The Deceiver

by Frederick Forsyth

  Rowse dressed and checked his watch: seven-twenty. He locked his room and went down to the terrace for a drink before dinner. Beyond the terrace the sun had dropped below the mountains, bathing the far side of the valley in thick gloom while the silhouette of the hills was brilliantly back-lit. On the western coast, Paphos would still be enjoying a warm late-spring evening with another hour of sunshine to go.

  There were three people on the dining terrace: a fat man of Mediterranean look, an old fellow with unlikely black hair, and the woman. She had her back to him, staring at the view across the valley. A waiter approached. Rowse nodded to the table next to the woman’s, up against the terrace balustrade. The waiter grinned and hastened to show him to it. Rowse ordered ouzo and a carafe of local spring water.

  As he took his seat, she glanced sideways. He nodded and murmured, “Evening.” She nodded back and continued to gaze at the view of the darkening valley. His ouzo arrived. He too looked at the valley.

  After a while he said, “May I propose a toast?”

  She was startled. “A toast?”

  He gestured with his glass to the shadow-shrouded sentinels of the mountains all around them and the wash of blazing orange sunset behind them.

  “To tranquility. And spectacular beauty.”

  She gave a half-smile. “To tranquility,” she said, and drank a sip of her dry white wine. The waiter brought two menus. At separate tables they studied their cards. She ordered mountain trout.

  “I can’t better that. The same for me, please,” Rowse told the waiter, who left.

  “Are you dining alone?” asked Rowse quietly.

  “Yes, I am,” she said carefully.

  “So am I,” he said. “And it worries me, for I’m a God-fearing man.”

  She frowned in puzzlement. “What’s God got to do with it?”

  He realized her accent was not British. There was a husky twang; American? He gestured beyond the terrace. “The view, the peace, the hills, the dying sun, the evening. He created all of this, but surely not for dining alone.”

  She laughed, a flash of clear white teeth in a sun-golden face. Try to make them laugh, his dad had told him. They like to be made to laugh.

  “May I join you? Just for dinner?”

  “Why not? Just for dinner.”

  He took his glass and crossed to sit opposite her. “Tom Rowse,” he said.

  “Monica Browne,” she replied.

  They talked, the usual small talk. He explained that he was the writer of a moderately successful novel and had been doing some research in the area for his next book, which would involve Levantine and Middle East politics. He had decided to end his tour of the eastern Mediterranean with a brief break at this hotel, recommended by a friend for its good food and restfulness.

  “And you?” he asked.

  “Nothing so exciting. I breed horses. I’ve been in the area buying three thoroughbred stallions. It takes time for the shipment papers to come through. So”—she shrugged— “time to kill. I thought it would be nicer here than stewing on the dock side.”

  “Stallions? In Cyprus?” he asked.

  “No, Syria. The yearling sales at Hama. Pure Arabs, the finest. Did you know that every race horse in Britain is ultimately descended from three Arabian horses?”

  “Just three? No, I didn’t.”

  She was enthused by her horses. He learned that she was married to the much older Major Eric Browne and that together they owned and ran a breeding stud at Ashford. Originally she was from Kentucky, which was where she had gained her knowledge of bloodstock and horse-racing. He knew Ashford vaguely—it was a small town in Kent, on the road from London to Dover.

  The trout arrived, deliciously grilled over a charcoal brazier. It was served with a local dry white wine from up the Marathassa Valley.

  Inside the hotel, beyond the patio doors open to the terrace, a group of three men had moved into the bar.

  “How long will you have to wait?” asked Rowse. “For the stallions?”

  “Any day now, I hope. I worry about them. Maybe I should have stayed with them in Syria. They’re terribly mettlesome. Get nervous in transit. But my shipping agent here is very good. He’ll call me when they arrive, and I’ll ship them out personally.”

  The men in the bar finished their whiskey and were shown out onto the terrace to a table. Rowse caught a hint of their accents. He raised a steady hand to his mouth with a forkful of trout.

  “Ask yer man to bring another round of the same,” said one of the men.

  Across the valley, Danny said quietly, “Boss.”

  McCready jackknifed to his feet and came to the small aperture in the stone wall. Danny handed him the glasses and stood back. McCready adjusted focus and let out a long sigh.

  “Bingo,” he said. He handed the glasses back. “Keep it up. I’m going back with Marks to watch the front of the hotel. Bill, come with me.”

  By then, it was so dark on the mountainside that they could walk around to where the car was still waiting without fear of being seen from across the valley.

  On the terrace, Rowse kept his attention fixed entirely on Monica Browne. One glance had told him all he needed to know. Two of the Irishmen he had never seen before. The third—clearly leader of the group—was Kevin Mahoney.

  Rowse and Monica Browne declined desserts and took coffee. Small sticky sweetmeats came with it. Monica shook her head.

  “No good for the figure—no good at all,” she said.

  “And yours should in no way be harmed, for it is quite stunning,” said Rowse. She laughed away the compliment, but not with displeasure. She leaned forward. By the candlelight Rowse caught a brief but dizzying glance of the channel between her full breasts.

  “Do you know those men?” she asked earnestly.

  “No, never seen ’em before,” said Rowse.

  “One of them seems to be staring at you a lot.”

  Rowse did not want to turn and look at them, but after that remark it would have been suspicious not to. The dark handsome features of Kevin Mahoney were fixed on him. As he turned, Mahoney did not bother to glance away. Their eyes met. Rowse knew the glance: puzzlement. Unease. As of someone who thinks he has seen a person somewhere before but cannot place him.

  Rowse turned back. “Nope. Total strangers.”

  “Then they are very rude strangers.”

  “Can you recognize their accent?” asked Rowse.

  “Irish,” she said. “Northern Irish.”

  “Where did you learn to detect Irish accents?” he asked.

  “Horse racing, of course. The sport is full of them. And now, it’s been lovely, Tom, but if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to turn in.”

  She rose. Rowse followed, his fleeting suspicion allayed.

  “I agree,” he said. “It was a wonderful dinner. I hope we can eat together again.”

  He looked for a hint that she might want him to accompany her, but there was none. She was in her early thirties, her own woman, and not stupid. If she wanted that, she would indicate it in some small way. If not, it would be foolish to spoil things. She gave him a radiant smile and swept off the terrace. Rowse took another coffee and turned away from the Irish trio to look out across the dark mountains. Soon he heard them retire back to the bar and their whiskey.

  “I told you it was a charming place,” said a deep, cultured voice behind him.

  Hakim al-Mansour, as beautifully tailored as ever, slipped into the vacant chair and gestured for coffee.

  Across the valley, Danny laid down his glasses and muttered urgently into his communicator. In the Ford Orion, parked up the road from the Apollonia’s main entrance, McCready listened. He had not seen the Libyan enter the hotel, but he might have been there for hours.

  “Keep me posted,” he told Danny.

  “You did indeed, Mr. Aziz,” said Rowse calmly. “And it is. But if you wanted to talk to me, why did you expel me from Libya?”

  “Oh, please—not expel,” drawled al-Ma
nsour. “Just decline to admit. And well, the reason was that I wished to talk to you in complete privacy. Even in my homeland there are formalities, records to be kept, the curiosity of superiors to satisfy. Here—nothing but peace and quiet.”

  “And the facility,” thought Rowse, “to carry out a quiet liquidation and leave the Cypriot authorities with a British body to explain.”

  “So,” he said aloud, “I must thank you for your courtesy in agreeing to help me with my research.”

  Hakim al-Mansour laughed softly. “I think the time for that particular foolishness is over, Mr. Rowse. You see, before certain—animals—put him out of his misery, your late friend Herr Kleist was quite communicative.”

  Rowse spun around on him, bitterly angry. “The papers said he was killed by the drug people, in revenge for what he did to them.”

  “Alas, no. The people who did to him what was done do indeed deal in drugs. But their principal enthusiasm is for planting bombs in public places, principally in Britain.”

  “But why? Why should those bloody Paddies have been interested in Ulrich?”

  “They weren’t, my dear Rowse. They were interested in finding out what you were really up to in Hamburg, and they thought your friend might know. Or suspect. And he did. He seemed to believe your tarradiddle about “fictional” American terrorists masked a quite different purpose. That information, coupled with further messages received from Vienna, brought me to the view that you might be an interesting man to talk to. I hope you are, Mr. Rowse; for your sake, I sincerely hope you are. And the time has come to talk. But not here.”

  Two men had appeared behind Rowse. They were big and olive-skinned.

  “I think we should go for a little ride,” said al-Mansour.

  “Is this the sort of ride from which one returns?” asked Rowse.

  Hakim al-Mansour rose. “That depends very much on whether you are able to answer a few simple questions to my satisfaction,” he said.

  McCready was waiting for the car when it emerged from the portico of the Apollonia onto the road, having been tipped off by Danny across the valley. He saw the Libyans’ car—with Rowse in the back seat between the two heavies—turn away from the hotel.

  “Do we follow, boss?” asked Bill from the rear seat of the Orion.

  “No,” said McCready. To try and follow without lights would have been suicide on those hairpin curves. To put on headlights would give the game away. Al-Mansour had chosen his terrain well. “If he comes back, he’ll tell us what went on. If not ... well, at least he’s in play at last. The bait is being examined. We’ll know by morning whether it has been taken or rejected. By the way, Bill, can you enter that hotel unseen?”

  Bill looked as if he had been grievously insulted.

  “Slip that under Rowse’s door,” said McCready, and he passed the sergeant a tourist brochure.

  The drive took an hour. Rowse forced himself not to look around. But twice, after the Libyan driver had negotiated hairpin bends, Rowse could look back the way they had come. There was no moving wash of another car’s headlights behind them. Twice the driver pulled to the side of the road, doused his lights, and waited for five minutes. No one came past them. Just before midnight, they arrived at a substantial villa and drove through wrought-iron gates. Rowse was decanted and pushed through the door, which was opened by another heavyweight Libyan. With al-Mansour himself, that made five. Too heavy odds.

  And there was another man waiting for them in the large drawing room into which he was pushed, a heavy-set, jowly, big-bellied man in his late forties with a brutal, coarsened face and big red hands. He was clearly not a Libyan. In fact, Rowse easily recognized him though he gave no sign. The face had been in McCready’s rogue’s gallery, shown to him as a face he might one day see if he agreed to plunge into the world of terrorism and the Middle East.

  Frank Terpil was a CIA renegade, fired by the Agency in 1971. Soon after, he had gravitated to his true and very lucrative vocation in life—supplying torture equipment, terrorist tricks, and expertise to Uganda’s Idi Amin. Before the Ugandan monster was toppled and his hideous State Research Bureau broken up, he had introduced the American to Muammar Qaddafi. Since then Terpil, sometimes in association with another renegade, Edwin Wilson, had specialized in providing a vast range of terrorist equipment and technology to the most extreme groups around the Middle East, always remaining the servitor of the Libyan dictator.

  Even by then, Terpil had been well out of the Western intelligence community for fifteen years, but he was still regarded in Libya as the “American” expert. It suited him well to hide the fact that by the late 1980s, he was completely out of touch.

  Rowse was told to take a chair in the middle of the room. The furniture was almost entirely shrouded in dust sheets. Clearly, the villa was a holiday home for a wealthy family who had shut it up for the winter. The Libyans had simply taken it over for the night, which was why Rowse had not been blindfolded.

  Al-Mansour removed a dust sheet and fastidiously seated himself in a brocade high-back chair. A single bulb hung over Rowse. Terpil took a nod from al-Mansour and lumbered over.

  “Okay, boy, let’s talk. You’ve been going around Europe looking for arms. Very special weapons. What the hell are you really up to?”

  “Researching a new novel. I’ve tried to explain that a dozen times. It’s a novel. That’s my job, that’s what I do. I write thriller novels. About soldiers, spies, terrorists—fictional terrorists.”

  Terpil hit him once on the side of the face—not hard, but enough to indicate there was more where that came from and plenty of it.

  “Cut the shit,” he said without animosity. “I’m going to get the truth anyway, one way or the other. Might as well keep it painless—all the same to me. Who are you really working for?”

  Rowse let the story come out slowly, as he had been briefed, sometimes recalling things exactly, sometimes having to search his memory.

  “Which magazine?”

  “Soldier of Fortune.”

  “Which edition?”

  “April ... May, last year. No, May, not April.”

  “What did the ad say?”

  “ ‘Weapons expert needed, European area, for interesting assignment’ ... something like that. A box number.”

  “Bullshit. I take that magazine every month. There was no such ad.”

  “There was. You can check.”

  “Oh, we will,” murmured al-Mansour from the corner of the room. He was making notes with a slim gold pen on a Gucci pad.

  Rowse knew Terpil was bluffing. There had been such an ad in the columns of Soldier of Fortune. McCready had found it, and a few calls to his friends in the CIA and the FBI had ensured—or so Rowse fervently hoped—that the placer of the ad would not be available to deny he had ever received a reply from Mr. Thomas Rowse of England.

  “So you wrote back.”

  “Yep. Plain paper. Accommodation address. Giving my background, areas of expertise. Instructions for a reply, if any.”

  “Which were?”

  “Small ad in the London Daily Telegraph.” He recited the wording. He had memorized it.

  “The ad appeared? They made contact?”

  “Yep.”

  “What date?”

  Rowse gave it. Previous October. McCready had found that ad as well. It had been chosen at random, a perfectly genuine small advertisement from an innocent British citizen, but with wording that would suit. The Telegraph staff had agreed to alter the records to show it had been placed by someone in America and paid for in cash.

  The interrogation went on. The phone call he had taken from America after placing a further ad in The New York Times. (That too had been found after hours of searching—a real ad listing a British phone number. Rowse’s own unlisted number had been changed to tally with it.)

  “Why the roundabout way of getting in touch?”

  “I figured I needed discretion in case the placer of the original ad was crazy. Also that my s
ecretiveness might impress whoever it was.”

  “And did it?”

  “Apparently. The speaker said he liked it. Set up a meet.”

  When? Last November. Where? The Georges Cinq in Paris. What was he like?

  “Youngish, well dressed, well spoken. Not registered at the hotel. I checked. Called himself Galvin Pollard. Certainly phony. A yuppie type.”

  “A what?”

  “Young, upwardly mobile professional,” drawled al-Mansour. “You’re out of touch.”

  Terpil went red. Of course. He had seen the term but forgotten it.

  What did he say? He said he represented a group of ultra-radical people, Rowse replied, who were sick and tired of the Reagan Administration, of its hostility to the Soviet and Third Worlds, and particularly of the use of American planes and taxpayer money to bomb women and children in Tripoli the previous April.

  “And he produced a list of what he wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  “This list?”

  Rowse glanced at it. It was a copy of the list he had shown Kariagin in Vienna. The Russian must have a superb memory.

  “Yes.”

  “Claymore mines, for God’s sake. Semtex-H. Booby-trapped briefcases. This is high-tech stuff. What the hell did they want all that for?”

  “He said his people wanted to strike a blow. A real blow. He mentioned the White House, and the Senate. He seemed particularly keen on the Senate.”

  He allowed the money side of it to be dragged out of him. The account at the Kreditanstalt in Aachen with half a million dollars in it. (Thanks to McCready, there really was such an account, backdated to the appropriate period. And bank secrecy is not really all that good. The Libyans could confirm it if they wanted to.)