Reckoning (19 page)

Dartley felt a cold fear sweep over him. To have to lie on his back, able to think but not to move, was one of those horror
scenes Dartley preferred not to think about. He could handle most things. Not that. Despite the pain it caused him, he was
soon threshing about on the bed, moving every movable joint in his body and limbs.

Dieudonne laughed. “Very good. It’s clear from some of these accounts that the government believes that perhaps Egan was murdered
for some oil discovery he made in the Ituri. If the injured man in the hospital bed wished to delay awkward questioning from
officials, he should slow down his signs of recovery. Apparently nothing is known about these poisons and they will assume
he is paralyzed until he chooses to let them see otherwise. There are very sad accounts in all the newspapers of the handsome
young man who cannot move a muscle. The government is embarrassed too, because Zaire is the most progressive country in Africa
and we do not want foreigners to think they have
to worry about pygmy-poisoned arrows while they are here.”

He sorted through the newspapers. “The unknown killer seems to have escaped. The nuns said he spoke Canadian French. Only
one other item is of interest. He was seen with a policeman in the town of Titule before the killing. That policeman was found
shot dead in a dump about ten miles from here yesterday. If he hasn’t paid you a visit by now, he probably won’t. There’s
a policeman at the entrance desk, who would certainly question him. But just in case, I brought you this.”

He showed Dartley a tiny automatic in the palm of his hand. Dartley knew the gun—a Beretta Minx which fired .22 shorts. Without
letting the old man see what he was doing, Dieudonne pushed it between the mattresses of his bed, not Dartley’s. It was plain
that Dieudonne foresaw searches as well as questions in Dartley’s future.

Dieudonne stood. He raised his shirt just enough for Dartley to see his moneybelt. “The people at Diku have all been compensated.
The nuns received a generous gift for their help. The passport is safe. You should leave as soon as you can.”

Dartley nodded. “Thanks, Dieudonne. You’re a real friend. I have one thing I must ask you to do. Someone I know in Washington,
D.C., monitors the world press on computers and so on. He will have seen what has happened. You must phone. Go to one of the
big hotels here in town and find a barman or someone who speaks good English to make the call for you. It’s
to an answering service. For Viscount Enterprises. Don’t believe all you hear. Stay where you are. No sender’s name. All right?”

Dieudonne nodded.

“Come back for me tomorrow,” Dartley went on. “I’ll be ready to go, come hell or high water. Today I’m too dizzy to walk.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Thank you. By the way, next time you’re up in Diku, tell those pygmies I never saw them and never knew what hit me. They’ll
enjoy hearing that.”

Dieudonne shook his head. “They already know. None of us ever see them until they want us to.”

Dartley woke. He was instantly aware of the presence of others in the room. The old man stirred in the bed next to his. it
must be the middle of the night. The room door was open, and the corridor fluorescent light cast a soft white glow into the
middle of the room, between all four beds. Someone was standing there. At the foot of his bed. Watching him.

He had not moved. It hurt to move, so he thought about it before he did, even while waking up. Doctors had been to see him
earlier. They had stood in their white coats at the end of his bed, looking at him intently, asking him to try to move his
right foot, his left hand, to make a fist, and so on. Was this a doctor?

He had better play paralyzed. Anyway he could not get to the gun in the old man’s mattress. Who the hell was this? But he
did not move his head.

The figure finally quietly stepped forward along the side of his bed closest to the wall. It was a man. Broad shoulders. White.
All Dartley’s doctors had been black. He couldn’t see the man’s face because the light from the door was directly behind him,
but he could tell that the man was looking down at him. He could see that Dartley’s eyes were open.

Dartley knew it was Dockrell. He heard him make a sound, a soft sound with his mouth, like a sob. No, it was a laugh. The
bastard was trying to hold back his laughter at his paralyzed opponent.

He reluctantly began to move again, hating to interrupt the enjoyment he was obviously experiencing at looking down at his
immobile rival. He opened a metal closet against the wall and took a pillow out. Then holding the pillow in both hands, he
leaned over Dartley on the bed. He even allowed Dartley to suck in a deep breath of air into his lungs before covering his
face with the pillow—in order to prolong the agony of his slow suffocation. Then he pressed down heavily with both hands so
that the pillow blocked the mouth and nostrils of the paralyzed man.

Keeping his shoulders from moving, Dartley slid his right hand between the sheets over to the edge of the bed where Dockrell
was standing. He made no hurried movement that might tip off his attacker. He was supposed to be helpless as a spider’s supper.
He held his breath and groped upward with his hand, found Dockrell’s nuts, grabbed them in a vicious squeezing grip and sharply
twisted them.

Dockrell howled like a coyote, pulled himself free and hobbled out the door into the corridor, clutching himself. His pain-maddened
scream woke patients and brought nurses running. He struck a nurse who tried to stop him and knocked her to the floor. He
then pressed the escape bar on an emergency exit and disappeared out into the night.

Dartley pushed the pillow off his face and breathed in air that seemed to him incredibly sweet, regardless of its hospital
smell. The effort of fighting back had drained him of all his energy. Even if his bed had been on fire, he did not have the
strength at this moment to stand on his feet.

“My dear uncle, it’s your loyal nephew again. How are you today?” Dieudonne pressed a large number of banknotes into the old
man’s hands. “I heard about the disturbance last night. Well, you should all feel very safe because there’s a large unfriendly
policeman sitting on a chair just down the corridor. He gave me a dirty look until a passing nurse who knew me from my frequent
visits here smiled at me.”

He tossed a green scrub tunic and pants on Dartley’s bed and placed a pair of white OR shoes on the floor.

Dartley had tried some early morning practice walks when no one was around and he had recovered. He fell down the first time,
but now the wave of dizziness that hit him again when he stood upright no longer caught him by surprise. He held onto the
bed
until things steadied inside his head, and only then tried balancing and putting one foot before the other.

He pulled on the scrub tunic and pants. Dieudonne laced the shoes. Dartley took the clipboard from the end of his bed. He
staggered and had to lean on Dieudonne for a few steps. Then he was okay. The two walked down the corridor past the policeman
on the chair, Dartley looking at the clipboard and saying in French to Dieudonne, “There’s still a question whether we should
operate. The shock to his system may be too much…”

They turned a corner and left through an emergency door. Dartley would have fallen down the single flight of metal steps if
Dieudonne had not caught him. He had looked down and the ground had swayed from side to side and rushed up to meet him.

They crossed the sun-baked grass of a lawn, and Dieudonne held open the back door of a Mercedes for him. There was a package
on the back seat.

Getting behind the steering wheel, Dieudonne said, “Better change your clothes. Once they miss you in the hospital, they’ll
be looking for you on the road to Kinshasa, where the international airport is. I’m taking you south to Burundi instead. It’s
only half the distance to Kinshasa.”

Dartley found an impressive dark blue suit, white shirt, conservative tie and black shoes in the package. He pulled the scrub
suit off and got into the new clothes as Dieudonne drove out of the city. He wrapped the green scrub suit and white shoes
in the packaging and tossed them out the window. Dartley tried to see how he
looked in the rearview mirror. Not bad. Fortunately a nurse’s aide had given him a close shave the evening before.

“Won’t they be looking for us on the road to Burundi also?” he asked reasonably enough.

“Certainly. But will they expect a paralyzed runaway from a hospital bed to pass them, dressed like an ambassador, in a chauffeured
Mercedes?” He looked back over his shoulder from the front seat as he placed a peaked cap on his head.

“That’s what I like,” Dartley said with a smile. “Attention to detail.”

They were waved through all the way. His passport was not even checked at the Burundi border. He got a ticket on the Paris
plane due to leave. Bujumbura within the hour.

Dartley said, “Give me a thousand U.S. dollars from the moneybelt. Keep the rest.”

Dieudonne was stupefied. “But that will make me a rich man.”

“That’s what can happen when you go out on a limb. But remember this, Dieudonne. Next time you see someone like me coming
at you, walk the other way. This time you lucked out.”

Abdel Saleh’s second and third wives argued with the mob leaders through the locked steel gate fitted outside the house door.
The students and street zealots had surrounded his house in a Teheran suburb. Abdel’s first wife sulked in a room upstairs,
saying she didn’t care what happened to him, he deserved whatever he got. The women claimed Abdel was not at home. The mob
had put spies on watch. They knew he was there.

“If you do not leave immediately,” the second wife shouted, “Abdel will have you arrested. I know who you are. I have a great
memory for faces. He will see to it that you suffer for this.”

The crowd laughed but they were not too hard on her. They had a certain sympathy for these women, and admired them for the
way they stood up for their man. These women were virtuous—their tragedy was they had that infidel dog Abdel for a husband.

Abdel Saleh had been denounced by the mullahs
only that morning. Yesterday some of the same men now screaming for his blood outside his home were bowing deferentially to
him and jostling each other to get close to him. But Allah had revealed how this treacherous pig had schemed with the Zionists
and the Great Satan America to bring about the fall of true believers in Iran. The viper had been in their midst, ready to
strike.

The mob didn’t know any more details than this of Abdel’s wrongdoings. They didn’t need to. The mullah’s resounding denunciations
rang in their ears, along with the name of Allah and the fact that Abdel was a pig, a dog, an enemy of Islam. Their duty was
clear.

The mob leaders had another reason for arguing with the women at the iron gate over the house door. So long as the women felt
they were making headway in reasoning with the mob, the occupants of the house would focus attention on them. This gave the
zealots a chance to throw a grappling hook on a length of rope over the side of the building. The hook landed on the flat
roof, and they cautiously pulled on the rope until one of the claws of the hook caught on the wall. Clutching the rope arm
over arm, each of the three walked up the two-story wall to the roof.

Like all high-level leaders of the Revolutionary Guards, Abdel was known to have an armed bodyguard with him at home and to
have a store of weapons. Keeping the women talking had distracted attention so far, and the leader of the three on the roof
decided to stay with it. He waited until one of the men had opened
the lock on the roof door with a knife blade, then he walked softly to the front of the building and signaled down.

When they saw the signal, the mob leaders began to agree with the women and to push back their puzzled and indignant supporters,
who were not sure what was going on. They had stormed out here to bring Abdel Saleh to justice—and now they were being asked
to go away because of the honeyed words of two women!

The three zealots slipped down from the roof inside the house. They did not harm the five silent, frightened children they
found in one room, nor the sullen woman they found in another.

The bodyguard waited for them around a turn in the hallway. He held his Kalashnikov automatic rifle in his right hand and
the magazine for it in his left, signifying he would not fire on them. He nodded toward a closed door next to him.

The leader turned the door handle and inched the door inward. Through the crack he could see Abdel standing at the window,
peering down through the shutter slats. The door swung silently on its hinges, and the zealot crossed the room without a sound.

Abdel saw him and went for the pistol tucked into the front of his pants. The zealot slapped down his right wrist and grabbed
him, pinning down his arms. One of the others relieved him of the weapon. They pulled the shutters from the window and displayed
their captive through the glass to the mob below.