Enemy of My Enemy (49 page)

When he didn't respond, she added, "Am I making myself clear?"

Michael knew better than to argue with her. She had the option of sending someone else to Baku in his place. "You always make yourself clear," he said, sounding respectful. He was determined to carry out his assignment in Baku. At the same time, he planned to kill Suslov.

Joyner's eyes were blazing when she put down the phone. Her first call was to General Childress. "How soon can you get to the White House?" she shouted.

"What happened now?"

"Drozny won't lift a finger. The trucks have moved across the Russian border. The time for playing games with Kendall is over."

"Whoa. That's a mouthful. I'd say you blew your cool, Margaret."

"Damn right. How about fifteen minutes?"

"I'll be there."

Her second call was to the president's secretary. "This is Margaret Joyner. Is the president in his office?"

"He is, but he has—"

Joyner cut her off. "Tell him that General Childress and I will be there in fifteen minutes. This is more important than anything else he's doing."

Unaccustomed to being spoken to in this manner, the flustered secretary stammered, "Please hold for a minute, Mrs. Joyner. I'll see if—"

"I won't hold, and you won't see anything. Tell him we're coming."

Joyner shimmed the phone down and grabbed her briefcase.

* * *

The treasury secretary and three aides with thick notebooks of economic data were hustled out when Joyner and Childress arrived.

She slapped a map down on the president's desk. In a voice cracking with emotion, she told Kendall what she had learned from Michael and the satellites, and where the convoy was now.

She was prepared to lean on Kendall with every bit of strength she had in her body until he gave the order to increase U.S. forces and block this exchange from taking place. It didn't take much. By the time she finished her presentation, the sheepish and abashed look on Kendall's face told her that the president now realized he had played this poorly. He should have left intelligence and military matters to her and Childress. She wondered if this was how Kennedy had felt when he had personally micro-managed and mismanaged the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Kendall was now willing to get out of the way and let the professionals take over. "Do the best you can," he said to General Childress. "Keep me posted."

"Will do, sir..."

Kendall was looking at him with a shell-shocked expression.

The general continued in a businesslike tone: "I would like your approval, Mr. President, to coordinate our activities with the Israelis. They're probably ahead of us here. They can help us play catch-up."

Joyner was looking at the president, ready to pounce if he turned Childress down. The president glanced from Childress to Joyner and back again, then swallowed hard. He didn't like the proposal, but he had no choice. "Whatever you think makes sense under the circumstances."

Joyner suppressed the urge to smile.

Then Kendall continued: "There is one condition, though. The Israelis have to understand that we take possession of the nuclear weapons and sort out with the Russians what their disposition is. They don't get control of those. Can you sell that to your buddy in Jerusalem, Margaret?"

"Moshe will agree to it," Joyner said without hesitation. "According to our intelligence, they've got an adequate stockpile of their own, although they'll never admit it."

Kendall stood up. The craggy lines in his face had deepened with worry. "Okay, you two, go and get the job done."

Outside the Oval Office, when they were alone, Joyner said to Childress, "I marveled at your self-control. I'm sure you wanted to tell him that he's the one who buried you in a sand trap. Now he wants you to make an eagle."

Childress laughed. "Did you ever play golf, Margaret?"

"Never in my life."

"That's what I figured. Well, I play, and you just came up with a terrible metaphor. There's almost no chance anyone, even Tiger Woods, could make an eagle on a hole in which he's been buried in a sand trap."

Joyner gave him a wry, intelligent smile. "That's precisely why it's a good metaphor."

Childress winced at her. "Except for one fact."

"What's that?"

"I've had marine units and helicopter gunships at Karshi-Kanabad in Uzbekistan on alert. I figured it would come down to this. So we're not buried in a sand trap. We might just make that eagle. On the other hand, Baku's not an easy place for our troops to reach without getting shot down by hostile forces."

 

 

 

Chapter 37

 

Oliver guided Layla each step of the way. He took her into a shop on Avenue Bosque that sold nurse uniforms. He picked up an empty brown paper shopping bag from a fruit vendor and told her to stuff the uniform inside. Pretending to be a member of the Syrian embassy staff, Oliver learned that Nadim was in room 321 at the hospital.

Their last stop was the pharmacy at Hospital St. Lazare, across town. Oliver had forged the papers Layla needed to emerge from the shop with a bag of potassium chloride solution and a syringe.

"You don't have to worry," he said. "When I was writing the scene for
Cops on the Loose,
I had the lead actress actually run through it incognito at another hospital. It worked like a charm. Security at hospitals in this city is a joke."

Finally, when he pulled into the parking garage for University Hospital, Oliver said to Layla, "Okay. Showtime. I'll be waiting here for you."

"I'm not sure I can do this," she said.

He reached over and squeezed her arm for encouragement. "Of course you can. Go get him."

As Layla left the car, holding the nurse uniform in the brown bag in her hand, her mind was focused on Nadim and how horrible he was. By the time she walked through the front door of the hospital, she was determined to succeed. The righteousness of her cause gave her strength.

Nadim was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, even thousands of people—her people. What she was doing was totally justified.

She had wondered what security would be like in the reception area of the hospital. There was none. The young woman behind the desk was engrossed in a personal call.
Walk as if you belong,
Oliver had told her.
As if you know where you're going.

She saw a sign for elevators that pointed to the right.

Clutching the brown bag tightly, she took that path, rounding a corner out of sight of the young woman. Opposite the elevator doors were toilets.

Layla ducked inside and looked around. The room was deserted. Before anyone else could enter, she went into a stall. Quickly she pulled off her clothes and put on the nurse uniform. She slipped the syringe and the potassium chloride into her pocket. Once she put her own clothes into the shopping bag, she looked in the mirror.
Not bad,
she thought. She started toward the door; then it hit her: Nurses on duty didn't carry shopping bags. She had to stash it somewhere until she was finished with Nadim and ready to leave the hospital. But where?

She spotted a trash bin open on top in a corner of the rest room. She'd have to take a chance that it wouldn't be cleaned out before she returned. Unable to think of a better solution, she stuffed the brown shopping bag with her clothes into the bin. She straightened up her uniform and walked outside into the corridor.

In the elevator there were visitors for patients, as well as doctors and nurses. Two exhausted-looking residents with bloodshot eyes were discussing how many admissions they had gotten last night. As they yawned, she wondered how such tired doctors could care for their patients. Nobody stared at her, as she had thought they would. Layla was relieved that she didn't stand out, but she knew the tough part was still ahead. What if a doctor or a nurse stopped and asked her to assist in treating a patient? What would she do then?

Layla exited the elevator on the third floor and followed the signs leading her to room 321.

I can't believe I'm doing this,
she thought, but then she remembered everything else that had happened to her in the last couple of days since she had met Jack at the wine dinner at L'Ambroise.

Announcements were continually blasting over the loudspeaker: "Code blue, room two-ten"... "Dr. Benoit, call two-four-six-seven." Nurses scurried down the hall and nodded to her. A patient on a gurney went whizzing by, surrounded by four urgent-looking medical personnel.

She was looking at the room numbers as she passed. Room 321 should be around the next corner to the right. She was about to make the turn when she heard Moreau's booming voice coming from that direction. "Listen, Doctor, I want you to call me when he regains consciousness. I'll be right over. I have to talk to him."

Oh, my God, he's coming this way,
Layla thought.
I have to get out of this corridor, and fast.
She looked around, on the verge of panic. There were a couple of patient rooms on the left. She could head for one of those, but the doors were open. She would be visible to Moreau from the corridor. On the left she spotted a door marked,
Linen Room.
She ran that way and grabbed the doorknob.
Please let it be unlocked.
It was.

Inside the darkened room, she collapsed onto a pile of clean sheets and tried to listen through the closed door. A few seconds later she heard the sound of Moreau's voice—albeit softly, muffled by the wooden door—as the SDECE agent passed by.

Layla breathed a sigh of relief. She decided that she'd better wait a couple more minutes before exiting the closet.

To her horror, the door opened. A medical orderly, a young man, dark complexioned with curly black hair, entered the room and turned on the light. He saw Layla and gasped. "What are you doing in here in the dark?"

Layla stood up and took a deep breath. "Just resting for a couple of minutes. I worked a double shift. I'm exhausted."

"You okay? Should you see a doctor?"

"I just have to finish up, go home, and get some sleep. I'll be okay."

He bought her story. "The administration's so fucked-up here. They know they need more nurses, and they refuse to hire them. This place is run by imbeciles."

Layla smiled. "You can say that again."

She decided to exit quickly, lest he try to draw her into a more detailed discussion.

Out in the corridor she rounded the corner. Room 321 was on the right. Before entering, she peeked in. As she had hoped, Nadim was alone. He was in bed with monitors hooked up to his body. His burned hand was wrapped in layers of sterile white gauze. His wrists were restrained to the bed. He had a central line in his right subclavian vein. From one of the ports he was getting fluids. The other two ports were clamped.
Perfect,
she thought. That was exactly the way Oliver had described it to her.

Nadim's eyes were closed. Judging from what Moreau had said, he was still unconscious. That was too bad. She wanted him to see her, to know what was happening.

Approaching the bed, she stared at his face. Waves of revulsion surged through her body as she thought about that dreadful evening with him in his apartment and everything he represented.

When she reached into her pocket for the syringe, her hands began shaking.
Stay focused,
she admonished herself.
In another minute it will all be over.

She moved close to him with the needle in her hand. Suddenly his eyes fluttered open. He was moving into that foggy state of semiconsciousness, gradually emerging into the realm of the conscious.

He recognized her. Her name emerged in a low murmur from his lips: "Lay-la."

His eyes were pleading with her. He feebly attempted to jerk his wrists forward to free himself, but the restraints held him back. She stifled a scream. Then, acting on instinct, with sure, deft fingers she unclamped a port with one hand, while she injected the potassium chloride through the port into his vein with the other. Oliver had told her this would go straight to his heart and kill him.

From his eyes, she knew that he realized what was happening, but he was powerless to do more than raise his head slightly.

"You won't be able to harm me or anyone else," she said in a quiet whisper.

She replaced the empty syringe in her pocket and reclamped the port. She wanted to bolt from the room before someone came, but she willed herself to stay. She had failed to kill him once. She wouldn't fail this time. Calmly she stood, staring into his face with one hand on his pulse, until his heart stopped beating.

Then she moved quickly, exiting the room. Her clothes were waiting in the trash bin on the ground floor. Once she was in Oliver's car, she made a call to David Navon at the Israeli embassy. "This is Layla Gemayel. Please help me."

* * *

Michael's cell phone began ringing fifteen minutes after his plane touched down in Baku. He was still in the terminal when he heard the familiar
beep... beep... beep.
He whipped it out of his jacket pocket, hoping that, however improbable, Irina was calling.

She wasn't. Rather it was her good friend Natasha. He began walking toward a deserted area of the terminal as he listened.