Star of Egypt (8 page)

“But, Ham—I’m already committed to protect the President during this thing. And we both know the limits of that commitment,
so the best I can do is try to get Haman before he gets me.” His voice was deadly and neutral. Winship did not have to be
told the side-effects of the game, but Slayton felt the urge to lay them out in detail.

“And if Haman gets me, I think we can both give up on the President.”

Winship puffed thoughtfully on his pipe, meeting Slayton’s eyes directly only for a second as he spoke.

“I should have better faith in the men I would assign to replace you,” he said. “But I think you’re right, though I’ll call
you a liar if you were to tell anyone else.”

“Anything else on Haman,” asked Slayton, slightly embarrassed and returning to business.

“The international computers don’t take any more time than the domestic ones. All are damn short on details, except for descriptions
of the raids Haman participated in; assassinations, torture, murder… and of course, lists of the dead. Which is why you have
to watch your step, Ben.” Rarely did Winship use Slayton’s first name in this fashion.

“Haman is particularly ruthless in the matter of retribution. He once uncovered a spy in his own group, a plant from a French
group of corporations he was in charge of blackmailing. He promptly delivered a personal demand for twice the amount he had
tried to extort previously—a demand that went directly to each company head, accompanied by a piece of the dead agent. His
hands, his ears, his testicles… there were quite a few executives.” He let the implications hover in the space between himself
and Slayton. “They paid.”

“So if Haman places my handsome face, I can say hello to the meat grinder. Except for one thing: I don’t really think Haman
placing me would be allowed to leak unless Haman wanted me to know he knew me.”

“I don’t follow.”

“He’s throwing the gauntlet down, daring me to stop him. Of course we could cancel the tour, lock the President in a bank
vault somewhere. But to Haman that’s a chicken-hearted response. Fear is what allows him to operate freely. Cancelling the
tour would in itself be a propaganda victory of sorts. If we
don’t
panic, and accept the challenge, we have a better chance of getting him.”

Winship’s expression rearranged into horror at the prospect of setting up the President of the United States, which is what
Slayton seemed to be getting at.

“Wait, sir, wait. Now—Haman loves to be the victor, not just to do a job you could hire any thug for. It’s his style. It’s
why his attacks are flamboyant and successful. He prefers hunting a cougar with a bowie knife and winning, rather than insuring
his win by shooting carp in a beer barrel, if you follow my analogy.”

The expression subdued itself, just slightly.

“If you’ll pardon me, sir, I think Haman knows that I am about as proficient as he is. It’s a dare. Or rather, a wager—the
winner gets the President.”

“Jesus H. Christ on a
crutch
, Slayton!” Winship had absently gathered the papers into a neat stack on the desk, hinting that the exchange was finished
on a factual level. “Your duty is to protect the President at any cost, not to trifle with his life to even some obscure,
stupid score!”

“Exactly, sir. And I think a moment ago I mentioned that I understood the depth of that commitment. Trust me.”

Winship. snorted, calmed down a bit by now. Slayton made for the office door, turning for a parting shot.

“And you’ll see me after this, sir, and I’ll still be in one functional piece.” The door hissed shut with a thump.

The dour expression had become resigned. “I hope so, Benjamin,” the man behind the desk said. “Sincerely.”

Slayton spent a while with a pot of coffee and the stack of documentation, soaking up specifics on Rashid Haman’s diverse
inventory of atrocities. It was entirely possible that, despite the events of the last two days, Slayton had had no direct
contact with the terrorist.

He would have operatives waiting in the United States, people who would follow his orders—providing one of the best ways to
execute hits and gimmicks. Fly them in, and if they live through the gimmick, fly them out. But don’t pick them off the local
trees. The British authorities had wasted months after the gimmick that bumped off a pair of Cabinet members, rounding up
and grilling locals, when Haman had shipped in one of his star students, a Japanese now supervising terrorist phalanges in
his home country. While the British were convicting a couple of wackos who happened to have antigovernment diaries, the Oriental
was enjoying a drink on the plane home. Now, like Haman, this man also farmed out work for money whenever he needed folding
cash.

Which brought up another ugly point, which became even more apparent as Slayton delved into the new dossiers: Haman was no
patriot. He needed a formidable cash-flow to maintain his nonprofile, to hide, to set up and execute gimmicks. Often, officials
had to be bribed on an international basis, and that required lots of money. Thus, it was entirely likely that Haman’s choice
of America had a twofold motivation. Not only was somebody paying him to set up the President and embarrass the government
in front of the Egyptians, but somebody else was forking over for his services as a teacher of home-grown guerillas. Plus,
Slayton’s subconscious nagged, there are probably four or five other reasons you haven’t thought of yet.

The Seth-Olet tour was setting up in Washington, D.C., and the head count among the crew and supervisors remained constant.
If Haman was there, he had not disappeared on the docks.

Of course, he would know the government could identify the work of Rashid Haman, and that would make it necessary to leave
the country as soon as possible. To Haman, the best way to vanish from a country was to stay inside its borders. You either
escaped within seconds, or stayed around to watch the guys with the diaries get grilled on national television. Either way,
you did not get caught, and that was the basis of the bigger game.

Slayton did not make a habit of smoking, but he wanted a cigarette now. He needed some philosophical smoke drifting around
him.

Terrorists had no ideals; they played both sides of political shortcomings against the middle, usually killing the innocent
in the interest of point-making for people or systems they would just as easily turn on, killing for whoever would pay the
asking price. Politicians fought wars, killing the innocent to perpetuate the international shell game. Revolutionaries and
anarchists killed the innocent for causes. Deaths were totalled in different coinage, but the result was still death. Haman
specialized in death, in spreading the madness, and it was Haman and people like him who had brought the United States to
the brink of the same type of urban terrorism that now determined railway schedules in Ireland, or curfews in Jordan.

He pushed back from the desk. The records room was too well-lit, like a classroom, conducive to reading but not to thinking.

He glanced at his watch, a Seiko which he had retained, sweep hands and all, throughout the craze for electronic digitals.
It was midnight, and it was time to contact Wilma, to see if she had come up with anything on the histories of the tour people.

Slayton stepped out of the building.

“I’ve got an absolute ream of notes,” Wilma told him over the phone. “I’d rather pass ’em to you under a table than read the
entire novel over the telephone.”

“Done and done,” said Slayton, and they arranged to meet at Wilma’s apartment.

Driving, Slayton felt a residual twinge of anxiety. He was certain he was not being followed, yet, if Rashid Haman was on
his tail—as his paranoia did not insist, but
suggested
, with its sly, used-car dealer’s grin—it would be idiotic to endanger anyone else, let alone anyone close.

Somehow Slayton felt he would live through the night. He also knew, as did Wilma from the moment she picked up the phone,
that it would be impossible to merely scoop up the folder-full of her painstaking amateur detective work and breeze out of
the apartment. The idea that he might get murdered had nothing to do with terrorists.

She met him with a glass of wine, and his fears were confirmed. But first, she insisted, “I have to tell you about the Egyptological
swap meet that’s coming to our fair town.” Slayton smiled pleasantly, and braced himself for a dunning repetition of facts
he had known for some two days.

“It seems that the barge that brought these priceless artifacts to our shores—it’s called the
Star of Egypt
, fittingly enough—may also have unloaded a second cargo of god-knows-what.”

“What?”

“Take a look,” she said, trotting to the sofa with a manila folder of 8×10 glossies. She dropped it in his lap. The positives
were heavily grainy.

“Are these blowups?” said Slayton.

“Yeah. Unfortunately I had to use my James Bond camera.” It was the way she referred to her 16-mm subminiature Minolta. She
saw him squinting, and leaned closer, pointing. “The men unloading the boxes are Americans. The trucks—there were two—checked
out as rentals out of Albany, New York.”

“Where is this?”

“Okay, only orientation I could get was against the boat. Ship, I mean. Here.” She pointed out several shots that emphasized
a warehouse door, a garage-sized affair set into a cul-de-sac beyond the rear portion of the
Star of-Egypt
. Beyond that, Slayton could make out, in fuzzy relief, what had to be the cordoned-off section of the docks where the Seth-Olet
tour had unloaded.

He felt like smacking his head. Right next door!

“What do those boxes tell you, Ben?”

He saw no point in lying. “They look to me like grenade crates, crates for M-16’s or LAW rockets.” He stopped and looked directly
at Wilma. Her enthusiasm flagged just slightly.

“I know, I know,” she said. “Which brings it into the jurisdiction of not only the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,
but also U.S. Customs, which both translate as Treasury, which translates as you… and do I have to give up my pictures?”

She and Slayton had had this conversation before, in varying degrees of seriousness, throughout their relationship. But he
needed whatever else she had.

“I’d like to take them, but not for the reasons you think. These could help me immensely. So,” he piled them back into the
folder and placed the folder between them, “… let’s skip the part where you deny having duplicates, okay? Otherwise you wouldn’t
bait me by asking if you could keep them.”

“Rats,” she said. “You rise so eagerly to the offered carrot, you know, and sometimes it’s fun to watch. I knew I was onto
something.” But she did not yet feel the piercing sense of urgency that Slayton was contending with. “They’re yours,” she
said.

“On one condition,” Slayton finished.

She looked taken aback. “No way. I’ve got several. First board: exclusive story rights if and when.”

That was normal, and Slayton nodded, as usual.

“Second board: I’m not going to stop my investigation just because you’re starting yours.”

“Fair enough.” She would, anyway.

“Third board: you’ve got to tell me what you know about that ship in exchange before I give you what I’ve got on the passengers.
I have a sneaking feeling they’re connected somehow.”

She had watched him react to the photographs, and the reactions to the shots of the dock area were mainly ones of familiarity.
She, too had skipped steps in the conversation. The dazzling blue eyes were all business.

“Alright,” Slayton said simply. “For that I’ll need time, though.”

Wilma had heard that one before, so she said, “Word of honor.”

“Uh-oh, caught again. Okay. I promise, alright?”

“Fine.” She excused herself, presumably to dash to the bathroom.

He returned his attention to the pictures. Perhaps there had been a door, or egress of some kind, behind the junked machinery.
It would surely provide for the quick escape of the assailant he never had gotten the chance to identify. What if Seth-Olet
crates had been removed from one part of the warehouse to an adjacent section, all the time men were loading and unloading?

It made elementary sense, if one could see past the fact there were some thirty workers and guards in the Seth-Olet section,
none of whom were asleep. Seth-Olet boxes could be taken next door, broken down, and trucked away while everyone’s attention
was on the safety of the artifacts.

Shauna Ramsey had noticed tampering with some of the crates, and consulted him.

He grimaced into the maddeningly fuzzy photographs. Somewhere in there were the faces of Rashid Haman’s domestic army, his
trainees. Still, it was an unexpected windfall of sorts. More verification he did not need, after this.

Wilma reappeared, wrapped in a trench coat. “Tell me, Mr. Slayton, would the image you see before you pass muster as, shall
we say, an unobtrusive spy-sorta person, someone who could blend into the scenery and operate unnoticed, like, for example,
a Treasury agent?”

“Have you filled out an application?” he said, deadpan.

“No. But I have excellent references.”

“Unfortunately, tops on our list of qualifications is
not
the question,
do you have your own trenchcoat?
”

“Darn.”

“Do you have any more conditions?” he asked, indicating the folder beside him on the couch.

“One more.” She nodded soberly.

“I’m waiting,” he said.

“Do you really think I wouldn’t make a good secret agent?”

“Secret agent, I don’t know. Treasury agents don’t wear secret agent trenchcoats, though.”

“I know
tae-kwondo
. I can shoot.”

“I know.”

“I have a spy camera. I’ve seen all the James Bond movies.” she added, mock-desperately. “Twice.”

Slayton folded his arms, administratively silent.

“Guess I ain’t cut out for the life. huh?”

Slayton struggled to look like Winship in one of his gruff, bureaucratic moods. He cleared his throat importantly and nodded.