The Cool War

XII

The elderly Egyptian pilot twisted in his seat, bawling something. He was pointing down at the desert, and, although Hake’s rusty Arabic had been coming back to him, most of what the man said was lost. “Drive the airplane,” Hake ordered. From the way the Egyptian handled the little prop-jet Hake suspected he had got his first flight training in MIGs, from Soviet advisors before the Yom Kippur war.

“What’s he trying to tell us?” Alys asked in Hake’s ear.

Hake shrugged. “Something about the wind being bad. I think it’s about that stuff down there.” They both craned to look down. The Empty Quarter was empty, all right: rocky desert, not even a herd of goats or the black tents of a Bedouin camp. But parts of the ground were queerly colored, brownish green and strangely out of focus, as if an oily fog lay over the scraggly bushes.

“I wish this plane had a bathroom,” Alys said irritably. She was playing the part of a bored American tourist extremely well: pretty; well dressed, in her three-piece gray shorts-suit with a puff of scarlet silk at her throat. It was a wholly unsuitable costume for the Empty Quarter, but for that reason all the more suitable for someone who wanted to look like a tourist.

Her fidgety boredom probably was not altogether an act, Hake thought. Likely enough, she was having second thoughts about this adventure. The night before in the Cairo hotel, both of them out of it with jet-lag and fatigue, she had lain rigid beside him in the immense king-sized bed. When he had moved to touch her, more out of compassion than lust, she had jerked angrily away. He could understand her qualms. The closer they got to Abu Magnah, the more his own qualms surfaced. What had looked easy from half a world away looked more and more daunting at first hand.

“What’s that idiot doing now?” she demanded.

The pilot had unstrapped himself, leaving the controls untended, and was staggering back toward them. In Egyptian Arabic he shouted, “The oasis is coming up in just a minute. Did you see the locusts?” Hake turned to peer back along their course, but the sweep of the wing blocked his view. “Too bad you missed it,” grinned the pilot. “Now fasten your seat belts. If God wills it, we are about to begin our descent into the landing pattern.” He returned to his seat and a moment later, as he took over from the autopilot, the plane dipped one wing and began to circle to the left.

As the undercarriage rumbled and locked in the landing position, Hake got his first glimpse of Abu Magnah. It was much more than he expected. It looked like the interlocking-circles symbol for the Olympic games, but on a huge scale—immense disks as much as a mile across. They were ‘irrigation circles, and where they interlocked was no cluster of tents and palms but a city. Wide roads threaded. in between the farm plots, almost bare of traffic.

It had been Hake’s notion that Abu Magnah was a private pleasure dome of Sheik Hassabou’s. It was bigger than that. At least fifty snow-white, dome-shaped buildings were laid out in city blocks; minarets and mosques in white and gold and darker colors; a sprawling building like two dominoes joined together with a hotel sign on top of it, and, out in the farm circles, surrounded by walls, two or three story-book palaces, with pools and gardens. All in all, it was daunting. And quite new. There were few trees, because Abu Magnah was not yet old enough for trees, though a bright green pattern of seedlings showed where pine groves would be one day, and a scattering of gray-green promised olives. At the edge of one huge circle north of the city, dark brown and damp earth only lightly flecked with the beginnings of a crop of some kind, there was a rectangular tower taller than any of the minarets. Scaffolding showed that it was still under construction. Then the airplane dipped and twisted, and a runway was rushing up to meet them.

They went through the haphazard customs formalities, and the pilot was waiting for them at the hotel van. “Pay me now, please,” he said.

“No. Why?” asked Hake. “You still have to take us south.”

“But if you pay me here with your credit card it will be in the sheik’s currency, which is tied to the Swiss franc. Besides, how do I know you will not go off without paying?”

“Well—” said Hake, annoyed, but Alys Brant moved in between them.

“Not a chance,” she said firmly, and tugged Hake into the van. “Oh, Horny,” she sighed, settling herself, “you do let people impose on you. You must have a lot of personal charm, why else would I have let you talk me into this crazy scheme?”

With an effort, he didn’t answer. He clamped his jaw and stared out of the van window. There was not much traffic apart from themselves—none at all to pass, except for a huge machine that looked like a snow-removal truck but turned out to be a sand-sweeper. But the wide road was banked like an autostrada. If it was not used often, at least it was used when drivers wanted to go fast. And as they passed one of the walled compounds, borne on the hot wind through the open windows of the hotel van, Hake heard what sounded like rushing water. A waterfall? How preposterous, in the middle of the Empty Quarter!

How formidable, too. He was surrounded by evidences of wealth and power, and who was he to oppose them? Not to mention that formidable power he worked for, with whom he would sooner or later have to reckon.

“Ahlan wa-sahlan,” said the formally dressed clerk at the registration desk, offering a pen.

“Inshallah,” responded Hake politely. He signed in, one eye on the signature on his passport to make sure he had it right, and they were conducted to their suite. They had three bellmen to carry their four small pieces of luggage— “I must do some shopping,” Alys whispered in the elevator —and all of them fussed about, opening and closing drapes, trying gold-plated taps in the bath, adjusting the air-conditioners until Hake handed them each a flfty-riyal coin. He closed the door behind them, stood thoughtfully for a moment, and then began to rummage in bureau drawers until he found, first, a copy of the Q’ran, and then what he was looking for: a leather-bound, gold-stamped little volume that was the telephone directory for Abu Magnah. The curlicued script was easy enough to read, surfacing in his mind out of childhood memories as he needed it. But he wasn’t actually reading it. He didn’t exactly know what he was looking for, and what he was mostly seeing was the tenuousness of his plans. 1, go to Abu Magnah. 2, rescue Leota. 3, figure out what to do next. Even as an overall strategic intention it lacked focus. And tactically… where did one begin with step 2? The rescue had seemed even possible, back in Long Branch, as if all he would have to do was go to the local police station and report a kidnapping. But in this oasis town, fiefdom of Hassabou and his relatives, that was not even a hope.

Alys emerged from the bathroom, smiled at him and began to unpack: her cosmetics in a row on the mirrored dressing table, her toiletries in the bath, her clothes in the top drawers of the largest chest. “If you’ll give me one of your credit cards,” she said, “I’ll get whatever else I need this afternoon. You can put your own stuff in that other bureau.”

“Don’t get settled in,” he said. “We’re only going to be here three days at most.”

“But we might as well be comfortable while we’re here. Don’t worry, Horny. I can whisk all this stuff back in the bags in two minutes—after you figure out what we’re going to do, I mean.”

“Fine.” He got up and gazed out the window. Hot as it was, the streets were full of people, a League of Nations of the Arab world. Some of them might help, mightn’t they? A little baksheesh, a clever play on old blood feuds—he could see Jordanians and Yemenis, even an Ait Haddibou Berber in white burnoose and headdress. All he had to do was figure the right ones to approach. His previous experience as a spy-saboteur was not much help; it had led him to a sort of James Bond conviction that somewhere along the road from the airport, or in the lobby of the hotel, some swarthy Levantine merchant or deferential tiny Anna-mese sailor would beg a ride, or ask for a light, and turn out to be an ally. It had not worked out that way. He was on his own.

“What’s this stuff, Horny?” Alys had finished her own unpacking and started on his. She was investigating the jumble at the bottom of the bag, lock pick and electronic teasers, code books, the rest of Art’s tapes, a stiletto.

“Tools of the trade. Just leave them.”

She sighed with pleasure. “You do lead a fascinating life.” She put them in a drawer, hung up his shirts and sat down to regard him brightly. “Let me see,” she said. “Since you’re the expert spy, I’m sure you’ve got a plan all worked out for what we’re going to do next but, just for practice, let me see if I can figure it out. Since we’re pretending to be tourists, we’d better tour. We can look this place over, and that way we can see how to get at Leota. They must have some nice picture postcards in the lobby. Maybe a map. I’ll bet we can piece together quite a lot of information, just by sightseeing and so on. And then, by tonight, we’ll be in a position to make a plan. Am I right?”

Hake studied her innocent face for a moment, then grinned. “My very thoughts,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Where the two wings of the hotel joined, the architect had placed a revolving roof dining room. They ate in the turret that night, and as the restaurant turned Hake could see the sheik’s palace, floodlit in pink and blue under the bright desert night sky. Now that they had seen it close at hand, it looked more formidable than ever. ,. but maybe, Hake thought, he was just tired.

It had been a tiring day. Alys had found postcards and maps easily enough. After ten fruitless minutes talking about tour buses with the concierge—none of them went to the right places, and Hake could not find a way of explaining what the right places were without giving away more than he wished—they had walked out the hotel door and been besieged by taxi drivers, thrilled with the notion of being hired for an afternoon’s sightseeing. Hake picked a displaced Moslem Armenian named Dicran (least likely to notice anything strange about his Arabic, while he was still practicing it), and they had driven around for three hours. Dicran’s over-the-shoulder commentary was a gloss of what he considered the romantic and strange—white Mughathir camels swinging along, ridden by the local police; mosques for Sunni, Shiite and Alawaite Moslems, churches for Druses, Dervishes and, yes, even Christians. And he had been proud to show them Sheik Hassabou’s palace on request. They drove along the farm highway that ran past its walls, and Dicran confided in them, smirking, about the electrified fences inside what looked like green hedges around the harem. Not to mention infrared alarms and armed guards at all the entrances. He had insisted they visit an aipursuq—Hake had puzzled over the word for a while, then laughed as he recognized “supermarket”—to buy local cucumbers, pomegranates and figs, and they had picnicked on real grass, just across the road from the palace itself. Dicran had been a mine of information. But, when you put it all together, how much closer were they to rescuing Leota? Or even to making a plan?

Not much.

But here, in public, with the headwaiter bringing them immense old-fashioned menus, they couldn’t talk about it anyway. And there was always the chance he would think of something. As the waiter strolled gracefully away Alys giggled and leaned closer to Hake. “He’s wearing eye shadow!” she hissed. -

“That’s kohl, Alys. It doesn’t mean he’s gay. They need it to protect their eyes from the sun.”

“At night?” She winked and returned to the menu.

She at least was having a good time, especially when she glanced up over the menu at Hassabou’s pink and blue palace, and seemed almost to stop breathing. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement. There was something about the idea of being held so closely that thrilled her. He almost thought she envied Leota; but, as she turned back to the menu, all she said was, “Do you suppose the trout is fresh?”

It was, and could not be from any place closer than the Pyrenees. And so was the Iranian caviar they began with; and the wines were chateau-bottled Graves.

Alys ordered with the precision and arrogance of a well-practiced tourist. Calculating the cost of the meal in his head. Hake thanked his one-God-at-the-most that he Was not going to have to pay for it.

He understood at least that reason why Yosper and the others so enjoyed their work. It was difficult to remember that thrift was a virtue when you didn’t have to pay the bills—when, in fact, with their complicated juggling of computer programs and credit cards, each charge was paid unwittingly by an enemy, so that each extravagance was a blow struck against the foe.

Living like a millionaire was a new experience for Hake, and quite an immorally pleasant one. But it shriveled in contrast with the lifestyle of Sheik Hassabou. Abu Magnah was not his personal possession, but it was, every inch of it, his family’s. Their palaces were the dozen others scattered around the irrigated areas, but his was the largest, the principal, the one from which the power flowed. And what power! He had created a world, where nothing had been before but a silty, salty camel-wallow and a few dwarf trees.

The irrigation circles that gave Abu Magnah life could have been created at any time. But no one before Hassabou had been willing to pay the price. Under the scrub and rock was an ocean of fossil water—faintly brackish, yes; but cool, ample for irrigation, even drinkable if one were not fastidious. But it was nearly half a mile down. Every pint delivered to the surface represented 2,000 foot-pounds of work. Power-piggery! And on a vaster scale than Hake had ever dreamed. The sheik had found the old oasis, and bought it, and tapped its underground sea to recreate in the Empty Quarter those A1 Halwani courts and palaces he had played among as a child. All it took was energy. Energy took only money. Money enough to buy his own plutonium generator—soon to be replaced, Dicran had said, by the new solar tower going up north of the city— and pump the water up from the sea beneath the sands. Money to distill the water to drink, and to spread it in the irrigation circles around the desert, so that the great rotating radii of pipe could make the desert bloom. Money to track-truck in the marble and steel to build his palaces; to subsidize and house the Palestinians and Saudis and Bedouins who farmed his circles and staffed his city; to buy his own muezzins to call out the hours for prayer, and to build the towers they called from. Money to buy a woman he fancied, and to bribe the police to look the other way when he abducted her here. One woman? Perhaps he had a hundred. Dicran’s winks and leers were ample for a thousand.

And the money was there. For more than a generation all the gold of the Western world had sluiced into the Near East to pay for oil. Oil became capital. Capital bought hotels and auto factories and publishing companies and thousands of square miles of land, some of it in building sites in New York and Chicago and Tokyo and London. Even when the oil was gone, the capital remained and ziz rreaeriK roni replenished itself, and kept pouring money into their treasuries.

That was what Hake was challenging.

Against that, what forces could he muster?

There were some. The pick-lock and martial-arts skills he had learned Under the Wire. The codes and cards that would let him draw on the secret funds of half a dozen major industrial powers. His own determination.

The forces were not even, but for this limited objective, the rescuing of a single prisoner—maybe they were even enough. If he was general enough to know how to deploy them.

With all that money, could he not buy himself an ally or two? A corruptible cop? A Palestinian with relatives still stuck on the West Bank? Maybe even one of Hassabou’s guards?

But how, exactly, did you go about that?

And there were only two days left.

They took their after-dinner coffee and brandy on the roof terrace, just outside the rotating turret. They were the only ones at the tables around the swimming pool, and the barman obviously thought they were crazy. The night wind was still hot. The sand made the surface of their table gritty however many times he wiped it away. But at least they could talk freely.

Alys was not in a mood to conspire- “You’ll work it out, dear,” she said, stretching languorously and gazing out toward the dark desert, “and, oh, Horny! Doesn’t this beat the hell out of Long Branch, New Jersey?”

Well, in a way it did. In some ways Hake was still very young, freshborn out of the wheelchair. But the darkness under the horizon’s stars struck him as less glamorous than threatening.

Alys lifted her snifter to her lips and then jerked it away. “What’s the matter?” Hake demanded.

She was laughing. “Parts of this place are a lot like Long Branch,” she announced. “There’s a bug in my brandy.”

Hake woke up with a flashlight shining in his eyes. A voice he had not expected to hear said, “Don’t move, don’t touch anything.” A rough hand patted his body and explored under his pillow. The light circled around the bed and did the same for Alys, who woke with a gasp. Then the light retreated. Hake could not see past it, but he remembered the voice.

“Hello, Reddi,” he said. “Which one are you?”

The wall-bracket lights came on, revealing the slim, dark man with the small, dull gun pointing at them. “I am the one who is quite ready to kill you, Hake. I do not like having to follow you all over the world.”

“Well,” Hake said, “I really didnt want to put you to the trouble.” He rubbed his eyes and sat up. Beside him Alys was awake but silent; she was watching the entertainment with great interest, waiting to see what would come of it.

The gun was in the Indian’s right hand, and there was a scar over his eye: this twin was Rama Reddi. “How did you find me, Rama?” Hake asked conversationally.

The Indian said, “It was not hard to guess you would be coming to see Leota. Especially as you took her old school chum with you. I caught up with you in Cairo, and beat you here in a private jet; I was in the airport when you arrived.”

“I didn’t see you.” Hake didn’t expect an answer to that, and got what he expected. He rolled his feet over the side of the bed and said, “Do you mind if I get up and make myself some coffee before we continue with this? I have instant in the bathroom.”

“Yes? And what else do you have there, Hake? I am more comfortable to keep you where you are.”

Alys stirred. “Suppose a person has to tinkle? As I happen to.”

Rama Reddi studied her for a moment, then went to the bath. He peered inside, entered, rummaged among the pile of towels, opened the medicine chest. He did not leave the door, and the gun remained fixed on them. “All right, Miz Alys Brant,” he said. “Keep in mind that this gun does not make any noise, and I have no special reason not to kill you both, since Hake has chosen to cheat my brother and me on our agreement.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Hake said. “I haven’t broken our agreement. If anybody has a right to be pissed off, it’s me—why did you blow up my car?”

“Then our agreement is in force? You will work with us?”

Hake rubbed his chin. “Well— Will you help me get Leota out of the harem?”

“Certainly not. Have you not understood that my brother and I are not amateurs, or patriots? We have no client for this.”

“I’ll be your client. I’ll give you information—for a starter, I’ll tell you about the mission I’m on now. It’s big. It involves at least twenty Team personnel—”

“In A1 Halwani, yes, to sabotage the solar power installation,” Reddi nodded. He paused, watching Alys carefully as she came out of the bathroom. She was holding a glass of instant coffee for Hake, a towel wrapped around it to save her fingers from the heat. When Reddi was sure there were no surprises in the towel, he said, “I have no client for that either, Hake. It does not interest me.”

“I didn’t know you knew about that,” said Hake, dampened. “But it’s got to be pretty valuable. I have a map of it—I can get plans, even bring you with me, maybe. Surely you could sell the secrets to somebody.”

The Indian looked at him incredulously. “If I wished to do that, why would I go so far? And we still have no client.”

Alys said suddenly, “Horny offered to be your client.”

“Do not interrupt unless you can say something intelligent, Miz Brant. How would he pay?”

“He can get money out of the computer system. Lots of it. Can’t you, Horny?”

“Sure I can, Reddi. I’ll give you a—a hundred thousand dollars!”

Reddi crossed to a chair by the bed and sat down, the gun now in his lap. “That at least is a new idea. Perhaps it is worth discussing.” He sat silently for a moment, then produced an envelope from his pocket and tossed it to Hake. “Here,” he said. “I will go this far for you now.”

The envelope contained three photographs of a woman in harem dress and face-veil. It was Leota!

Although the thing Hake most remembered about Leota was that she was a different woman every time he saw her, this was a new variety of different. She wore gold arm-bangles, tight vest and baggy, gauze pants, and she seemed to be wearing curiously patterned stockings beneath the pants. Two of the pictures showed her getting out of a huge old gasoline-burning Rolls-Royce, one of them in heated argument with a black, liveried driver who carried a dagger. The third— Hake studied it carefully. It showed Leota sitting at a table with another woman, and behind them was a familiar window opening on a rooftop view. “That’s right here in the hotel!” he cried.

Reddi nodded. “I too found it amusing that she was here, while you were looking for her all over town. I took it this afternoon. She comes here sometimes for tea.”

“You mean she can get out?”

The Indian said, “Do not assume that means she is free, Hake. There are bodyguards always. And the bracelet on her left arm is a radio. Because of it she can be traced at any time, and they listen to her conversations. However,” he went on, “I permitted her to see me. She is therefore alert, in the event that I elect to assist you in this.”

“The price is a hundred thousand dollars,” said Hake.

“Oh, at least that,” the Indian said, studying Hake. After a moment he said, “You are puzzling, Hake. You have become a great deal more sophisticated since Munich. You miss much that is obvious—for example, you must have seen the solar facility that Sheik Hassabou is constructing here as you flew in, but you did not recognize what you saw. But you are using your government’s facilities for purposes of your own, and on no small scale, either. This implies to me that you have a means for breaking computer net security. I will have to talk to my brother but— Yes, that would be worth something to us, Hake.”

Hake glanced at Alys, and picked his words carefully. “Supposing,” he said, “that I could tell you where to find the code words and programs to break into the Team computer net and help you, ah, steal them.”

“You cannot give them to me yourself?”

“I don’t have them. But Yosper and Curmudgeon do, and they’ll be in A1 Halwani.”

Reddi rubbed his right hand along the barrel of his gun contemplatively. “I think,” he said, “that you are lying to me.”

“No! Why would I do that? Talk it over with your brother, we can make a deal.”

“Oh, I will talk to him, Hake. But now I want both of you to lie face-down on the bed.”

The hairs at the back of Hake’s neck prickled erect “Listen, Reddi—”

“Now.”

Hake set the coffee down and, unwillingly, joined Alys on the bed. They heard Reddi move across the room. The light went off. The door opened and closed.

Alys sat up immediately. “Horny, what the hell are you doing, lying to that man? You trying to get us killed?”

Hake breathed hard for a moment, trying to accept the fact that they were both still alive. He said, “I’m trying to prevent it. Figure it out, Alys. Suppose I gave him the code words and cards and told him my thumbprint opens a channel. What do you suppose he’d do after he got them?”

“Why—if he’d made a bargain with us—”

Hake shook his head. “He wouldn’t have anything more to gain. He’d take off with the cards and the codes—and my thumb.”

“Horny! He wouldn’t!”

“He would. Go to sleep, Alys. We’re going to need our rest, because we’re going to have to do this alone.”

But he slept poorly. Twice he woke up to the sounds of distant sirens and what sounded like fire-engine hooters, and the second time thought he heard the patter of rain against their window. Rain! Of course not. It was still dark, and he forced himself to keep his eyes closed.

Until Alys whispered softly in his ear, “Horny? Horny. Wake up and tell me what’s going on.”

It was barely first light. She was pointing to the window, which seemed to be covered with great oily drops of blackness. The sirens were still going, and a distant /iee-haw hooting that sounded like an air-raid alarm. He got up and approached the window.

The oily raindrops were not drops of water. They were insects. Hundreds of them, rattling against the window and dropping to the little ledge below. All the ornamental plantings on the window were covered with them, the flowers invisible under a hundred insect bodies apiece, the stems bending to the dirt beneath their weight “Locusts,” breathed Hake.

“How awful,” said Alys, fascinated. “Are those the same ones we flew over?”

“I expect so.” She was standing beside him, shivering with excitement. Looking out the window was like looking through one of those snowflake paperweights, except that the flakes were dark browny-green. They drowned the desert view with their bodies. Hake could see the buildings across the street and, dimly, a minaret a few hundred yards away. Beyond that, nothing, only the millions and billions of insects.

Out in the hall the hotel’s piped-music speakers were muttering in several languages. Hake opened the door. Alys listened and said, “It’s French. Something about the main body of locusts being on the radar—two kilometers north, approaching at twenty kilometers an hour. But if this isn’t the main body, what is it?”

“Don’t ask me. We never had locusts on the kibbutz.”

The speaker rattled, and began again. This time it was in English. “Gentlemen and ladies, we call your attention to the swarm of locusts. They are in no way harmful or dangerous to our guests, but for your own comfort you will please wish to remain inside the hotel. The main swarm is approximately one mile away, and will be here in some five to ten minutes. We regret that there may be some interruptions in serving you this morning, due to the necessity of employing staff in protecting our premises against the insects.”

“I bet there may,” said Hake, staring out the window. Past the thousands dashing themselves against the window, through the dung-colored discoloration of the air, he could see turbulent activity in the streets below. Women were streaming out toward the farms, carrying nets, that looked like wicker fish traps and wire-screen cylinders, while hydro-trucks of men with heavy equipment were threading past them. Farther out, the sky was black. There appeared to be two layers of clouds, the rust of the swarm beneath, the red-lavender of sunrise on the wisps of cirrus higher up.

“Oh, Horny, let’s go outside and see!”

Hake tore himself away. “We might as well, I suppose.” They dressed quickly and took the elevator. The lobby was full of guests, milling around far earlier than most of them had intended to rise. By the time they reached the sidewalk the sun was above the horizon, but it was still twilight—a green-browny twilight that rustled and buzzed. The fountain outside the door was already crusted with a skin of drowning insects, and a porter was setting up an electric fan to blow clouds of them into a net sack. As they stepped off the curb, bugs crunched under their feet. Alys stared around, thrilled, oblivious of the insects that drove against her face and were caught in her hair. “How exciting!” she said. “Do you suppose they do this often?”

“If they did there wouldn’t be any farms,” Hake said. “They call them ‘seventeen-year’ locusts, but I don’t think they come even that often. And time’s running out for us.”

“Horny! You can’t be thinking of going after Leota in this. We don’t even know where she is.”

From behind them, Rama Reddi said, “She is in the gardens at the palace.”

Hake spun. “How do you know that?”

“Oh,” said the Indian, “it is not only her jailers who can track her electronically. Do you want to talk or get on with the project?”

Hake hesitated. “Why did you change your mind?”

“I did not change my mind. It is the circumstances that have changed.” Reddi waved an arm at the locusts. “There is much confusion because of this, and the odds become better. I don’t promise. But I have a car; let’s go see.”

The air was filled with insects now. To supplement the dull, dingy sun the Land Rover’s headlights were on, and their beams painted two shafts of insect bodies ahead of them. Reddi drove carefully through the hurrying farm workers, circling around trucks on the shoulder of the road; it was not far. They crossed a bridge over a rapidly flowing river, with what looked like a waterfall just below —no, not a waterfall; it was a hump in the river itself. And past the bridge, in a field that had once been barley and was now green-brown insects, shadowy figures were scattered by great fans. From what they wore Hake knew they were women; he could not have told in any other way, because what they wore was flowing robes and the headdress and scarf—the hatta w-‘aqqal—that was meant to protect against desert sand, and worked as well against locusts. Across the road a line of men was moving away from them, beating at the plants and forcing the locusts into flight again. Hake could not see what purpose that served, until he saw that the insects in flight were being sucked through the fans into wire cages. It was not just the fans. Hake became aware of a pungent, cockroachy smell: pheromone attractants.

At a turning, Reddi stopped the car and turned off the headlights.

“What’s the matter? Why don’t we go find Leota?”

The Indian said, “She is the third one in line back there. Did you not see her? But her little bracelet is still broadcasting, and my device located her.” He stared around, scowling. “However,” he said, “there are problems.”

“What sort of problems?” Hake demanded.

“You see them!” He gestured at the men across the road. “They have radios too. And it is probable the sheik himself is wandering about. He enjoys adventure— Hell!” He stared in the rearview mirror, then jumped out of the car and held up a warning hand.

One of the women was walking toward them. At Reddi’s signal, she stopped. It was impossible to make out her face, but Hake had no doubt who she was.

“She saw us pass,” said Reddi. “But it is too dangerous.”

He tugged at his scant beard, and then shook his head. “We will go on and try again, later.”

“The hell you say! This is the best chance we’ll ever have, Reddi!”

“It is no chance at all. If there were no men near— But there are, and the guards are always monitoring. We cannot even speak to her, or they will hear.”

“We can just take the radio off her—”

“And do what? They are all around. If they look to where she is supposed to be and see no one, what will they do, Hake? Say, ‘Oh, perhaps my vision is blurred, I must be mistaken’? No. They will investigate. Then they will search, and if they search they will find us. And if we take her in the car, even if we do not speak, they will hear the sound of the car over the radio, and will locate her with the direction-finders. No. It is impossible. A little later—”

“I don’t believe you’ll do it later,” Hake said. Alys put her hand on his arm.

“Mr. Reddi? Why can’t I take her place?”

“What?” Hake cried. “Don’t be insane! You don’t know what you’re saying.”

She leaned to kiss his cheek. “Dear Horny,” she said, “Leota is my friend, too. And anyway—it does sound interesting. And when you come right down to it, men always liked me better than Leota, back in college, and I don’t think Sheik Hassabou will mind too much.”

She jumped out of the car. The Indian glanced once at Hake, then followed. Hake started after them, then stopped himself; it was out of his hands; if he said anything, it would be heard and they would all be caught. He squinted through the blur of locusts as Reddi produced wire cutters and expertly snipped the golden arm-bracelet. It was soft, easy to remove, easy to bend onto Alys’s willing arm.

Almost at once a voice came from it. “What is happening, Leota?”

“Nothing,” said Leota, chin on Alys’s shoulder. “I just tripped and bumped into something.” She hesitated. “I’m getting tired of being out here,” she complained. “I’m going back to my room to sleep for a while, if His Excellency doesn’t require me.”

The voice laughed. “His Excellency will surely wake you if he does.”

Alys touched the bracelet, then smiled at them. She formed with her lips the words Get out of here! as she turned to move slowly toward the distant loom of the palace. Hake stared after her as they turned and retraced their path, until Reddi snapped, “Eyes front! Don’t attract attention! That’s the sheik.” They were crossing the bridge, and down the stream, on the permanent hump of water, someone was standing on a surfboard, moving back and forth across the standing wave. He did not look toward them, and in a moment the locusts hid him from view.