Star of Egypt (2 page)

Winship nodded professorially.

“The tour is as good a cover as any; we know he could move into the country undetected if he wanted to. If he’s not with the
tour, the rumor that he is is a diversion, most likely initiated by Haman himself. Same trick as the Black September operation
in ’77, when everyone heard he was in France. Everybody believed it long enough for him to hit a Japanese industrialist in
broad daylight in Yokohama. He was supposed to be in Canada during that mess with the Iranian Embassy.”

“Thus, the importance of investigating,” said Winship, letting Slayton sew the skein of events together for himself.

“We have to know whether he’s really here or not. Either way, it’s an ominous development. Whenever that guy moves, the ears
of his enemies prick up. That’s about half the people in the civilized world. Implanting the information that he is smuggling
himself into America via the tour would be a perfect way to draw attention away from the tour itself.” With a bitter little
grin Slayton added, “Thus do the wheels of international intrigue grind and grind.”

Winship shifted himself back to business. “For the moment, you greet the members of the tour, acting as an American liason.
a sort of high-priced tour guide.”

“Right. All smiles and urbane charm.” Slayton’s eyes darkened. “And if I make Haman…?”

“You’re a free agent,” Winship said. “Act as the conditions dictate.”

Slayton scooped up the dossier, already thinking that the first order of business was elementary research. He headed for the
office door. As he was on his way out, Winship harrumphed loudly, an almost petulant expression on his face.

“Sir?”

“Be discreet,” Winship said, somewhat plaintively.

Slayton smiled. “I always am, sir.” His exit was smooth.

Benjamin Slayton wanted very much to kill Rashid Haman.

The Capitol Building dome glowed, huge and golden. With the darkness of night to obscure the litter and the other less photogenic
aspects of the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. looked just like a picture postcard. The air was heavy with moisture.

Around Ben Slayton, the traffic strobed into abstract blurs of red and yellow light. He was thinking about a man named Barney
Kaufman.

Elfin-faced, bright-eyed, with a perpetual grin that could light up a room, Barney Kaufman had been the man who introduced
Slayton to what he termed “the sleazy delights of Tangier.” Slayton had been through Morocco only once before in his life,
a fly-by through the capital city of Rabat that did not really count as a visit, and so had taken up Barney’s jovial offer
of an interesting place to dispense with some accumulated leave-time back in November of 1978.

Barney Kaufman was an ex-CIA agent. International applications and troubleshooting. Barney Kaufman, jovial, smiling Barney,
had killed maybe fifty people in his lifetime, one at a time, with garrotes, karate, point-blank dum-dum shells, long-range
sniping, broken beer bottles, and arranged accidents. Once he described to Slayton how he had killed a man by punching a ballpoint
pen into his brain through the eye socket.

Slayton, in turn, described some of his chores as a fighter-bomber pilot in Vietnam. To Slayton, there was little moral distinction
to be made between breaking some Polish double agent’s back with your knee and blowing Viet Cong to bits, flaming entire tracts
of land and sending people running and screaming with their hair on fire. Kaufman had retired from the CIA. Slayton left Nam
and was honorably discharged.

There was an easy camaraderie between the two men. Both were passionate about personal ethics, not causes. They made no apologies
to each other. It looked as though they might spend some good times together, raising hell in foreign countries and generally
making a happy shambles of the clichéed images of Americans abroad.

Ben Slayton was sitting three feet away from Barney Kaufman when Rashid Haman’s guerrillas hit the Tangier cabaret in which
they were dining.

“This
bouillabaisse
will curl your hair, buddy,” Barney had said. “Sort of like the food you get at the McDonald’s in Paris.”

“Subtly unlike the domestic stuff, I gather?” Slayton grinned over his glass and nodded in somber approbation of the nearly
naked and astoundingly brown dancer quivering not five feet away. The band was loud and raucous, but their instruments were
ancient. Slayton appreciated Barney’s taste.

“Well, French hamburgers are made from beef that’s grass-fed, not corn-fed. If you’re not prepared for the taste—” He grimaced.
“Phew! And they make milkshakes out of water.”

“They don’t even use milk in them in America anymore, so what’s the difference?”

At that moment the frenzy of the dancer’s gyrations caused her magnificent breasts to burst free of her costume. They were
finely toned—the dancing muscles helped—and exhibited deep brown buds. She merely smiled at her audience, showing fine white
teeth and a dark, gypsylike face, and continued dancing.

“To stop the dance in the middle of the story would be a
faux pas
of major proportions,” shouted Barney, rapping knuckles on the rough-hewn table in time to the music. The woman returned
Slayton’s appreciative smile enthusiastically. She had the darkest eyes Slayton had ever seen.

“Why are we sitting here talking about hamburgers and milkshakes?” he yelled back over the din, and both men broke up laughing.

Barney had raised his glass in the general direction of both Slayton and the dancer, when the top of his head was torn off
by a salvo of 9-millimeter slugs from a Smith and Wesson M76 submachine gun in the grip of a man in a black fighting suit
standing in the small entrance foyer to the cabaret. More men crowded in behind him, weapons bristling. A thermite jug went
noisily off behind the bar, cutting what little electricity illuminated the place, and everything was plunged into panic and
blackness.

Slayton hit the deck, tearing a Baretta Brigadier he had borrowed from Barney away from the shoulder holster he wore. His
shirtfront was spattered with his friend’s blood and brains, and he could feel viscous moisture speckling his face as well.
It took only a second for his eyes to adjust to the ambient candlelight in the large room. He snapped off two clean rounds,
and saw a silhouette near the entrance jerk backward and drop in a sprawl. Slayton was up and moving before anyone could fix
his position.

The dark room was alive with screams and shouts, shooting, and rampant movement. Slayton body-rolled across an open space,
coming to a crouch and up-ending a filled table into the path of a guerrilla nearly invisible in his black outfit. The man
pivoted into a forearm smash from Slayton that cleaned his feet from under him. His head cracked on the table edge, and Slayton
drove the heel of his hand into the man’s throat, crushing his larynx. He did not get up.

Slayton snatched up his weapon, an Uzi submachine gun his hands recognized even in the dark, and sprayed the doorway in two
arcs. He fixed on return fire, and cut down a man holding a pistol near the flaming remnants of the bar.

Like that, it was over. Apparently the guerrillas had hit their mark and fled, taking less than forty-five seconds for the
entire operation.

Maybe their mark had been Barney, Slayton thought uneasily. It was not unlikely. All men like himself had enemies; sometimes
it did come to this. And if he had been sitting about a foot to the left, he would be on the floor with his friend, fodder
for the morgue, instead of picking the ID and personals off his corpse.

Slayton took Barney’s belongings, and in so doing took responsibility for his friend until they put him in the ground. He
told the relatives and those who needed to be told. He dispatched his primary obligation of honor.

Two days after the fracas, Slayton learned through Interpol that the hit had been arranged through Egyptian shipping interests,
using imported thugs. The dead bodies in black suits, two of whom Slayton had killed, would never be traced. They were picked
to be linked to Palestinian interests if killed. A lot of Moroccan cash, laundered via Saudi Arabia, had paid for the hit.
The targets turned out to be a table-load of minor-league Egyptian shipping executives who happened to be sitting several
yards away from Slayton and Barney. It was specified that the hit be messy, and leave a lot of bodies. It was, and it did.

Slayton also learned that the hit was used by the Black September terrorist named Rashid Haman as a dry run for a more important
assassination assignment, to follow several weeks later in Johannesburg. Barney had been murdered purely as local color for
Rashid Haman.

As he drove, the Washington weather now threatening rain, he thought of Barney, dumped unceremoniously on the cabaret floor
in a welter of black blood, and of the topless cabaret dancer, flung over a broken chair like a dirty shirt, her left foot
jutting upward in the stillness of death, her fine, fine body perforated by at least ten Uzi bullets.

As a special troubleshooter for Treasury, Slayton sometimes acted as a contra-terrorist, who employed the same moves and methods
as men like Haman. He was not a government hit man. He knew himself to be different in an important, basic, chemical way.
But thinking now about Barney and Rashid Haman, he was damned if he could name that precise difference to himself at the moment.

“I had a premonition I might find you moping around here. This makes three times in recent memory you’ve bounced back to Washington
without calling me.”

Slayton looked up from his mostly untouched
medallions de veau au bec rouge
with
sauce milo
and instantly felt a sting of sheepishness. Yes, he should have called. Wilma Christian was worth a call, despite his packed
and mechanically tedious day.

He had spent most of his time poring over a Treasury Department security A-priority computer terminal, extracting information
to construct a rise-and-fall graph of Rashid Haman’s terrorist activity. Slayton preferred having vital details centralized
into his own handwritten notations on a yellow legal pad—often, his own constructs yielded patterns the machines and the political
experts overlooked. One byproduct of his labor was adrenalin; it accumulated poisonously in his system as he documented Haman’s
activities into boxes subgrouped by
real, suspected
, and
advisory
participations. He could not cleanse Barney Kaufman’s face from his mind, and the negative energy he had dammed up toward
the faceless entity known as Rashid Haman proved to be frustrating. Slayton felt a surge of relief—or something like it—upon
looking up and recognizing a friendly face.

“I could blame dereliction of duty, but I don’t think you’d buy it,” he offered. “How about preoccupation? No?”

Wilma smiled. Slayton had already risen at the approach of the waiter who threaded Wilma back toward the private, three-quarter
carrel where he dined, and now Wilma slid easily in beside him.

“You look like you’re starving,” he said.

“Jesus, Ben, a line like that I thought you’d reserve for the high-schoolers you like to molest,” she said with a light smirk.
Looking toward his plate, she added, “I might order something later, maybe. After I do this.” And she leaned over and planted
a delicious, welcome-home kiss on his lips.

Slayton forgot about the fair-to-middling French concoction before him.

Access to A-priority terminals had all sorts of advantages. For example, according to the machine records,
CHRISTIAN, WILMA B(LAIR), b. 06/ 13/ 50 ss# 527-55-1937
, was a
WFA
, had
bl/br
, was
5′9
^¾
″
and
1301b
and was cross-indexed under
JOURNALISTS
, among other categories that somehow related to her professions, her upbringing, likes, dislikes, or political leanings/potentials.

“Hello,” she said, breaking the kiss at last.

Slayton cleared his throat. “Evening, ma’am.”

What Wilma Christian actually was was a soft and incredibly wily creature in a field whose beat, the nation’s capital, often
required uncompromisingly dirty play from those who tried to succeed as reporters and journalists. Her fabulous cascade of
hair was a mellow sandalwood color, not brown, and her eyes a brilliant Danish blue, the irises ringed in direct black—eyes
that commanded attention. She was a hard-core professional whose beauty frequently butted opponents off-kilter, and one way
or another she ran whatever she needed to earth, in due course. She was perhaps one of the five top reporters in the city.

And sometimes, Slayton added mentally, she had just a little trouble reconciling her ethics with her news sense. But then
everyone did… even Treasury agents.

He was a bit perturbed by the immediate way she asked him the question he knew was coming: “You on assignment?”

He let it off lightly. “Of course. And no, it’s not open for discussion. Next topic. Cheers.” He raised his glass as the waiter
returned with Wilma’s martini.

“Sorry,” she said. “Mata Hari strikes again. One of us will learn. So anyway, why has my phone not been alive with invitations
to visit you in Virginia again?”

“You’re the only houseguest I’ve ever had that didn’t wait for a butler to putter in to clean up after her, did you know that?”
Of course she did.

“Evasive, Slayton. Good god.” A pause. “Your august presence in Washington doesn’t have anything to do with the President’s
crowing about ‘more visible political figures,’ does it?”

Slayton frowned into his wine.

“Okay, okay, change of tack,” she said. “Wherever you dumped your attache case, let’s stop there and get whatever you may
need on the way back to my flat.”

“Actually, I’ve been sleeping with my pet computer console,” said Slayton.

“Isn’t the pillow talk a bit, um, stilted?”

“Practically prefabricated.”

“One more, and this one isn’t so much nosy as personal interest: when do you have to go to work?”

“Sunday morning,” he said, too quickly.