Omar Bin Al-Wafa wanted out.
To be transferred to another assignment, to be relieved of his duties, even to be sent home in disgrace. It did not matter anymore. He was old, he had served his masters well, and enough was enough. He well understood that the role he played was a living lie, but even his duplicity had its limits. His last encounter with Martina Klump had shaken him to his core, for he sensed that he was being used to set her up for a fall, and he would not be able to face a mirror if they turned him into a murderer of courageous children.
The tip of his cane clicked on the icy sidewalk as he descended with care along the last appendage of Forty-second Street between First Avenue and the FDR drive. His spectacles were coated by the fog of his own breath, and the tufts of white hair beneath his black beret completed the impression of an eccentric French tourist whose senility had led him to an area not meant for strolling septuagenarians.
He appeared to be an inviting target, yet his dark mood had raised his blood pressure and sharpened his reflexes.
He turned the corner down by the Robert Moses Playground, its high wire fences and empty courts black beneath a moonless night. The homeless under the causeway had not even made a fire, too cold to come out from their shelters of cardboard boxes and plastic sheets. He was alone, with the exception of the pair of ridged rubber soles he heard tiptoeing carefully behind him. Cars were darting intermittently along the drive, but Omar knew that in this satanic city they would not stop to help even if a killer was strangling a naked toddler.
Omar suddenly halted. Then he turned and faced his attacker squarely. The junkie also stopped, just five feet away, smiling through a short beard. He was very large and wore a woolen watch cap, some sort of worn field jacket, torn blue jeans, and combat boots. Omar lifted the walking stick and shifted it to his left hand, gripping it at the middle of the shaft.
The junkie was amused by the old man’s defensive posture, but did not much feel like getting rapped on the skull by the cane’s ivory pommel. He pulled out a six-inch switchblade, held it near his leg, and pushed the button. The blade clanged as it flipped down and gleamed.
“I’m twice your size and half your age, grandpa,” he whispered. “So just give me the cash and we’ll skip the fucking dance.”
Omar reached over with his right hand, gripped the cane head, twisted, and pulled. And then he was holding a very long, tempered steel sword as he dropped his little body into a fencer’s stance.
“En garde,” he said, in an alarmingly controlled tone.
The junkie instinctively leaped backward, landing in an awkward crouch that sent a flush of rage to his face. He raised the knife to eye level.
“Okay,” he snarled. “I can dig it.”
Yet before he could make his first probing lunge, Omar extended the sword, and a web of bright-blue lightning, accompanied by a wicked crackle, arced across the concealed prongs near the point of the blade.
The junkie froze. Oh, shit, he thought. Not this again. Just a week ago a young woman had stunned him with one of those fifty-thousand volt pocket zappers. One second he was reaching for her necklace, and the next thing he knew, he was sprawled on the sidewalk in a puddle of his own urine.
Omar suddenly yelled like an enraged baboon and lunged forward, driving the flashing épée toward the junkie’s throat. But the young man was already sprinting away, and he disappeared through a white cloud of his own breath.
Omar stood still for a full minute, watching the streams from his lungs curl through the air, the fading footfalls of his assailant echoing in his brittle ears. He nodded to himself, and had he not been overburdened by his broodings, a smile of satisfaction might have spread his frozen mustache. He had not had a physical confrontation like this in perhaps twenty years, and he was pleased to discover that his hands were still steady. He inserted the blade into the wooden scabbard and slammed it home with a flourish.
He looked up at the sky, the low ceiling of midnight clouds hued amber by the lights of a city that never rested. For a moment, he closed his eyes and replaced the bitter wind from the black river with the warm breezes of a khamsin skipping off the Sea of Galilee. He did not care for the cold, but he could endure it, as he had done in many winter capitals of the world. For always in his mind was the promise of the Middle Eastern climate, waiting to embrace his bones at the end of every journey.
“And I will again return there soon,” he whispered. “But not as a Judas.”
At that moment, warmth arrived in a form more immediate and practical. A dark-blue Lincoln Continental slid down the street alongside the United Nations compound. It turned the corner, its brights flashed once, and Omar stepped forward. The rear door opened, and he slipped inside.
“Lailtak sa’idi.” A voice bade him good evening from the darkened corner of the compartment. “Kif halak?” It asked after his welfare in a Farsi-accented Syrian dialect.
“Ilham’ dilla mashruh. Thank Allah, well,” Omar answered as he settled back into the leather cushion.
“Shai?” A hand extended a glass of dark tea, and Omar understood why the interior of the limousine seemed bathed in a low fog. Yet he declined the refreshment.
Omar’s host leaned forward, his face appearing in the dim light from a door panel. Ali-Hamza Asawi had soft and unlined features, short black hair, and a narrow jaw covered by a manicured beard. Although his vision was perfect, he often wore plain metal spectacles to further enhance the academic appearance he cultivated. His black wool three-piece suit was typical of Iranian diplomats, a white, collarless shirt was buttoned at his throat, and the only bow to Western decadence was a taupe cashmere scarf draped around his neck.
Asawi’s diplomatic cover was as a press attaché and assistant to Mohammed Ayatollahi, Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency. He held full credentials as a professor of journalism from the Sharif University in Tehran, and he actually lectured there on occasion, but his tenure had little to do with higher learning.
Ali-Hamza Asawi was chief of psychological and counterintelligence operations for the Western Hemisphere division of SAVAMA, the Iranian Revolutionary Secret Police. After the fall of the Shah, SAVAMA had been quickly organized to replace the SAVAK, whose American- and Israeli-trained agents had all been executed or exiled. The new intelligence organization could now hardly be distinguished from the old, even surpassing it in fanaticism and cruelty, although its political bent was the polar opposite of its predecessor’s.
Although just forty-two years old, Asawi had risen rapidly to one of the most powerful posts in SAVAMA. AS an infantry captain in 1979, he had virtually no intelligence background when he volunteered for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fledgling secret police, which was sorely lacking in trainers and advisers. Asawi proposed a simple plan, rapidly approved. He imprisoned the former head of SAVAK’s PsyOps and Counter-Intel program for a full year, promising a pardon and redemption before God if the agent would reveal the secrets of his trade.
He spent nearly every day of twelve months with his former enemy, culling the arcane arts of false flag operations, populace subversion, disinformation, communication interceptions, and technical acquisitions forbidden by international law. When the interrogation was finally completed to his satisfaction, he thanked his “mentor” and had him executed in a public hanging.
For the past few years, Asawi had appeared to be engaged in an effort to support Mohammed Ayatollahi’s contention that Iran had the same right as any other nation to improve its lot through technological advancement. The small research reactor at Sharif was, he insisted, nothing more than that. And even though Iran’s enormous oil supply could keep its lights aglow for a thousand years, who but Allah could say that she did not deserve the benefits of peaceful nuclear power?
However, Asawi’s talents lay in deception rather than scientific enlightenment. He flooded the U.S. Department of Commerce with requests for purchase approvals: an ES/9000 computer from IBM, circuit boards from Textronix, timing devices from Rockwell. And while he kept FBI, Treasury, and Customs agents busy battling with industrial lobbyists on Capitol Hill, he sent his agents out to acquire vacuum pumps and balancing machines from Leybold and Schenck in Germany, supermagnets from Thyssen, beryllium from Semipolotinsk, and M-9 missiles from North Korea.
A few American components did make it through to Sharif. And thanks to the lack of oversights, many crucial European items were shipped to Ispahan, the sealed Iranian city of mosques and minarets, where the efforts to create a nuclear weapons capability were in full swing. But at this rate, Asawi and his masters knew that they would enter the next century without seeing a mushroom cloud blossom over the sands of Dasht-e-Lut.
Asawi finished his tea and replaced the glass in a holder of the limousine’s liquor bar, which held only mineral water, a few bottles of Snapple, and a brass finjon sitting in an electric warmer.
“Be on your vey,” he instructed the driver, in an accent that often caused Americans to mistake him for an Indian. There was no partition between the compartments, but he felt secure that the black chauffeur would not comprehend a Syrian dialect. The car belonged to the Iranian mission and was electronically swept each day. The drivers were switched every week, hired through an American cutout.
The limousine made a right turn onto Forty-first Street and headed west into midtown. Omar did not bother to inquire about its destination, for he had accompanied Ali-Hamza Asawi on a hundred seemingly aimless meanderings. He had strolled with Asawi through the streets of Paris and nearly frozen with him on a chairlift in the Alps. Once, they even hired horses in the south of Spain and trotted off onto the beaches near Málaga to be assured of distance from prying ears. In fact, Omar realized that in all the years he had been working for SAVAMA, he had never once met Asawi in any building that remotely suggested the People’s Revolutionary Government of Iran, or in any office that was more than a transitory cubicle rented by his control for the occasion.
Omar had arrived in Tehran in 1968, when thousands of disenfranchised Palestinian Arabs had sought refuge throughout the Middle East, hoping that their exile would be temporary. Being of partial Iranian descent, he had felt comfortable with the people and their culture, although his birthright was not forgotten as he became a street policeman, rose to the rank of detective sergeant, and gained a professional reputation regarded as apolitical by Iran’s new mullahs. His fervor for the Palestinian cause put him in good favor with the revolutionary government, and although he was about to retire, a recruiter for Asawi swept him up. At the time, one did not refuse an offer to aid in the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam.
On the whole, Omar was grateful to be active at an age when most men resigned themselves to sheshbesh games on street corners. Ali-Hamza Asawi had always treated him with respect, and he had never asked Omar to undertake a mission that might conflict with his Palestinian nationalism. Yet now Omar’s conscience was overpowering his need to feel useful.
Still, it would not be easy to resign. Although he had become a full-fledged Iranian, he and his sons and their children were considered of foreign descent, and his employment in SAVAMA assured them all a great security.
“And so, my friend.” Ali-Hamza Asawi began the debriefing in Arabic. “How is our Mrs. Seafore?” Even though the driver was linguistically “deaf,” Asawi would use no proper monikers.
“She appeared quite shaken by the bombing,” said Omar. He removed his beret and opened his coat. The limousine was comfortably warm, and the lights of passing traffic drifted by the smoked windows like hazy torches in a midnight demonstration.
“Shaken?” Asawi sounded surprised.
“Well, perhaps ‘offended’ would be a more appropriate word.”
“How so?”
“She thinks the incident may somehow interfere with her own mission.”
Asawi smiled. “And so it shall,” he said softly.
Omar turned in his seat so he could see Ali-Hamza’s face. Even though his suspicions were threatening to burst from his mouth, he could not afford to face his control with false accusations. He rested his walking stick on the upholstery and patted it with his hand.
“By the way, Ali-Hamza,” he said. “This article came in very handy tonight. I was nearly mugged.”
“Really?”
“Just before you arrived.”
“Good!” Asawi was truly pleased. “Now perhaps my men will understand why I do not give them aftershave as going-away presents for missions to New York. I have your permission to relay the story?” the Iranian asked.
“Khadamtak sharaf. To serve you is an honor.” Omar smiled, and then he quickly switched subjects. “But tell me, Ali-Hamza. Don’t you think that the Israelis might actually suspect Mrs. Seafore of involvement?”
The pleasure remained in Asawi’s eyes. “Perhaps.”
“But she was not involved.” It emerged from Omar as an unconvinced statement.
“No.”
“Yet the attack does have the earmarks of one of her efforts.”
“If I have done my job properly,” said Asawi without further elaboration.
That was it, then. Martina’s instincts had been on the mark, her anger justifiable. She suspected that her employers were funneling her into a trap, while Omar had denied it in his naïveté, an unwitting buffoon. He gathered his courage.
“Ali-Hamza,” Omar said as he stared straight ahead. “I wish to be relieved of this assignment.”
Asawi hardly raised an eyebrow. He was not surprised, for Omar Bin Al-Wafa was essentially a kindly man with a sense of justice. For this reason, he was rarely privy to the purpose, or the impact, of an assignment. “Is your conscience troubling you, Omar?”
“I do not wish to be the instrument of this young woman’s destruction,” Omar declared.
“She is not a woman,” Asawi said. “She is a weapon, and she is well paid to be utilized as we see fit.”
“I do not wish to participate in this,” Omar insisted.
“Then we will discuss your termination after I have properly debriefed you.”
The implication was not lost on Omar, and he settled back with a sigh. Ali-Hamza was correct; one did not withdraw from a running mission, no matter one’s distaste. But if Omar were to be forced to continue, at the very least he wished to understand. He was used to Asawi’s elaborate manipulations, but this one genuinely confused him. Martina had not perpetrated the bombing, but Asawi had placed her signature upon it. To what end?
“So, Omar,” Asawi continued, “did you sense in your meeting that our lovely lady might guess the true nature of your representation?”
“Not at all.”
“She believes that your motives are pure? That your background is genuine?”
“It is genuine. As is my accent—not that she could really discern such subtleties.”
“Why not?”
“A few years in Lebanon do not turn a German into an Arabic scholar.” Omar shifted in his seat. Ali-Hamza’s debriefing had taken on the annoying grate of interrogation.
“And she did not make further inquiries as to the identities of your ‘employers’?”
“She is believing what she wants to believe.” Omar’s voice rose a bit. “That I am a Palestinian, and a representative of one of the Rejection Front leaders.”
“But you are a Palestinian,” Asawi said with a certain disdainful authority.
“And you are a Persian,” Omar shot back, and the driver looked up into his rearview mirror. “But first we are Moslems, faithful only to Allah—”
Omar stopped himself. Ali-Hamza was regarding him with a thin smile. The Iranian raised a finger and wagged it at him. “Got you again, Omar Bin Al-Wafa.”
Omar slumped back into the seat, embarrassed. “My age is making me brittle,” he sighed.
“We are never too old to learn. Your emotions linger too close to the surface,” Asawi gloated. “But I am sure that as a detective you also addled the brains of a few prisoners.”
“Do you think of me as a prisoner?”
“Don’t be foolish,” Asawi snorted, though in fact he viewed the old man as exactly that, a hostage to SAVAMA’s wishes and commands. They were both fully aware that the status of Omar’s family depended on the merits of his service. “Now, give me the details of the good lady’s plans.”
The limousine turned right on Sixth Avenue and moved slowly north as Omar recited verbatim the list that Martina had shown him. When he got to the sentence that summarized her action plan, Asawi leaned forward as if he had not heard.
“Repeat that,” he said.
“She intends to acquire a prototype man-carried antiship weapon for use against the prisoner exchange.”
“A ‘prototype’ weapon?” Asawi was squinting now at the floor.
“A sort of minitorpedo.”
“A minitorpedo,” the Iranian enunciated carefully. “And how does she intend to ‘acquire’ this device?”
“She is going to hijack it.”
“From where?”
“From a U.S. naval facility. Somewhere in Europe, I believe.”
Now Asawi began to laugh. He placed his hands on his knees, sat back into the corner of the seat, and actually shook with laughter.
“This is no joke, Ali-Hamza,” said Omar.
“It is absolutely ridiculous,” Asawi managed.
“I assure you that she is a driven woman. She has planned every detail and is fiercely determined to make it work. And from what I could see, Yadd Allah will do her bidding. Like panting dogs they will.”
“Yadd Allah,” Asawi sniffed.
“And there was one other thing,” Omar continued, wanting to be relieved of the pressure of accountability because he could never write anything down. “Her budget. It appeared that there would be funds to spare, but Mrs. Seafore hinted that she had needs of a personal nature. In the event of her death, she said.”
Asawi nodded. He was silent for a while, and he twisted open a bottle of Snapple, poured himself a glass of the berry-colored liquid, and sipped as he pondered.
“Are you aware, Omar,” he said at last, “that our lady friend has a mother?”
“All of Allah’s servants have mothers,” Omar replied, knowing that he would soon be lost again in the labyrinth of Ali-Hamza’s mind.
“Yes, my friend. But her mother is alive and well. And living here in New York.”
The revelation stunned Omar. Intelligence operatives who worked at the “sharp end” of the business—contract agents, wet-work specialists, terrorists for hire—were extremely wary of exposing their loved ones to their professional associates. The irony of employment in intelligence—and this phenomenon was common worldwide—was that as soon as an agent demonstrated blind commitment by perpetrating extreme acts, he or she instantly became a liability. Family or friends could be used as leverage tactics. In Martina Klump’s case, Omar had come to think of her as an unnatural phenomenon, a being without origins who had somehow emerged from the political miasma of the extreme left. To him, she was like Macbeth’s executioner: not of woman born.
“How do you know this?” he asked, although the question sounded childishly naive even as it left his lips.
“My friend,” said Asawi, “we would hardly have you employ such a dangerous asset without first having a considerable file on her. She may not have become an ‘Arabic scholar,’ as you put it, in Lebanon. However, during those years she certainly exposed a great deal of herself to our associates.”
Ali-Hamza always referred to the members of the Party of God as his “associates.” There was a tone of disdain there, as if Hizbollah’s peculiar brand of religious zealotry was an anomaly to the cosmopolitan SAVAMA officer. Omar had the impression that Ali-Hamza used Hizbollah for his own ends, while remaining aloof from their political aspirations.
Hizbollah was, after all, the creation of a team of Iranian Revolutionary Guards who had been sent to Lebanon under the direction of SAVAMA in 1982. The present Hizbollah negotiator for the upcoming prisoner exchange, Sheik Tafilli, reported directly to Sa’id Abbas Mussawi, operational commander of the organization. Mussawi in turn reported to Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual father of the movement. And while Fadlallah claimed complete independence, he accepted “suggestions” from Mohammed Javad Larijani, the Iranian presidential adviser on intelligence affairs.
If SAVAMA required that Hizbollah should undertake a particular task—even something so distasteful as surrendering Israeli captain Dan Sarel in an exchange—Ali-Hamza Asawi’s position gave him the power to actually issue directives to Fadlallah through Larijani.
“Yes, of course,” said Omar. Still, the knowledge of Martina’s mother’s whereabouts was not a piece of information he cherished. He wondered how the German woman would react if she thought her mother’s name was being invoked in an operational discussion. The speculation did not comfort him.
“And a mother’s love is a powerful thing,” Asawi added.
“Yes,” said Omar. But not powerful enough to keep her sons from slaughter. He was thinking of the one million Iranian men who had been sacrificed in the bloody confrontation with Iraq. He was seeing the endless graves that stretched to the horizons of Tehran, the sad portraits of the fallen staring out from metal-and-glass frames above the flat stones. He was thinking of his own niece, a broken woman left with icons instead of sons.
Asawi reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and extracted a small leather-bound notepad. As he printed something carefully with a Mont Blanc, he asked, “Her list suggested that her operation would take place in Europe?”
“So it seemed.”
“Then it will occur on American soil,” he concluded confidently. And he issued his next directive to Omar. “This is what I would like you to do. Make contact with our infamous debutante and inform her that your Palestinian masters believe her plan to be foolish.”
Omar waited for the rest of it, while he thought: Why not ask me to simply smear myself in goat’s blood and go for a swim in a shark pool?
“Tell her,” Asawi continued, “that a great deal of money has been invested, her plan will never work, and she should stick to more mundane ideas—such as frogmen and limpet mines.”
“Frogmen and limpet mines,” Omar repeated weakly, like a psychiatric patient under hypnotic suggestion.
“Yes. And when you have done that”—Asawi tore off the small rectangle of blue paper and handed it to Omar—“call the New York Police Department’s hot line. Do not call 911, for you will merely speak to a dispatcher there. Make it one of the publicized numbers—Crime Stoppers, or Cop Shot.” He pointed to the slip of paper now in Omar’s hand. “Give them that name, and that address, and say no more.”
Omar looked down at the note, suddenly feeling his age, just as he had so strongly felt his youth not twenty minutes earlier. He was being instructed to first insult an unpredictable contract agent and then expose her vulnerabilities to the enemy. Now was the time to reiterate his refusal of this mission. Yet even though he was not so concerned for himself at this stage of his life, he also held the lives of his family in his hands.
“With all due respect, Ali-Hamza,” Omar said quietly, “such pressure is likely to make her crazy.”
“Precisely,” Asawi quickly replied. “And if the Israelis believe that she was instrumental in the bombing—and with this small but generous clue you shall provide, that is a conclusion they must draw—they will pursue her with typically vengeful enthusiasm.”
Omar removed his spectacles, closed his eyes, and rested his head on the seat back. He had worked for Ali-Hamza Asawi for a long time, and he had never been bold enough to ask for the whole picture. However, this time he wanted to comprehend, for the sake of his own motivation. He had to understand why the Iranians had first arranged for the prisoner exchange, then set in motion a plot to destroy it, and were now applying pressure to their own proxy!
“I apologize,” Omar sighed. “I am a bit tired.” He paused. “I know, Ali-Hamza, that it is not my place . . .”
“But you wish to understand.”
“Yes. I confess that for once I do.”
“You are correct. It is not your place.”
Omar opened his eyes, turned his head, and smiled weakly at Asawi.
Asawi returned the smile. “I sympathize. Blind obedience is for the very young, but you cannot know everything, my friend.”
“Of course not.” Omar replaced his spectacles, and Asawi, seeing that the old man had once again embraced compartmentalization, decided to risk some generosity.
“This much I can tell you. We care very little for the return of Hizbollah’s Sheik Sa’id, and certainly less for an Israeli commando.”
“Yes.” Omar listened carefully.
“That prisoner exchange is nothing more than cover. A way to distract the efforts of Israeli intelligence. Do you follow?”
“Thus far.”
“Good. Now furthermore, if there is someone who is trying to thwart the exchange, the Jews will redouble their efforts to protect it. They will be forced temporarily to refocus their intelligence resources, redesignate manpower. Hopefully, for a time, they will neglect other areas.”
“Yes, that makes sense.” And suddenly Omar did comprehend. For a moment, he had forgotten that Ali-Hamza’s talents lay in deception. No part of Omar’s assignments was ever directly related to the primary mission, whatever that might be.
“And finally,” Asawi explained in a light crescendo of self-satisfaction, “one selects a delegate—in this case our honorable Mrs. Seafore—who is difficult to dissuade once set upon her course. If we then place obstacles in her path, her determination will increase, making our true mission that much easier to execute.”
“Mashallah.” Omar held up one of his small hands. The word meant “Bravo,” but it was not said facetiously. “I understand. It was stupid of me . . .”
“Don’t apologize.” Asawi waved a hand. “And have no fear. I would not have told you more.”
“I have no need to know.”
“And you will carry out these next small tasks?”
“With skill, I assure you.”
“Allah reward you for me.”
The briefing was over, and the two men settled into a comfortable silence.
The limousine had passed Times Square and was weaving through the theater district. Awasi told the driver to enter a parking garage on West Forty-seventh Street and drive through it to the next block. He was accustomed to being followed by American counterintelligence watchers, and any car that mimicked this act would be easy to spot.
The Lincoln drove north once again, and Omar could not help wondering as to the nature of a mission so significant that it required a red herring of global proportions to mask it. The car had grown very warm inside, and he opened his window for a few breaths of air. They passed a construction site protected by a long fence of plywood slabs, the boards covered with posters by the ghostly paste-wielders that one never actually saw. The Angelika 57 theater was hosting a retrospective of American features from the early cold war era, and a bold title against a background of red cloud flashed over and over again.
Atomic Café . . . Atomic Café . . . Atomic Café . . .
Omar closed the window.
For most of the last decade, SAVAMA’s efforts had been concentrated on two primary missions: fomenting a Moslem fundamentalist revolution throughout the Levant and acquiring the Bomb. Omar had surmised that many of Ali-Hamza’s missions involved the acquisition of nuclear components. However, Iran had not yet succeeded in its quest to join the international nuclear clique, and SAVAMA was most certainly engaged in tapping an alternate nuclear vein.
Perhaps one of the splintered Soviet republics was finally desperate enough to sell the Iranians a warhead or two? This would certainly fall within Ali-Hamza’s area of operations, as would the concept that such a transaction would have to be masked by another event. Otherwise, the Israelis would pull out all stops to halt the delivery.
Omar was suddenly gripped by a sensation of constriction. He thought of his grandchildren, living under the specter of an Iranian government that was always less than stable and certainly did not need to have nuclear toys at its disposal. But then, he was just an old man doing the will of Allah.
He decided that if his mission was successful, he would have to move his family. Again. Another exile. There were rumors that the Israelis and the PLO were holding secret talks. More than ever now, he found himself hoping for their success.
The car coasted to a stop. Omar looked over at Asawi, who shrugged in slight embarrassment.
“I am sorry, Omar,” he said. “Procedures, you know. We are only a few meters from the main road.” He touched a button, and the electronic door locks popped up. He smiled. “I trust that you will not need your cane again for anything but walking.”
Omar opened his door and stepped out, pulling his beret onto his head as he looked around. Through the black fingers of the trees he could see the white lights of Tavern on the Green. He was in Central Park.
“And Omar,” said Asawi from the black rectangle of the compartment. “I am pleased that I was able to dissuade you from leaving our employ. Auda’ nak. Farewell.”
“Allah yihfazak. God keep you,” Omar replied as he gently closed the door. He straightened up, took his bearings, and began to walk.
Asawi watched the little figure recede toward Central Park West. Then he waved at the driver, and they proceeded in the opposite direction.
He reached for the telephone, dialed a number, and spoke in Farsi.
“Book me on the next flight to Tehran.”
He snapped the cellular into its cradle, opened the cabinet under the bar, and came up with a small flask of Dewar’s. He poured himself half a tumbler, neat, then tuned the radio to a country-and-western station, sat back, crossed his ankles, and sipped.
He did not care to be in New York when Martina Ursula Klump began to vent her rage.