“No.”
“Of course he did. Just then, just while it was going on. Not afterward.” He sighed, accepting the idea that it was his fate to be misunderstood. “Never mind that,” he said. “The point is, you knew I had people listening here, monitoring my phone, I told you that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“So you made that crack about religious nuts just to let everybody realize you know more than we thought. Jesus, Sam, didn’t it occur to you they don’t want to be known? And don’t you realize they could kill you?”
“They almost did.”
“They could do it right now.”
“And bury me in the swimming pool?”
He raised his eyes to heaven. “There you go again. Sam, you’re going to be here for a few days, and then that’s it. I argued like hell for you, I really did.”
I remember reading once that an insane person is simply a sane person who starts off with one firmly held wrong idea and then everything else has to flipflop to go along with step number one. If you think Martians are communicating through the fillings in your teeth, for instance, you don’t have to have any more wrong ideas to be — and act — crazy. It’s a kind of colorblindness of the mind: Once you think blue is green, you have to make so many other alterations in your view of the world to accommodate it to your belief that eventually either you or the world must be cuckoo, and it isn’t the world.
On that basis, Ross Ferguson was now a certifiable lunatic, so what would I gain by arguing with him? His one wrong conviction was that he and these Barq people were partners, working together toward a common goal; or at least toward similar goals. He’d negotiate with them, he’d bargain and deal with them, he’d do lots of busywork on his project, never knowing that all along they would merely be humoring him, letting him have what he wanted until they didn’t need him anymore. At this moment Ross and I were both under sentence of death, but only one of us knew it. And poor frightened Doreen was in it with us, of course, making it all up as she went along, hoping for the best.
Which made me suddenly remember Bly, still asleep at my house. I absolutely didn’t want Ross and his business associates to know she was there and would miss me. I didn’t want them deciding she knew too much. I said, “Ross, how long am I going to be here?”
“Until next week. I can tell you now, since you can’t do anything about it. The whole thing will be over next Tuesday, that’s when the minister’s coming and they’ll grab him.”
“Minister?” I hadn’t thought Islamic religious figures were called “minister.”
They aren’t. “Oil minister,” Ross explained, “from one of the Trucial States. He’s the guy they’re gonna get.”
A Trucial State; would that be Dharak, the oil minister an associate of Hassan Tabari’s? But if I asked, it would turn out I was showing too much knowledge again, so I just said, “On Tuesday. So I’m here until then.”
“I’m sorry about that, Sam,” he said, “but you honest-to-God did bring it on yourself. I’ll make you as comfortable as I can, but this is gonna be your home for the next six days.”
“Then do me a favor.”
“Anything. Something to read? I don’t think they’d let me give you a TV.”
“Nothing like that. But I’m supposed to see Bly tomorrow afternoon, and she’ll worry if I don’t show up.”
“You want me to call her? Sure.”
“No, Ross, I do not want you to call Bly.” I was very tensed up and scared with all these guns around, but I made myself sound as sarcastic as possible under the circumstances, to make him do what I wanted without thinking about it too much. “If you call her,” I said, “what’s she going to think? You’re supposed to be the plot genius around here.”
He didn’t like that. Face stiffening, he said, “So what do you want?”
“Call my house first thing in the morning. Before eight o’clock, so Robinson won’t have gone out anywhere.” And Bly won’t have started to panic yet, with luck. “Tell Robinson I’m going out on the boat with you for a few days and I asked you to call him while I made my business calls. Tell him I’m supposed to see Bly, and ask him to phone her and make my excuses and say I’ll explain next week. All right?”
“Fine,” he said. “Consider it done.”
“Good.”
I was counting on Rohinson’s having quick reactions here, not blurting out on the phone that Bly was already in the house. But I had to hope for something to fall my way. And wouldn’t Robinson and Bly then put their heads together and decide it was time to phone Deputy Ken? And wouldn’t that be enough to get them onto this property before some of these guns around here started going off?
Six days of this. Good God.
42
Dynamite.
No, I don’t have six days.
Is Ross lying to me, or are they lying to him? And what difference does it make?
I had fallen into a very uneasy sleep on the sofa, the recessed fluorescent ceiling light still on, and had abruptly awakened with a mind clustered and confused, but understanding more than when they’d locked me in here.
A truckload of dynamite had been caught on its way to Al-Gazel.
Some Islamic fundamentalist leader had urged the faithful to destroy that mosque.
The pool-company van was filled with metal-banded cardboard cartons of dynamite.
I’d been too distracted by thoughts of Bly when Ross told me the story about the oil minister from the Trucial State, or I would have realized at once that it didn’t make any sense. If this small army of people, this Barq group, were really interested only in kidnapping some Middle Eastern country’s oil minister, there had to be better places to do it than the Al-Gazel mosque. Of course such a man would have tight security around him all the time, but people who travel a lot — and Middle Eastern oil ministers travel all the time — are constantly vulnerable, particularly to a concerted semi-military action by a large, well-equipped group of men. An airport, a hotel, a limousine on the freeway; almost anywhere at all would have fewer security problems for the attackers than Al-Gazel.
Did Ross believe the story? It was so hard to tell, but his enthusiasm led me to believe the answer was yes. Could he be enthusiastic about a project with real mass murder in it? On the other hand, his working title suggested he knew the truth: Fire Over Beverly Hills.
When the van full of dynamite explodes, taking Al-Gazel with it.
On Friday.
That was the other lie, that they weren’t going to make their move until next Tuesday. Again, it was impossible to tell if Barq had lied to Ross to keep him controllable or he had lied to me for the same reason, but the lie was still the same. They were not out to kidnap one oil minister next Tuesday; they were out to destroy the entire place. Friday is the Islamic holy day, when the faithful must say noon prayers in the mosque, and this Friday was to be the official opening of Al-Gazel, with major ceremonies. The building would never again be so full. When better for Barq to attack than when Al-Gazel would be packed solid with their political and religious and financial enemies?
I looked at my watch, but of course it was gone. They’d taken that, and my belt, and my shoes, and everything in my pockets, when they’d locked me in here. There were no windows, only the overhead fluorescent as a light source, and so no way to tell what time it was, whether it was day or night.
It had been quarter to four Thursday morning when Doreen had phoned, just a few minutes after four when I’d reached this house, probably no more than quarter past the hour when I was put into this room. Then I’d moped and paced in here for a while, considering flushing all Ross’s manuscripts down the toilet in revenge, before groggily passing out on the sofa. I was hungry now, but that didn’t mean anything in particular. It seemed to me the time could be anywhere between eight in the morning and noon, but how could I be sure?