The King Faisal Hotel was a two-hundred-story specimen of government-financed construction straight
out of Hollywood and the Arabian Nights, turned slummy by five years of North African sun and no
maintenance. I paid off my helicab in the shade of thirty yards of cracked glass marquee, managed my
own bags through a mixed crowd of shiny-suited officials, Algerian and Moroccan officers mingling quite
peaceably outside business hours, beggars in colorful costumes featuring wrist-watches and tennis shoes,
Arab guides in traditional white lapel-suits, hot-looking tourists, journalists with coffee hangovers, and
stolid-faced UN police in short pants with hardwood billies.
I went up the wide steps, past potted yuccas and a uniformed Berber doorman with a bad eye that bored
into me like a hot poker. I crossed the lobby to the registration console, slapped the counter, and
announced my arrival in tones calculated to dispel any appearance of shyness. A splay-footed Congolese
bellhop sidled up to listen as I produced the teleprinted confirmation of my reservation that Felix bad
supplied. I asked for and received verbal assurances that the water was potable, and was directed to a suite
on the forty-fifth level.
It was a pleasant enough apartment. There was a spacious sitting room with old-fashioned aluminum and
teak-veneer furniture, a polished composition floor, and framed post-neo-surrealist paintings. Adjoining
was a carpeted bedroom with a four-foot tri-D screen, a wide closet, and a window Opening onto a view
of irregular brickwork across a twelve-foot alley.
Behind the flowered wallpaper, there were other facilities, unknown to the present management -
installed, during construction, at the insistence of one of the more secret agencies of the now defunct
South African Federation. According to the long, chatty briefing papers Felix had tucked into the
newspaper, the CBI had inherited the installation from a former tenant, in return for a set of unregistered
fingerprints and a getaway stake.
I looked the room over and spotted a spy-eye in a drawer knob, a microphone among the artificial flowers
- standard equipment at the Faisal, no doubt. I would have to make my first order of business a thorough
examination of everything ... as soon as I had a cold shower. I turned to the bedroom - and stopped dead.
My right hand made a tentative move toward my gun, and from the shadows a soft voice said, "Uh-uh."
He came through the sitting-room door with a gun in his hand - a middle-sized, neatly dressed man with
wispy hair receding from a freckled forehead. He had quick eyes. An inch of clean, white cuff showed at
his wrist.
"I was supposed to be gone when you got here," he said quietly. "The boys downstairs slipped up."
"Sure," I said. "They slipped up - and I'm dancing tonight with the Ballet Russe." I looked at the gun.
"What was I supposed to do, fall down and cry when I saw that?"
His ears turned pink. "It was merely a precaution in the event you panicked." He pocketed the gun,
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