The Old Boys (22 page)

“How could he be sure?”

“He couldn’t be sure. But he knew Bücher by sight and behavior. Lots of people did in the old days, before Ibn Awad was allegedly assassinated. At that point, Bücher disappeared. But before that, he was a man about town. There was nothing secret about Bücher’s position in Ibn Awad’s household.”

Tea arrived on a tray carried by a fair-haired young waitress. Ben engaged her in conversation and in a matter of minutes was in possession of her entire curriculum vitae. She may have begun by thinking that she was talking to a nice old gentleman, but after the first five sentences Ben’s age ceased to matter. He was simply a lean and hungry male with an interested look in his eye. Ben had learned much from the bedu, but asceticism was not one of the lessons. He was famous for the spell he cast on women. At cocktail parties I had watched other men’s wives take off their shoes, remove their earrings, shake their hair, dance to inaudible music while merely chatting with Ben in a corner of the room.

When the waitress left us, reluctantly, I asked Ben why he thought Ibn Awad was moving his hiding place. He finished eating a buttered scone before replying.

“Because Mubarak was called back to treat Bücher,” Ben said.
“This time he flew to Tehran by commercial jet and was given another ride in the private plane. Then a long helicopter ride. He wound up in an entirely different place from the last time.”

“Also in the desert?”

“Yep. Different landscape altogether, different feel. But the same tents, which included a fully equipped portable hospital. Operating room, all the latest instruments and gadgets. He says it was a U.S. Army field hospital.”

“How would he know that?”

“Maybe he watched
M*A*S*H
. Anyway, that was his opinion.”

“Why did he go back?”

“To report biopsy findings,” Ben said. “The tests confirmed that Bücher had cancer of the pancreas. This is invariably fatal. The patient didn’t accept the diagnosis. They argued in Arabic. This time Bücher told Mubarak who he was. He mentioned his degree from the University of Vienna, the most famous medical school in the world when he was there. He emphasized the fact that he had been personal physician to Ibn Awad for many, many years.”

“Bücher just blurted that out?”

“He wanted professional respect. He wasn’t quite ready to stand before the Judgment seat. He wanted Mubarak to
do
something.”

“Save him.”

“Operate. But Mubarak wasn’t qualified to perform this kind of surgery. Besides, even when it’s successful, which is rarely, it only increases life expectancy by a few months.”

“How long can Bücher live without surgery?”

“With the latest drugs, which are being administered, somewhere between three and six months. He was diagnosed about three weeks ago.”

“What happens now?”

“He already has jaundice and itchy skin that can’t be treated,” Ben said. “Next come pain, sleeplessness, weight loss, deep fatigue, anemia.”

“Amnesia?”

Ben gave me one of his frigid Sherlock Holmes glances, up and down, as if he were the much taller man. What made me think that he would omit such an important detail?

“Not inevitably,” he said. “But of course the pain and fatigue soon reach a point where the victim doesn’t care about remembering anything, or is so drugged that he can’t remember.”

Ben rose to his feet. “Time for a walk,” he said.

We strolled in a freezing mist along the gray beach beside the gray sluggish water of Lough Swilly. We had to shout to be heard over the rain drumming on our hats, the bottled-up sea sloshing in the lough, the moaning wind. We walked on in silence for a mile or so before turning back. Dark was falling and the whitecaps became less visible, then phosphorescent. We reached the path to the hotel. By now it was full dark and Ben and I could not see each other. I could smell him, though—wet tweed, tea and cakes on his breath, shaving soap.

He said, “I suppose you’d like to talk to Bücher before he dies.”

“That would be useful.”

“You can hardly do it yourself,” Ben said. “So the question is, who can, without getting himself killed?”

“Mubarak.”

“The prime candidate, but unapproachable.”

“He doesn’t seem to have all that many scruples about spilling secrets to his grandfather.”

“True, but Mubarak doesn’t know what we need to know, i.e., exactly where Ibn Awad is, exactly where the bombs are.”

“Exactly what we want to ask him.”

“Bücher may not know, either,” Ben said. “There’s no reason why he should. For that matter, especially now that Bücher is dying and is of no medical use, there’s little or no reason why he and Ibn Awad should be in the same place at the same time.”

Ben had always irritated me. “I’m not interested in what Bücher
doesn’t
know,” I said. “I’m interested in what he does know.”

“Then
all we have to do is snatch him from his deathbed or send him someone he trusts,” Ben said. “Someone he wants to confess to.”

Elementary, my dear Watson.

It does focus the mind wonderfully to be the subject of a fatwa. Add to that the vengeful mood of the Russian mob, the homicidal impulses of a couple of Schutzstaffel golden-agers, the cheery ambiguity of Kevin and his Gray Force (if that’s what it was) and the arithmetic of being a frequent flyer in the age of terrorism, and you’ve got yourself an actuarial crossword puzzle. Paranoia was nothing new in my life. You can’t let it get in the way of work or spoil your leisure hours. The trick, as I was told as a trainee by what I then regarded as wise old instructors, is to avoid getting into situations from which there is no escape. Always case the joint before you go in, always sit with your back to the wall, always make sure there’s a back door. A majority of my classmates took this advice to heart and were not much good to themselves or anyone else thereafter. In practice, you have to walk right in and sit right down. Sometimes getting out the back door involves breaking somebody’s neck on a dark stairway.

Actually, if I may lecture for a moment, the trick is to find a way to turn the threat back on the threatener. He has committed himself to an action, so it’s jujitsu time; you use your attacker’s energy to destroy him. This means getting close to the adversary, and that means overcoming the instinct to get as far away from the person who is trying to destroy you as you can, as quickly as you
can. However, in operations the question is not, How do I get myself out of this? It is, What can I do to the other fellow next? One must always be the aggressor, never the defender. Always the joker, never the butt. Always the carefree American boy (think of Kevin) who is never suspected of guile until it’s too late. The odds are never what they seem. Your opponent, taking his three-point stance across the line of scrimmage, might have more hair on his knuckle than you have on your entire body, but you have the inestimable advantage of his belief that you’re going to be no trouble to him merely because you
are
less hairy than he is.

However, theory is one thing, reality another. After saying good night to Ben I lay abed in Donegal, doing what I had done as a cross-country schoolboy runner, as an infantryman, as an operative, as a prisoner of my own government—counting a hundred reluctant footsteps, then another hundred and then another as a way to keep on advancing into an undesirable future. We had collected a lot of information, far more than I had expected, in a relatively short time. Time is supposed to fly for people with gray hair, but it seemed a long, long while since David and Harley and Jack and Ben and I had left Washington. My mind was in the future. Images of Simon Hawk in Manaus, Captain Zhang in Xinjiang, even the fresh recollections of Mikhail in Moscow were already fading in my memory. In fact the Old Boys had been in the field for scarcely a month. Nevertheless we were moving too slowly; we
were
behind schedule. We knew more now than we had known to begin with, but not enough to take action. We were still in a passive state, watching, listening, sniffing the wind. We did not yet know exactly where to go or exactly what to do when we got there. There was nothing unusual about this. Operations develop like the seduction of a woman who knows that she’s worth any amount of trouble—false hopes, faux pas, misunderstandings, rebuffs, zones of silence, long gazes into seemingly candid eyes that will not answer the simplest question. And then, when you have despaired of ever seizing the moment, it arrives.

Although
Ben Childress and Jack Philindros might differ with me on this point, it is not necessary to know everything, to tie up every conceivable loose end, before making the leap. At least we were beginning to sort things out. Choices had emerged. Philindros and Childress had provided excellent leads. Jack had reminded me that the quarry was Ibn Awad and the prize was his bombs. Ben had pointed out that finding Claus Bücher was not the same thing as finding Ibn Awad. But then, neither one of them understood that finding Paul Christopher might be the key to everything. And neither had mentioned something that was obvious to me—that wherever Ibn Awad was, he and the bombs were not necessarily in the same place. If he was moving from one place to another, he could hardly take twelve unshielded nuclear devices with him in his luggage. Finding the bombs without finding Ibn Awad, or vice versa, would be a good outcome, but the only acceptable outcome would be to find both. The bombs without Ibn Awad meant that whoever was guarding them for him would be free to use them as he saw fit. Better the madman you know, etc.

What we wanted was the bombs and Ibn Awad’s head. No apocalypse, no more resurrections. And the way to achieve this— the only way, I truly thought—was to possess something that Ibn Awad wanted with all his twisted heart.

The Amphora Scroll. But how to let him know I had it, even though I did not have it?

After breakfast, the traditional Irish eggs-and-everythingincluding-black-pudding affair, Ben and I went for another walk in the misting rain. On the beach we saw the fresh hoofprints of two galloping horses and before long the horses themselves coming back, riders up, kicking up sand and sending pulses of sound through the porous ground beneath our feet. There was no other sign of life under the pewter sky, not even a gull.

I said, “Tell me, Ben. Do you really think that finding a use for Mubarak is beyond our capabilities?”

“As a witting asset, forget it,” Ben said. “But even if he didn’t
know what was happening to him, the motivation to cooperate would have to be very strong.”

“Like what?”

“Time was when money was always in good taste in that part of the world, but money means nothing to a man like Mubarak. Even if we had enough of it to rent him for awhile, and I assume we don’t.”

“Not enough to compete with Ibn Awad,” I said. “He’d have to be unwitting. The invitation would have to come from someone he trusts.”

“If you mean his grandfather, forget that, too,” Ben said.

“I mean Ibn Awad.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Ibn Awad is going to need a new doctor. It’s possible he’s put out a want ad on the terrorist Internet and Mubarak is the first candidate to be interviewed.”

“That’s creative thinking, all right,” Ben said. “But what good would that do us?”

“Mubarak could put Ibn Awad in our hands.”

“How would we get close enough to induce him to do that?”

“Suppose we had the item that Ibn Awad most wants in the world?”

“A hydrogen bomb?”

“Think smaller.”

“The Amphora Scroll.”

“Bingo.”

He trudged on into the sodden wind, head down, unspeaking. Of course he knew perfectly well what I had in mind. I waited in vain for him to say so. In Lough Swilly a sail appeared, white against sky and water that were the same shade of gray. On the errands of mercy that had cost them their future, the Christophers had sailed the
Mahican
in waters like these and in the same kind of weather.

“What’s needed is a messenger Ibn Awad can believe, like his doctor,” I said. “If Mubarak tells him who has the Amphora Scroll, that should do it.”

Ben
stopped in his tracks. “That’s what I was afraid you were going to suggest,” he said. “Horace, you’re crazy.”

“You don’t think Ibn Awad wants the scroll?”

“He wants your severed head.”

“Not before I tell him what he’s dying to know.”

Ben said, “But you don’t know where the Amphora Scroll is.”

“Then I wouldn’t break down under questioning, would I?”

Ben quickened his pace, leaving me behind. I didn’t try to keep up, though my legs were longer than his and it would have been easy enough to do. This went on for considerably more than a hundred paces. He was thinking, deducing. Ben didn’t like ideas that were not his own. This was a weakness that had preserved him from the inconvenience of senior leadership in the Outfit. The old Outfit’s lifeblood had been a combination of bright young men with freedom of speech and older men who listened to them because they had once been bright young men themselves. Ben had once been a bright young man. The problem was, he had remained a bright young man well into old age. Headstrong. Not a good listener. But a man who loved daring ideas as long as he thought they were his own.