Reprisal (20 page)

One of the ground crew helped them with the plane. Dartley sat in the cockpit and slipped headphones over his ears. He wanted
to hear everything the control tower said to the pilot. His left arm brushed against the solid bulk of the Colt .45 automatic
inside his jacket.

“Where to?” the pilot asked casually.

“Cairo.”

The pilot gave the control tower their flight destination in English and was cleared for takeoff, also in English.

“Allah yisallmak,” the air traffic controller said. May Allah keep you safe.

Over the Sinai, Dartley had the pilot change course for Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, on the Mediterranean. He
figured he might be subjected to less scrutiny there than at Cairo. People were gathered around those with transistors at
Alexandria’s airport to listen to the news about the attack on Ahmed Hasan at Aqaba when they arrived. The Egyptian
president had already accused the Americans and Israelis of a joint conspiracy against him and pointed out that Allah had
triumphed in saving him from these agents of evil. Hasan’s subjects at the airport did not show any great joy at his escape
from death. In Dartley’s opinion, they showed a very healthy interest in the prospect of their president’s destruction. No
one at the airport’s control tower or security or immigration apparently made any connection between this Lear jet arriving
from Aqaba a couple of hours after the assassination attempt. It was an Arab jet, traveling from one Arab country to another
with a foreign journalist as its passenger. All the same, Dartley was glad he had come here instead of Cairo, where controls
would probably have been much tighter.

He hired a car from Hertz under the name of Fairbairn Draper and drove along the Corniche, where the luxury apartment houses
and hotels fronted on the Mediterranean. He could have been on the French Riviera rather than in Egypt so far as these surroundings
went. He followed the sweeping, crescent seafront, glancing out to sea from time to time at the cruise ships, fishing boats
and naval frigates. He had had enough of boats for a while.

Why hadn’t that control box worked for the guided missiles? Dartley knew enough about sophisticated armaments to accept that
the more technologically advanced they were, the more things that went wrong with them. Probably some break in some damn microscopic
wire in a microcircuit array less than the size of a fingernail. Someone might have dropped the control box. Or left it out
in the sun too
long. Hell, no, the Cobra was manufactured in Germany according to military specifications. Things didn’t go wrong with something
like that all that easily. If only he had tested the weapon when he had fired the rifles and pistols early in the morning—he
had left the Colt .45 behind him in the Lear, hidden under his seat, not wanting to risk taking it through customs. But he
knew he had made the correct decision early that morning. Either a guided missile works or it doesn’t. It had to be taken
on faith. He could not have endangered the whole mission by test-firing a weapon powerful enough to register on military surveillance
equipment, let alone be seen exploding by ground observers ten miles away.

Such technical difficulties could have happened with any piece of sophisticated equipment. Dartley could even have believed
that if it weren’t for two other things that kept nagging at his mind. First, the helicopter gunship that bore down on them
had been looking for one man only. Why not him also? He had been standing only thirty yards away from Gottlieb when the Israeli
had been cut down by the chopper’s guns. Any pilot would assume that Dartley too was involved—unless he had prior information
that only one man was involved. Dartley had told Michelle Perret that he had not found a driver and did not need one now,
he was going it alone.

The second thing that stayed in Dartley’s mind was the fact that, although the Honda was where Michelle said it would be,
its ignition key wasn’t. That could have been deadly for him if he had abandoned the Peugeot and depended on the Honda to
escape in.

As he saw it now, he had escaped only through Michelle’s carelessness. He had never mentioned the Lear jet to her, and she
had assumed he had come to Aqaba on a commercial flight, by boat, or by road from Amman. She hadn’t bothered to check. As
soon as Gottlieb was found not to be the American they were after, the roadblocks would go up and passenger scrutiny would
become intense.

But they had Gottlieb’s body and they thought it was his. The only person in Aqaba who could tell them otherwise was Michelle,
and with typical Arab deference to the sensibilities of women, they probably did not like to ask her to view the riddled corpse.
He still had maybe a few hours before they began hunting for him again.

As Dartley drove west out of Alexandria, along the coast of the palm-fringed Mediterranean, he wondered who Michelle Perret
was working for. He felt no personal animosity toward her—she was a professional doing a job, same as him. And she had not
fully bested him. True, she had saved Ahmed Hasan by supplying Dartley with faulty missiles. But he was still alive and still
intent on killing Hasan, in spite of her efforts.

Were she and Jacques Laforque in on this together? Had Laforque intended that he be killed? Surely not before doing his job,
which was killing Ahmed Hasan. That didn’t make sense. Yet she was Laforque’s contact. He had sent Dartley to her.

If she was working for someone behind Laforque’s back, who was it? Only Laforque knew that Dartley was going to Aqaba. Unless
he mentioned it to Omar Zekri. Would the Frenchman have been fool enough
to do that? He had been fool enough to hire Omar to find Dartley. Now the Egyptian could guess that France was involved in
whatever Dartley was up to. If Omar knew Dartley had gone to Aqaba, he could infer that France was behind the assassination
attempt on Hasan. Laforque could be sloppy, but surely not that sloppy. Or could he?

Dartley felt himself unwind gradually as he drove alongside the miles of sunny surf and sand, interrupted only occasionally
by a town or an oasis. After about seventy miles, he came to a little resort town which looked half deserted. The wind had
picked up and blew sand off the desert along its streets. This was El Alamein.

This was the place where Montgomery’s Eighth Army made their last stand against Rommel’s Afrika Corps. Rommel had defeated
the British at Tobruk, in Libya, and in other desert battles, and drove them before him as he swept eastward toward the Nile.
In November, 1942, only Montgomery’s forces stood between him and British HQ in Alexandria. Once Rommel took Alexandria at
the mouth of the Nile, and Cairo farther up the river, nothing could stop him taking the Suez Canal. And after the Germans
had taken the canal—thereby cutting off Britain’s only short route to its empire in East Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand
and Asia—they could overrun the Middle Eastern oilfields. Without Arab oil and easy access to men and supplies from its empire,
Britain’s war effort would collapse in a matter of weeks; Rommel and Montgomery were not simply fighting over who controlled
the empty sands around the tiny Egyptian town of El Alamein.

A total of some eighty thousand men died in that conflict. But Montgomery held the line, and Rommel—Germany’s greatest hero,
who would later take poison on Hilter’s orders for plotting against him—had his first sour taste of a major defeat.

The German and Italian memorials were farther west beyond the town, and they were hardly the place to mourn the loss of a
Jewish comrade in arms. He went into the British War Cemetery on the eastern side of the town. The names of the Allied units
that had fought here were listed on the walls of the entrance building.

Dartley walked among the more than seven thousand headstones in strict military rows, almost as if these men stood at attention
forever in a parade ground in the memory of all free men. He was alone with all these dead heroes who had been sacrificed
for the sake of freedom before he had been born. They were not the first. Already it was known they were not the last. Any
reasonable guess would suggest there would be many more.

Dartley did not read the names on the stones. He just looked at them all as anonymous men, like every soldier was in combat,
looked at the row after row after row of headstones, wreathed in purple flowers, stretching away into the desert sand.

It was here that Dartley chose to mourn the death of Aaron Gottlieb.

Keegan picked up the off-green telephone connected to the KYX scrambler at this State Department office in Washington, D.C.
He identified himself and listened. It was a long call, much longer than the usual briefings Langley chose to give him. Which
meant only one thing—the CIA expected that shit was going to fly and that State was going to be hit by some or all of it.

The long and short of it, according to Langley’s version, was that the Mossad had lent a man to the CIA in Cairo and that
this was the man who had been killed while trying to assassinate the president of Egypt at a Jordanian resort.

Keegan felt the blood rush to his head, then leave it just as rapidly. He wanted to shout, but no sound came. He felt dizzy
and gulped some cold coffee from a Styrofoam container on his desk. His hands were shaking.

“You—you’re telling me you
borrowed
someone to kill President Hasan?”

“Hell, no, Keegan. Don’t be stupid. The Mossad man went to help an American agent. When our man in Cairo verified that this
American wasn’t one of ours and didn’t belong to the Pentagon or NSA, the Israelis figured he was with you. Or maybe the White
House. He was doing what the Israelis wanted anyway—taking out Ahmed Hasan. So I don’t suppose they gave a fuck if he was
from Mars.”

“You keep on saying ‘this American.’ What American?”

“That’s what we’d like to know, Keegan. Poke around and see what you can find. There’s no knowing if some half-cocked patriot
didn’t send someone over there—one of these dingbats on the fund raising side. Check into it.”

“I will,” John Keegan agreed. “You sure he’s not a rogue?”

“We’ve covered everybody. We don’t know who this fella is.”

“I’ll certainly inquire. Other than that, is there anything else we can do at State?”

“Sure.” Keegan heard a harsh laugh at the other end of the line. “Keep your heads down when it starts to fly.”

Omar Zekri shook hands with Pritchett when the American arrived at the hotel room. Pritchett always insisted on Omar getting
a room someplace and then waiting for him there, sometimes for hours, when they had anything that would take time to discuss.
Pritchett claimed that if he were seen in earnest
conversation with Omar, it could endanger the Egyptian’s safety. This was enough to convince Omar. He waited for the American
to unwrap and open the bottle of Dewar’s Scotch. Two empty glasses had been set on a table by Omar. He swallowed two mouthfuls
of the amber liquid before he spoke.

Omar said, “The Israeli spy who was killed at Aqaba was here in Cairo before he went there.”

Pritchett did not bat an eyelid, but then Omar decided that Pritchett had been expecting something anyway.

Omar went on. “When the newspaper said that this Israeli spy-had entered Egypt as a Beirut Christian banker and spoke Arabic
with a Lebanese accent, I recognized him in spite of his ski mask.”

“So?” Pritchett asked noncommittally.

“He was with Thomas Lewis, the American wheat expert.”

Omar smiled at Pritchett’s visible discomfort.

“I think Mr. Lewis went to Aqaba also,” Omar said softly. “To kill Ahmed Hasan.”

“Do you really think Washington is that stupid, Omar, to send an American and an Israeli to an Arab town to kill the Egyptian
president? Even your own newspapers are a bit suspicious of Hasan’s claims of an American-Zionist plot against him. I tell
you, this so-called wheat expert Thomas Lewis does not work for any branch of the American government. And I’d like you to
pass that fact along to your Egyptian friends.”

“Oh, they do not know that Lewis went to Aqaba. I have too much love for my American friends to tell the government here what
I know about this thing.”

Pritchett sighed in exasperation and got to his feet. “Listen to me, Omar. Do what you wish. Obviously, we’d be happier if
no American was known to be directly involved in this affair. But I’m not protecting one if he is—because I don’t know who
the hell he is. We might be best served if Egyptian intelligence did put an end to him before he tries anything else.”

“You wish me to pass that along?”

“No. All I’m trying to get you to understand is that this Thomas Lewis is not working for us. In any capacity, got that?”

“Oh, I know that, Mr. Pritchett. How do I know? Because I know who he is working for.”

Pritchett sat down.

Omar took his time in refilling their glasses from the bottle of Dewar’s. He sipped reflectively on his straight, warm whiskey.
“I think five thousand dollars should just about cover my expenses on this particular aspect.”

Pritchett grunted his assent. “Better be worth it.”

“Jacques Laforque paid me to find Thomas Lewis for him on an emergency basis.”

Pritchett’s expression did not change.

Omar was not fazed by this. “You know how Laforque behaves so self-importantly when he’s obeying orders. He was obeying orders.
He was in a hurry. He represents the party behind the Aqaba failure.”

Pritchett smiled. “Is Cairo into disinformation these days? Or does this come from someone else? Maybe Thomas Lewis himself?
Perhaps he’s hired you also.”

It was beneath Omar’s dignity to respond to such insults. He knew Pritchett was only playing for time as he sorted this new
information in his brain.

“Is Laforque in Cairo now?” Pritchett asked.

“No.”

“But you expect him back?”

Omar nodded. “And Thomas Lewis too.”

When Richard Dartley returned to Cairo, he felt depressed by his failure on the Red Sea. Here he was back again at the starting
point, with a few additional strokes against him. One of these additional strokes was the need for a new identification. When
he dropped off the car he had hired in Alexandria with the Hertz depot in Cairo, he destroyed his papers in the name of Fairbairn
Draper, along with those in the name of Thomas Lewis. Those were two gentlemen he had no wish to be associated with in future.
He had a fake U.S. passport and Egyptian visa in the name of Paul Savage. But that name was a safety cushion and he intended
to avoid using it if possible. It was just something to show the police if they stopped him in the street. His hair was now
fairer—bleached by the sun—and longer, uncomfortably long for him since he was used to it clipped short. He was growing a
mustache, wore aviator-style sunglasses, and bought French trendy styles in clothes. He was fairly sure he’d be hard to recognize
from a week before. He sure as hell hoped so. There were some people here in Cairo he did not want to meet.