Reprisal (10 page)

“All of us here know that I am a mere figurehead, only a tool to achieve the will of the Light of Islam. You are the true
rulers of Egypt and I live only to obey your commands. At one word from you, the mob would tear me from limb to limb. And
yet a nation needs a figurehead. Within the privacy of these four walls, I ask you to tell me what to do. Shall I go ahead
to achieve an Islamic bomb?”

More than three-quarters showed their hands in support, and Hasan took to bowing and thanking them profusely. He deliberately
did not ask those against him to declare themselves. But this did not stop one thin-faced man with a glistening black,
pointed beard and the sharp eyes of a desert warrior from standing up and gesturing for quiet.

“Fear not, brothers. I do not intend to fight your majority on this. You know that I think Ahmed Hasan holds too much sway
over you and that he is a dangerously deluded man.” The fierce looking mullah paused to stare boldly at the president, who
avoided his eyes. “It is not that I and my supporters in this are less dedicated than you. Perhaps each one of us have different
reasons for feeling as we do. But, as I promised, we will not spend time discussing our dissent. Yet we will ask something
in return for not opposing you vigorously on this. A small thing. Something of benefit to you as much as to us.”

He looked about to make sure each man was listening. When he spoke again, it was with a different voice. No longer was his
tone friendly and reasonable.

“We have detractors overseas, Egyptians who insult their homeland with false stories, who shame us before the world, who insult
our Islamic values. These men are embittered by their material losses when the corrupt reign of the dog Mubarak was overthrown.
I need not name these individuals for you, and others join them daily when they see it is safe to do so, that no retribution
is visited upon the heads of these wrongdoers who are an insult in the eyes of Allah and His Prophet and a scourge to the
worthy mullahs of our homeland.”

He pointed a long finger in Hasan’s face. “We want you to open a training camp without delay to train young men to go out
in the world and silence these infidels.”

Hasan looked genuinely pleased and relieved that this was all that was being required of him. “Tell me what to do,” he shouted
to the others. “Is this your wish?”

This proposal was even more popular than the one for the atom bomb.

After dutifully escorting the mullahs to their waiting limousines in another inner courtyard, Ahmed Hasan retired to a private
room deep in the fortress. There he drank tea and smoked two pipes of hashish. He needed time to think. Ahmed was acutely
aware that he was now dealing with types of men he had previously been unaccustomed to. His whole adult life having been spent
in the army, he knew the military mind, and over the years—out of necessity—had become acquainted with the political mind
and the business mind. However, military men, politicians and businessmen were simple and straightforward, babes in arms in
comparison to mullahs and scientists. The religious mind and the scientific mind were ones he would have to familiarize himself
with before he could get the better of them. Ahmed liked to divide men into compartmentalized types according to their calling
in life. He noted each man’s behavioral eccentricities within his own group and remembered them. But to Ahmed, a man was first
what his job proclaimed him to be—a soldier, a politician, etc.—before he was an individual. (Ahmed put all women into only
two types: pretty ones and ugly ones.) Yet each man had a fearful peasant streak in him, no matter how high and mighty or
intelligent and enlightened he had become. He had only to be
trapped within his own nightmares and be pressured in exactly the right way, in exactly his weakest place, and he would howl
in anguish like any backward member of the fellahin. Ahmed’s problem was that he was not quite sure how to go about bringing
mullahs and scientists before him on their knees.

They too were greedy men, but theirs was an intellectual greed. Their lust for power was cloaked, often from themselves as
well as others, by their much praised strivings for and benefits to mankind. Ahmed always found it easier to manipulate men
who were aware of their own weaknesses. When a man wanted land or gold, that was what he got. But when a man’s greed was for
respect and fame instead of land or gold, Ahmed found him a trickier adversary to subdue. And all Ahmed wanted was to subdue
them—not degrade them into mindless yes-men who would be useless to him in their fields. He needed these mullahs and scientists.
He felt he needed them as beasts of burden. To use them as that, he would first have to break them, domesticate them.

Little Mustafa Bakkush had surprised him with his performance in the courtyard. The scientist had showed his own strange kind
of courage—after having previously displayed his cowardice by vomiting at a simple decapitation! A strange man… Ahmed had
looked down on the scene from a barred window high in a wall. It gave him pleasure to witness his enemies meet their end.
The mullahs had condemned these felons, and Ahmed saw this as a new beginning in their relationship with him, in which they
would function as a tribunal to pass judgment on those who offended him. Dr. Bakkush had nearly ruined everything
with his unexpected outburst and rescue of the engineer. Ahmed had merely wanted to frighten the little scientist by having
him see the execution of a colleague. It turned out that Bakkush too had an unpredictable side, like all these scientists.
The electrical engineer had been the same! Ahmed had forgotten now what he had done to cause the man to rebel—there had been
some incident, and the engineer refused to cooperate any further, regardless of penalty. Now Bakkush had saved this man’s
life in an unexpectedly reckless move. Ahmed could not let the engineer think he could defy authority and be saved by Bakkush.
He could not let Bakkush think so either. The engineer would obey or he would die, and Ahmed would teach him this. Even if
he was a scientist and behaved in strange ways.

Ahmed Hasan put aside his tea and hashish pipe, sent for an army officer and told him: “That electrical engineer will be important
to us if we can get him to work for us again. I don’t want him injured or too badly treated. Is there a prisoner here he knew
before they both came to the Citadel?”

“Yes, sir. A chemist we caught spying for the Americans. They often walk together in the yard. The engineer also knows most
of the other technical people under confinement here, sir.”

“He does? Of course. Is this chemist important to our military effort?”

“He’s a soil chemist, sir.”

“Useless! I’ll use him. Bring them both here.”

The officer left and Hasan wandered out of the room into the corridor. Two privates pushed a load of supplies on a two-tiered
metal table with wheels.

“Get rid of that stuff and bring the table in this room.” Hasan commanded. “Bring some rope too.”

The two privates returned with the table and in a while the engineer Mustafa Bakkush had saved was brought in. Hasan ordered
him bound in an upright chair close to the metal table. When the chemist arrived, Hasan had him stretched on his back on the
table, his wrists and ankles bound to the four table legs.

“Did you know that this man was a spy for the Americans?” Hasan asked the engineer, indicating the chemist spreadeagled on
the table. “At least you did not do that.” Hasan took a length of nylon fishing line from one pocket. He said to the engineer,
“You refused to work in your country’s nuclear program. I suppose that may be negotiable. But spying for a foreign power is
unforgivable.” He beckoned to one of the two privates and turned to the man on his back on the table. He gripped him under
the chin with one hand, his thumb on one side of the mouth, his fingers on the other, and by squeezing his grip, he forced
the man’s mouth open. He said to the soldier, “Catch his tongue. It’s slippery. Use both hands, pull it right out of his mouth
all the way it will come, hold on to it.”

The man on the table, who had said nothing until this point, now began to gurgle, but could not enunciate any words because
the soldier held his tongue extended from his mouth. Hasan wound the nylon line tightly around the roots of his tongue, knotted
the line, and cut off the loose ends with a knife. Hasan nodded to the soldier to release the man’s tongue. This done, the
man on the table began to
talk desperately, but only one word in ten was understandable. Hasan covered each of the man’s nostrils carefully with a Band-Aid.
His tongue swelled slowly and still fewer of his words made sense. Hasan placed another upright chair next to that of the
engineer’s and sat beside him to watch the man on the table, whose tongue was now bluish purple and filling his entire open
mouth.

“I’ll go back to work,” the engineer suddenly offered. “Let him go.”

“It took you long enough to make the offer,” Hasan observed.

“Because it’s sincere. Let him go before it’s too late. I promise. I’ll work.”

“We will consider your case,” Ahmed said judicially, turning the tables on him by treating the engineer’s bargaining as if
it were a plea for mercy for himself.

The president then lapsed into silence and stared stonily at the man choking on the table. As his tongue swelled more and
almost completely blocked the airflow through his mouth, the man tried vainly to snort off the Band-Aids sealing his nostrils.
He struggled wildly against his bonds, but they were secure. He quieted down and tried to wheeze air into his throat and lungs
around his swollen tongue. His eyes were popping. His head turned to one side and he gave the engineer a desperate, pleading
look.

The engineer struggled against his own bonds in the upright chair. “What can I do to save him?” he begged Ahmed, next to him.

The president ignored him.

The man on the table choked, gasped, struggled, coughed and shuddered. The engineer looked away.
Hasan gazed straight at the man until his last movement ceased and he lay staring from protruding eyes up at the ceiling,
his large purple tongue bloated in his mouth.

Hasan stood and cut loose the engineer. He spoke to the officer: “Have him wheel this punished traitor to all the cells where
there are technicians and scientists. He may describe what has happened in any words he pleases.”

The officer nodded to the privates, and they jostled the engineer toward the table. They followed him as he trundled the table
out the doorway.

Ahmed Hasan had a final word with the officer after they left. “Make sure he pushes the table himself and tells what happened
to everyone. When he’s finished, give him a week in solitary confinement and then ask him if he wants to work. If he does,
free him. If he doesn’t, shoot him.”

The officer saluted and left.

“No one can work in a vacuum,” Richard Dartley muttered aloud to himself as he walked along the corridor of a modern office
building in Cairo’s New City. He had told Omar Zekri that Pritchett at the American Embassy worked for him, which should take
a rise out of the CIA man. Dartley did not worry about being harassed by the CIA in Cairo—they had more than enough on their
hands already, from what he had heard, in trying to deal with Ahmed Hasan’s administration. He didn’t expect to learn anything
more from Zekri himself or anyone he produced as an “informant,” now that Zekir had time to consult and organize. Yet, for
better or worse, the Egyptian and the embassy CIA man were his only contacts in Egypt—his only escape from the vacuum—not
counting the man he was on his way to see in the office building. He found a frosted glass door with a legend, beneath Arabic
script, in English:
NILE VALLEY ENTERPRISES.

There was no one at the receptionist’s desk inside the office. Dartley caught sight of a man through an open doorway. He was
sitting at a desk, bent down in intense concentration over something in his hands. Dartley stepped quietly in and looked.
The man was fixing a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, snapped across the bridge. When he heard Dartley, he picked up one half
of the spectacles and held the lens over one eye like a monocle.

“Who are you?” he asked in English. He was dark-skinned, chubby, not at all apprehensive.

“Mr. Yahya Waheed?”

The chubby Egyptian scrutinized him through the lens and nodded.

“Herbert Malleson in Washington, D.C., told you I would be coming.”

Waheed smiled and waved to a chair. “Yes, he did. Make yourself comfortable and I will be with you in a minute.” He spoke
English with a noticeable American accent, but said nothing more as he went back to fixing his spectacles with a small tube
of super glue.

Dartley watched him work in the manner of a very nearsighted person, with the broken rims and tube of glue almost next to
his eyes. Waheed shook his right hand. He shook it again, then tried to separate his second and third fingers.

“Bonded,” he said. He picked up the tube and read, “‘Warning: Bonds skin instantly. Contains cyanoacrylate ester. Avoid contact
with skin and eyes. If eye or mouth contact occurs, hold eyelid or mouth open and flush with water only and
GET MEDICAL ATTENTION.
If finger bonding occurs, apply solvent.’” He put the glue down thoughtfully and tried to
separate his fingers again, without success. “I don’t have any solvent.”

Dartley fixed the spectacle frames with the glue. Waheed put them on and walked agitatedly around the office, looking at his
bonded fingers. Dartley observed him. If it had been anyone but Malleson who had put him onto this arms dealer, he would have
left there and then and taken his chances on a street purchase. But Malleson had never steered him wrong. Yet… Dartley put
a lot of importance on the source of his weapons. A dependable source was essential to the success of a mission, and at the
same time it represented one of its greatest security risks. It was often through the arms dealer that work leaked about an
upcoming operation.