His stomach began to churn and he felt his solar plexus shooting adrenalin into him as, hand on Chris Patrick’s trembling arm, beneath which an unladylike stain of perspiration was beginning to spread, he shepherded her through the crowd, ignoring everyone who reached out to him or called to him because he looked as if he were in control, as if he knew what he was doing, as if, in his accustomed economical way, he could make everything all right.
But this wasn’t a matter of a lost passport or stolen luggage—this was lost faith and stolen dreams. Damn the Islamic Jihad! Damn Dickson! Damn himself, too—and Ashmead, for not going to the wall when his net’s report wasn’t believed.
Still, as he guided the reporter he’d befriended through the outer anteroom, he hadn’t come to grips with the situation—not because he was emotionally incapable, but because he reflexively refused to consider situations about which he had no information.
And it was this internal discipline, this forcing of his perceptions outward, where information could be gathered, that made him realize what no one—not the civilians waiting in the anteroom or the three harried clerks trying to keep order there—had realized: that there was trouble of a more immediate sort beyond the sharp turn in the corridor directly ahead.
He couldn’t explain to Chris Patrick, whom he should have left behind in the anteroom, what alerted him—he didn’t want to make a sound.
He touched a finger to her lips while taking hold of her chin and turning her face toward him: Quiet, he pantomimed. Stay here.
Quizzically, she flicked a glance ahead, then nodded that she understood and would comply. As he moved silently past her, she was clutching her carryall in both hands.
Then he forgot about her: the sounds of scuffle he’d heard were gone now and he was about to walk blindly into he-didn’t-know-what.
In Jerusalem, he never carried a side arm; it was a perk he maintained he didn’t need, a regulation he disagreed was necessary, even if he was dealing all too often with people who understood little else: he was from State, not CIA, and he liked to keep the definition clear, wanted no guilt by association.
But he was armed, after a fashion. As he slid down the corridor, he unbuckled his belt and slipped the buckle-knife from its integral sheath of crocodile leather, grasping the wicked three-inch blade by its handle as he sidled around the corner.
Before him was a scene from a very standard nightmare: a crazed, burly civilian in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts was holding a balding man in a custom-tailored suit in front of him; beyond the big tourist who was holding Dickson in a hammerlock stood four very unhappy-looking consulate staffers—two of them plainclothed security people with their issue S&Ws at their feet and their fingers entwined on top of their heads.
One of the security men was blond and Beck worked out with him on occasion; his expression of relief was so palpable that Beck thought the big civilian would surely notice and that would be the end of Dickson—and probably Beck.
The overweight six-footer in the howlie shirt was sobbing truculently, “—get me on some frigging plane with this asshole, now, do you hear me! I’ve got to get home! I’ve got a wife and kids, a business to run! Now kick those damn heaters over here or I’m going to crack this s.o.b.’s neck like so much…” in a Brooklyn accent.
Beck was moving with as much stealth as he could muster toward the sopping Hawaiian shirt stuck to the huge back that, as he closed, Beck realized was trembling.
He felt a moment of pity for the panicked man from Brooklyn as he closed the final distance and grabbed a handful of the hostage-taker’s graying hair with his left hand while shoving the little buckle-knife to the right of the base of the man’s skull.
“Freeze, old man,” Beck said evenly, letting the point pierce whitening skin.
“Fuck!” said the man from Brooklyn. “I’m frozen, I’m frozen.” He began to sob in earnest now and pushed Beck’s chief away from him with enough force to send Dickson sprawling on the floor, saying, “I just want to go home, that’s all. See what’s left. Find my family. Nobody will tell me anything! The phones aren’t working! I’ve got to call my wife—Do something…. Go home, I just want to go home—find out if—if everything’s all right.” As if he’d forgotten that he was held at knife-point, centimeters away from certain death, the big man from Brooklyn buried his face in hamlike hands.
“That’s what we all want, old man, believe me,” Beck said gently, though his grip on the hostage-taker’s hair was still painfully tight. “And that’s what we’re trying to do here—find out what’s what, make sure everybody gets home, if… when,” he amended savagely, “it’s possible—safe and possible. Now you be a good old guy and let us help you.”
Meanwhile, the security men were retrieving their guns and the staffers their chief.
Beck was aware that the man he was holding wanted to slump to the floor; the Brooklyn voice was whining now, calling the names of his family each in turn, and bewailing the state of the world in New York Yiddish.
Beck removed the point of the knife from the thick bull neck and, with a glance to make sure the security men were ready to take over, released his grip on the old fellow’s hair.
The man slumped and everyone started talking at once.
Dickson was on his feet, brushing furiously at the arms of his silk suit, a look of sick fury in his eyes: “Beck,” he said tartly, “we’ve been waiting for you. In my office.”
No “thank you,” no “glad you happened along,” just business, as if it were an everyday occurrence for Beck to interdict a hostage-taker single-handedly.
It wasn’t: his fingers were shaking and swollen and he had trouble slipping the buckle-knife back in its housing, especially while trying to convince the security men that, under the circumstances, they ought to content themselves with escorting the bereaved man to the front gates.
The staffers were scurrying back to their desks and to a luckless civilian seated at one of them whom Beck hadn’t noticed in the heat of the moment, when he heard a pair of hands clapping directly behind him.
He wheeled around and confronted Chris Patrick, leaning against the wall, clapping her hands in a slow and measured fashion with a wide but sar donic grin on her face: “I thought I told you to stay where you were, Patrick. What do you think this is, a youth hostel? A refugee camp?” Since the consulate was about to become a little of each, Beck brought himself up short and apologized sheepishly: “I’m sorry. But remember our deal—you’ve come about as far as you can right now.”
She ignored everything he’d said: “You were fan tastic. And my mother always said I couldn’t pick’em.”
Beck, in his turn, ignored that: “Pickwick, see what you can do for this lady. All the courtesies and whatever you can manage above and beyond, on my say-so, all right? She’s going to wait here for me….”
Pickwick, the senior staffer present, was straightening his desk’s paperwork fastidiously. “If you insist, Mr. Beck, though I’ve fifty people out in the outer office with prior—”
Beck was already heading toward the door through which Dickson had disappeared.
Inside it, seated on a makeshift, make-do collection of bad furniture borrowed from half the missions in town, was the consulate’s senior staff, sharing a certain pallor not in the least lessened by the pile of gas masks, counter-biochemical warfare suits, radiation counters and plastic film-sensitive badges on the table before them.