"All in a day's work, Hugh," she said with a certain smile. She adjusted her lumpy frame in the car seat.
But behind the studied diplomatic expression, seeds of doubt were beginning to germinate in the mind of America's chief diplomat.
THE RUMORS OF SULTAN OMAY'S resurgent illness had been filtering out of Ebla for some time now. For a moment after leaving her car in the burning sun of Rebellion Square and walking into the main entrance of the Great Sultan's Palace, the secretary of state felt like some sort of morbid diplomatic vulture, swooping down to check for signs of life in heads of state.
She knew that this was a silly thought. These sorts of junkets were necessary. Especially in this region, and especially given the utter lack of anything even remotely resembling a coherent foreign policy in the current administration. It was important to the United States that the sultan reaffirm his commitment to the peace process. Even after all these years as a proved conciliator.
The concerns Helena Eckert had felt in the car vanished the moment she saw the careworn face of Ebla's leader. The famous face was kind, not cruel. The laugh lines beside his eyes had crinkled in joyful appreciation at every meeting they'd had since Helena assumed her post. In the touchy-feely brand of diplomacy she trafficked in, the secretary of state would even go so far as to term the man a friend.
But her friend was gravely ill. There was no doubt about it. The thought that it might be a resurgence of the cancer that the Eblan leader had so valiantly battled years before filled Helena's heart with pity. And a dying ruler would certainly explain the unusually taciturn manner of her driver.
The secretary wore an appropriate bland-bordering-on-concerned expression as she mounted the purple-carpeted staircase to the second-floor landing of the palace. Sultan Omay met the American delegation at the head of the stairs.
The Eblan leader's smiling face did not smile today. Helena did for him.
"Sultan Omay," the secretary of state said, stopping beneath the high marble arches at the top of the long staircase. "It is my pleasure to renew our friendship."
The secretary of state bowed slightly and offered a hand to Omay.
So frail he looked as if a desert breeze might topple him down the staircase, the sultan of Ebla dropped his eyes to the extended hand. He left it empty. Omay raised his eyes to the secretary of state's. The sickly white tip of the sultan's tongue appeared between his parched lips.
A phlegmy wet sound issued from the mouth of the sultan of Ebla. To the shock and horror of all the assembled American diplomats, it was followed by the expulsion of a single ball of viscous saliva.
Sultan Omay's spit slapped into the jowly face and neck of America's first female secretary of state. "What on earth!"
Helena instantly lost her diplomatic poise. She recoiled from the foreign ruler, grabbing instinctively at the handkerchief she always kept tucked inside the sleeve of her light designer blouse.
The response of the secretary of state to Sultan Omay's unexpected attack brought an even more unexpected reaction. As she reached for her silk hankie, every door in the palace seemed to burst open at once. Armed Eblan soldiers poured out into the hallway. They were shouting and waving Russian-made weapons. More swarmed menacingly up from the bottom of the staircase.
The tension level they'd experienced in the car soared through the roof as the secretary's entourage wheeled. Heads whipped back and forth in terror. Guns jammed ribs. Hands rose into the air.
It seemed as if the entire Ebla Arab Army had been dispatched to subdue the small group of unarmed diplomats.
"What is the meaning of this?" Helena stammered.
Her stunned brain was working overtime. She still had her staff at the airport. If they could just get back to the plane somehow...
Before she could even formulate a plan, the main doors on the first floor flew open. All eyes turned. The United States Air Force, Army, support staff and Secret Service personnel who had been left on the secretary's plane were shoved roughly into the palace by even more Eblan soldiers.
The faces of the new American arrivals were bruised and bleeding. As one of the men crawled across the carpet, an Ebla Arab Army soldier kicked him viciously in the stomach. The man dropped painfully to the floor, hands clasped to his belly.
The entire tableau was frozen for a long moment. The only sound the secretary of state seemed able to hear was the frantic beating of her own heart.
The silence was broken by a single loud clap from the sultan's pale, wrinkled hands.
Helena jumped at the noise.
A small cellular phone was quickly brought forward. Omay took it, extending the device to the secretary of state. His eyes were cold.
"I expect you have a call you wish to make, woman," Sultan Omay spit in clipped, precise English.
Helena Eckert didn't know what else to do but accept the phone in her shaking hand.
As the thick saliva of Newsweek's "Great Peacemaker of Ebla" dripped down onto the ample bosom of the American secretary of state, the terrified diplomat began entering the special government prefix for the United States.
Chapter 7
The loneliest post in the entire intelligence service of the United States of America was manned by an individual who had neither the time nor the inclination to think of himself as lonely. This stubborn determination to pointedly ignore his obvious isolation had served Dr. Harold W. Smith well in his three-decade-plus stewardship of the secret organization known only as CURE. Another man wouldn't have lasted more than a few years before the strain of solitude caused him to crack.
Not Smith.
He was completely without ego. He also lacked a need for social approval. And any sense of loneliness would necessarily stem from either one of those two things. Therefore, Smith did not feel lonely. QED.
That wasn't to say he didn't occasionally dwell on his solitude. On the isolation. But neither of those could be accurately called true loneliness.
Smith's mental state was perfectly suited to a man who spent eighteen hours per day in the same chair, behind the same desk in the same office for more than thirty years. Fifteen hours on Sundays.
He neither enjoyed the isolation nor disliked it. It just was.
This calm acceptance of his lot in life was one of the reasons why a young President at the start of a decade that would prove to be tumultuous had chosen Smith for the position of director of CURE.
Back in the early sixties it seemed the very fabric of the nation was tearing. To preserve the greatest experiment in democracy the world had ever known, it would be necessary to subvert its most cherished founding document. Both CURE and Smith would turn a blind eye to the Constitution. In this manner the President hoped to save the country for future generations.
That President was long dead. And his unknown legacy to his fellow Americans was a solitary patriot who still toiled-detached from the rest of the country-to heal the wounds of a troubled nation.
Smith was alone now in his Spartan administrator's office in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. Folcroft had been the cover for CURE's covert activities since the organization's inception.
Smith was like a character lifted from a 1950s black-and-white television set the tint set firmly in shades of gray. His three-piece suit, his hair, his very demeanor was gray. Even his skin was grayish, although a pacemaker had lately turned his traditional ashen pallor to a more robust fish-belly tinge. The single splash of color on his gaunt frame was the green-striped Dartmouth tie that hung in perpetuity around his thin neck.
The only sound in the tomb-silent office was the drumming of Smith's arthritis-gnarled fingers.
On the other side of his office picture window, cheerful afternoon sunlight dappled the waters of Long Island Sound in streaks of white as Harold Smith typed methodically away on the computer keyboard buried at the edge of his onyx desk. An angled screen also hidden beneath the desk's surface was Smith's portal to the world.
Navigating by touch, he made his way through the endless electronic corridors of the Net, trolling for anything that might warrant the attention of CURE. It was blessed mundaneness after a period of great turmoil for the organization he led.
Remo's current assignment was fairly straightforward. There was no real need for Smith to monitor his activities. Assola al Khobar was somewhere in California. Even if he was acting as an agent for the sultan of Ebla, he was only one man. Remo would have no problem with him.
Although Smith would not shy away if the circumstances warranted it, political assassination was not part of CURE's charter. Unless the sultan himself were entwined in some grander scheme involving al Khobar, Remo would simply take out the terrorist and be done with it. However, anything CURE's enforcement arm might learn about the sultan's possible terrorist connections could come in handy in the future.
Smith's suspicion of Sultan Omay sin-Khalam singled him out even further. Smith was the only man left in the world, it seemed, still mired in skepticism when it came to the Great Peacemaker of the Middle East. Of course, Smith knew he could be wrong. It was entirely possible that Omay's purchase of Taurus Studios was an innocent act. Perhaps one of his minions-unknown to the sultan himself-had lured al Khobar to California for reasons of his own.
Whatever the case Remo would find out. In the meantime Smith could busy himself with the pleasant tedium that he had neglected for much of the past year.
Smith was exiting the Reuters home page on the World Wide Web when a muted jangling issued from his desk.
Abandoning his touch-sensitive keyboard, Smith opened his lower desk drawer. When he pulled the old-fashioned cherry-red receiver to his ear, his face was already registering a look of pinched displeasure.