After the inactivity of the day Girling realized he had become careless. ‘Aren’t you taking a risk sitting here, talking to me?’
Lazan reached for a sunflower seed, cracked the shell with his thumb nail and popped the fleshy kernel into his mouth. ‘You know how the Mukhabarat works, Tom Girling. Its problem has always been a lack of imagination. The two bozos in the car have been told to follow you and that is precisely what they have done. When you leave here, they will diligently pursue you to your home, or wherever you decide to spend the night. And then, when they are relieved of their watch, they will go to their beds and sleep like babies, safe in the knowledge they have carried out their orders.’ He smiled softly. ‘But if only they had come in here; how much more Al-Qadi would have learned.’
Lazan clicked his fingers and asked for a beer before turning back to Girling. ‘Don’t worry, my driver will warn me if they make the slightest move.’
‘You know Al-Qadi, then,’ Girling said. ‘Aren’t you afraid of him?’
‘It would be stupid not to fear such a man. Though hardly a genius, he is most… unpredictable.’
‘Should I fear you, Lazan?’
The Israeli laughed. ‘Your colleague Stansell did not fear me. Why don’t you ask him?’
‘You know as well as I that that’s quite impossible.’
‘Oh?’ Lazan lifted his glass and drank.
‘You may be the last person who saw him alive,’ Girling said.
‘Alive? This is all very dramatic, Tom Girling. First following me then — ‘
Girling brought his bottle of Stella down hard on the counter. ‘Don’t play games with me, Lazan. Sure, I’ve been looking for you, but it was you who found me, not the other way round. Now why should that be?’
The Israeli lowered his glass. His small brown pupils watched Girling intently. ‘Stop talking in riddles, Tom Girling. Get to the point.’
‘The point is Stansell’s been kidnapped and you know it. You met Stansell last week at his request. It was the evening after the terrorist attack at Beirut, the day after they disappeared off the face of the Earth taking Franklin and his peace team with them. Do you remember now?’
Lazan said nothing.
‘You’d supplied information to Stansell before,’ Girling continued. ‘It was natural, therefore, that he should turn to you for help. Our editor had set him an almost impossible task, but what a prize would await him and Dispatches should he succeed. He’d been told to unmask the hijackers’ identity, a job made none too simple by the fact the government of the United States itself has no idea who is responsible.
‘But Stansell turns to you, because he knows that if anyone can give him a steer on Arab terrorism, it’s the boys from Tel Aviv. Stansell goes to see you at home and — because you and he are old pals — you help him out. You give him the Angels of Judgement on a plate. You were the primary source. But Stansell is a professional. He has to second-source this information. So he goes across town to see someone who can verify what you’ve told him. Dispatches goes and publishes the story and less than twenty-four hours later, while Cairo sleeps, the Angels of Judgement — or people who call themselves the Angels of Judgement — snatch him from his apartment. I know very little about you, Lazan, but I believe Stansell considered you a friend. I, too, am his friend. And I need to know what you told him that night.’
Lazan cracked a seed between his front teeth and spat the shell on the ground. ‘Did you work all this out for yourself?’
‘A colleague of mine saw Stansell mark a street map shortly before he left to see you. That map is in my possession now. It marks your house very clearly.’
‘Quite the detective, aren’t you, Tom Girling?’
‘I want to save Stansell’s life, Lazan.’
‘Like so many journalists, I’m afraid you manage to tell only part of the truth.’
‘This is no matter for professional pride, Lazan. I’m happy to admit I’m wrong if it means saving Stansell.’
‘And you think you are the one who will find him, is that it?’
‘He hasn’t got anyone else,’ Girling said simply.
Lazan pulled a slim, ornate case from his waistcoat. He offered a cigarette to Girling, who declined, before lighting one up himself. ‘Go home, Tom Girling. If these Angels of Judgement have him, then Stansell is past help.’
‘If?’ Girling asked. ‘You said ‘if the Angels of Judgement have him?’
‘There are many groups here who would gladly act in their name.’
‘That’s certainly a theory I’m working on,’ Girling said.
Lazan nodded, the light of the fire dancing on the right side of his face. ‘Overnight, the Angels of Judgement have become heroes for every disaffected hard-line Islamic group in the Middle East. Only a very special band of Muslim brothers could hold a super-power to ransom, after all. The Angels of Judgement have instilled a new generation of Arabs with inspiration.’
‘So that’s why you decided to show yourself,’ Girling whispered. He said the words to himself, but Lazan couldn’t help hearing them.
Girling met the Israeli’s eyes. ‘You’ve no more idea who they are than the rest of us. The Angels of Judgement scare the living shit out of you, don’t they?’
‘You don’t mince words, do you, Tom Girling?’
Girling studied the battered face for a moment. ‘Then if you weren’t Stansell’s primary source, who was?’
Lazan remained impassive. ‘I’d put my money on the Russians.’
‘The Russians?’ Girling remembered the reception at the Soviet Embassy. ‘Why them?’
‘Because the Soviets expelled one of their diplomats the day after the hijacking. Maybe he’d been telling tales out of school.’
‘That’s a bit of a long shot, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe. Stansell had good links with the fundamentalist community here. His primary source might well have been inside the Brotherhood. As you know, the Brotherhood here is well connected internationally…’
Girling looked Lazan in the eye. ‘Tell me what happened the night Stansell came to see you.’
Lazan pulled hard on his cigarette. ‘As you said, he already had the terrorists’ name when he came to see me that night. He was after confirmation, but how could I confirm a name I had never even heard of? When he mentioned these Angels of Judgement, I actually laughed. I told him that we would definitely have heard of a group with those kinds of resources.’
‘But you haven’t.’
‘Personally, no.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Tel Aviv is conducting a high-level inquiry right now into the revelations published by your magazine. If the Angels of Judgement exist, as Stansell said they did, then we will find them, be sure of that.’
‘Is there any chance you could let me in on their findings?’
Lazan let out a choked, gravelly laugh. ‘Are you mad?’
Girling held his hand up. ‘There is a connection between Beirut and Stansell’s disappearance. I’m prepared to share whatever I turn up, if you’ll do the same for me. I’m not talking about high-level secrets, just a steer in the right direction from time to time.’
Lazan leant forward till his face was a bare few inches away. ‘Then let me give you a steer, right now, Tom Girling. Get on a plane, leave Cairo, leave the Middle East and don’t come back. You are pitting yourself against a monster, a many-headed beast. And to this monster you will become an irritant — if you haven’t already become so — something for it to annihilate without so much as a second thought. It will show you no more mercy than it has done to Stansell. You can’t reason with it, for it knows none. It kills because it is conditioned to kill. It spares life only when it wants something in return — ’