It had cost him plenty of baksheesh to persuade them to take him to the coast near Doha in the middle of the night. But he knew that with Abdul Sa’ad and Nuruddin after him, he was definitely persona non grata and couldn’t just fly in to Riyadh. When he’d gone back to the hotel, he found that the hair he’d stretched across the doorposts was broken. The keys he’d left in a careful pattern in a drawer had been moved. The keys themselves were of no use to anyone. One of them opened the trunk of a car he’d sold six years ago and the other was for the apartment of a young lady in Georgetown who’d told him she never wanted to see him again, back in the days when he was still a CTP trainee.

He was almost spotted when he left the hotel and had to bribe a night porter to show him out through the kitchen to a back exit. He had reversed on foot through the souk to make sure he was clean, before making his way down to the wharves, where he had finally roused the boy and the old man.

He tapped his pocket where he kept the film cartridge. The next step was to get it to Macready in Doha. They’d be ringing alarm bells like crazy at Langley, trying to figure when the balloon was going up. Harris, of course, would act as if he knew it all the time, and would try to pressure him into finding out when and where Abdul Sa’ad would make his move.

He wondered if he had made a mistake letting Braithwaite live. Koenig would have said so, but Koenig didn’t owe Ralph a life as he did. Nor had Koenig ever been schooled in the harsh desert code of treachery and honor. Only once before had he been soft-hearted and it had cost Tuyet her life. Forget Saigon, forget Braithwaite, he told himself. Concentrate on the mission.

His excitement quickened as they approached the shore. Whatever was going on, the answer lay in Arabia. It was a strange excitement, part danger, part contentment, because in a certain sense he was coming home. Ever since he was a boy, he had known that Arabia was his destiny. “There is only the desert for you,” Sheikh Zaid had told him when he had first decided to return to the States. At the time, he hadn’t understood what Zaid had meant and had thought that the old man was full of hot air. Later, in Nam, he had discovered that it was a kind of prophecy. And now, his kismet was bringing him back.