Prince Hasan was out of the city and temporarily unavailable, but if the caller would leave a message stating where he could be reached, the prince would contact him at the earliest opportunity.
Carter gave his Lewis Fletcher name and said he could be reached after six in the evening at the Grand Sojourn Hotel.
With Wooten in tow, he crossed the square to the building housing Howard Sale's office.
The Securitron office was a burnt-out suite of gutted, fire-blackened rooms. The smell of charred debris still hung in the air, a week later. Plywood panels were nailed up where the doors used to be in a makeshift attempt to seal off the rooms. A quick peek through a chink in the barrier was enough to determine that everything inside was totally destroyed.
That made Carter feel a bit better.
The short-lived, high-intensity fire had sizzled Securitron to a meltdown, while barely touching the neighboring offices.
"That's suspicious as hell, if you ask me," Wooten said. "I make it arson."
He was right, but not in the sense he meant. Howard Sale was an AXE operative, a field agent whose cover was as a local representative of Securitron, selling electronic security devices. There really was a Securitron, home-based in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was an AXE proprietary company, whose real business was producing high-resolution cameras for orbiting spy satellites. The research was so hush-hush that no civilian company could enforce the needed security measures. Therefore, AXE owned the company outright. Securitron also marketed a line of burglar alarms and smoke detectors as a sideline, to camouflage the company's true purpose.
The office had been destroyed not by an arsonist, but by an arson machine, a last-ditch self-destruct mechanism linked to sophisticated computer terminals on the premises. Some unauthorized person had tried to access the computer memory banks without the correct password codes and entry keys, triggering the white-hot incandescent blaze that left the machinery so much useless slag, as well as burning up the office.
"I've seen all there is to see around here," Carter said. "Let's go."
"Where to?" Wooten asked.
"Petro Town."
The man-made oasis of Petro Town stood some twenty miles northwest of the city. Getting there was no problem. The emirate had one of the best highway systems the Killmaster had ever encountered, and traffic was light.
Petro Town rose within sight of the southern rim of the Zubeir Depression, one of the most oil-saturated places on the planet. A handful of pumps stood sentinel along the perimeter.
Support personnel are required to operate a field of that magnitude — engineers and administrators, mechanics, drivers, loaders, pipe fitters, hydraulics experts, geologists, and many others. The majority of the technologically sophisticated staff had to be imported from overseas.
Petro Town existed to house and serve them. It was a startling slice of Americana set down in the desert, an enclave of over thirty-five hundred souls. Its layout was similar to military posts in other parts of the world, and it boasted all the comforts and conveniences of home: a giant PX, schools, churches, two movie theaters, even a bowling alley.
Here, security was a concept, not a reality. Carter winced at the site's aching vulnerability, the sketchiness of the fence surrounding it, the lackadaisical good humor of the hot, tired, bored guards, few in number.
He hated to think of what a suicidal car bomber could do here, or the havoc a few well-placed rockets could wreak. What a prime target!
A gate guard directed Carter and Wooten to Howard Sale's residence. While not an oil man, Sale lived in Petro Town to be among his countrymen.
He lived in a small, neat, flat-roofed bungalow fronted by a square of parched lawn in a section relegated to the bachelors. A tract on the other side of the avenue held the family men with their wives and children. After Al Khobaiq, where the few females abroad were wrapped and veiled in the traditional chador, it was a bit of a thrill to see women and girls openly strolling about clad in halters and shorts and slacks.
Superintending the bachelor quarters was a transplanted American couple, Gus and Millie Ferguson. He was a former oil field roughneck who had semiretired into this maintenance job. He had a gray crew cut and a belly that said that here was a man who bought his beer not by the sixpack, but by the case. Millie was fleshy, flushed, sweaty, and irritable at having to come out in the heat of the day to let Carter and Wooten into Howard Sale's quarters.
"Don't rightly know as I should let you in," Millie said, fumbling with her ring of keys. "What with Mr. Sale not being here, I mean."
"That's why we're here, Mrs. Ferguson," Carter said. "We're a bit worried about Howard. His folks haven't heard from him for some time. I'm sure you'll be happy to help out."
"Well, when you put it that way…"
"I been a little concerned about the kid myself," Ferguson said.
"Why is that, Mr. Ferguson?"
"Call me Gus."
"Glad to," Carter said. "You've been worried about him, you said?"
"Yeah. He always struck me as a decent sort — nice, quiet, regular hours. You know. But in the last few weeks, he changed. Stayed away for days at a time, came in at midnight only to go right back out again. That sort of thing."
Millie sniffed. "I didn't care for the company he was keeping. There was one fellow who came here a few times, a fancy-talking Ay-rab I didn't cotton to."
"Would you recognize him if you saw him again?" Carter asked.
"Land sakes, no! I can't tell one of 'em apart from the other!"
"You couldn't forget that slick car of his," Ferguson said. "Big red sports car, looking more like a goddamned spaceship than an automobile."
When Millie turned the doorknob to fit the key in the lock, the door opened. "Well, that's funny! It wasn't locked. I hope nobody took anything."
"Much theft around here?" Carter asked.
"Just from the whites," Ferguson said. "The Arabs don't steal nothing. Penalty for stealing is to get their hand chopped off."
"That would be a deterrent."
Millie said, "If anything's missing, we're not responsible for it. We can't go around checking doors to make sure they're locked."
"No reason why you should be liable," Carter said equably.
They went in. Howard Sale was neat, especially for a bachelor. A quick once-over failed to turn up anything of importance.
Set on top of a bureau was a framed photo. Carter recognized Sale from other photos shown him by Hawk. Sale was young, and looked serious, sincere, earnest. Pictures and faces can lie; Carter's instincts told him this one didn't. The picture showed Sale with his arm around a plain, sweet-faced girl.
A wall calendar furnished a poignant note. It was decorated with a scene of an Alpine landscape. Sale had made what they used to call in the service a "short-timer's calendar," marking off with red X's the days of the month. The X's ended in the middle of the previous week, right about the time Sale notified AXE that Hodler was in the area.
After a little more poking around, Carter said, "We're through here. Thanks."
They exited, Carter and Wooten first, the Fergusons lingering to lock up. Carter whispered to Wooten, "Somebody searched the place before us."
"Yeah, I noticed that, too," Wooten said.
Gus Ferguson muttered an oath. "The door won't lock. It's busted."
Behind the row of houses were modular units with sliding overhead doors. "What're those?" Carter asked.
"Garages," Ferguson said. "The sun and the wind plays hell on a car's finish. Sand gets in the engine, fouls it up…"