and began pacing again. The murmur of conversation in the room which had gradually risen now died
away again. They kept an eye on Ahmed Hasan.

The president was beyond being annoyed by such trivialities at this point. He had decided to take action! He snapped his fingers
and pointed to a door. At this signal, his armed bodyguards in their battle fatigues peeled off walls, grew out of corners,
clustered around him, and suddenly moved with him like a small swarm of angry hornets out of the room.

A military officer in the room phoned the Citadel. “He’s on his way.” He smiled when he heard the groan from the other end
of the line. He replaced the receiver and joined a group in the room, which now was filled with conversation and laughter.

Ahmed Hasan jumped from one of the Range Rovers that came to a stop in an interior courtyard of the Citadel. He and his bodyguards
stormed through a stone archway into one of the buildings. Some plumbers working on a pipe in the hallway squeezed against
the wall to let them by.

Hasan stopped and grabbed a ten-pound monkey wrench from the plumbers’ tool box.

“Where are the traitors?” he shouted at the desk sergeant. “Take me to the traitors!”

The frightened sergeant dithered for a moment,
not daring to ask the president who he meant. He grabbed a bunch of keys and left his desk, with the president and his guards
right behind him. The sergeant unlocked a steel door and pointed at four men behind the bars of the first cell they came to.
The four were wan and emaciated, their muscles withered from malnutrition and extended lack of activity, their skull and arm
bones revealing the skeleton beneath the skin.

The president gestured toward the lock on the barred door. The sergeant fumbled, found the key, turned it in the lock, and
pulled open the door.

Hasan rushed in with the heavy wrench raised in his right hand.

“Traitors! Hand servants of foreigners! Dogs! Spies!” the president shouted.

He staved in the top of the head of a squatting prisoner with a single blow of the wrench.

The three other prisoners jumped to their bare feet and scampered around the cell in their rags as the uniformed president
chased them. The sergeant slammed shut the barred door.

Hasan brought one man down with a wild blow that caught him on the back. Before the man could rise, Hasan beat him to death
in a frenzy of blows while screaming about the Devil.

The two surviving prisoners watched, cowering against a wall and whimpering for mercy.

A female guard asked the sergeant, “What did these four prisoners do?”

The sergeant looked at her for a moment to see if she was serious. He shrugged.

Ahmed Hasan rushed at the two prisoners, sending
them both to the floor with a few blows of the reddened wrench. He beat each of them in a series of dull thuds until their
bruised and bleeding bodies stopped moving and they lay inert as sacks of wet clay at his feet.

He threw the wrench across the cell and made for the door. The sergeant held it open for him. A female bodyguard handed him
a large white handkerchief, which he used to wipe the blood from his hands and arms

She pointed to blood spatters on his pants. “They’ve ruined your uniform.”

“No,” Hasan declaimed. “Any loyal Egyptian should be proud to wear a traitor’s blood upon his clothes.”

Dr. Mustafa Bakkush did not dodge away from the prayer group for coffee anymore. He had not said a word about being waylaid
by the American in the cafe, fearing that, sooner or later, Hasan would make him pay for his betrayal with his blood if he
ever came to know of it. There was safety in numbers, and Mustafa now liked to bury himself in the midst of the group of engineers,
scientists and other technicians that was ushered from the Citadel to the mosque by the mullahs. On one occasion, while the
others were prostrating themselves on the mosque tiles, a mullah Mustafa had never seen before clasped him by the arm and
led him away from the prayer area. He took him to a large room with a vaulted stone ceiling and decorative tile walls. The
floor was covered with a magnificent thick carpet. There was no furniture. The mullah pointed to the carpet and Mustafa sat,
tucking his stockinged feet beneath him. The mullah
left without ever having spoken a word to him. Mustafa waited.

Then two mullahs, whom Mustafa had seen before, entered the room and sat near him on the carpet. They all exchanged the polite
pleasantries customary for Arabs before a serious word was spoken. Mustafa had seen these two when he had explained nuclear
technology to President Hasan and the mullahs at the Citadel. One had a huge white beard. He remembered this man’s striking
appearance, although he had left the meeting before this mullah accused the president of playing with the Devil by depending
on advanced Western technology.