by Jack Higgins
The Death Trade
( Sean Dillon - 20 )
Jack Higgins
The master of suspense returns with a cutting-edge tale that pits his heroes Sean Dillon and Sara Gideon against the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
An eminent Iranian scientist has made a startling breakthrough in nuclear weapons research, but he can't stand the thought of his regime owning the bomb. He would run if he could, but if he does, his family dies. He is desperate; he doesn't know what to do.
It is up to Sean Dillon and the rest of the small band known as the Prime Minister's private army to think of a plan. Most particularly, it is up to their newest member, an intelligence captain and Afghan war hero named Sara Gideon, who thinks there just might be a way to pull it off.
But plans have a way of encountering the unexpected. And as the operation spins out, from Paris and Syria to Iran and the Saudi Arabian desert, there is very much that is unexpected indeed. And much blood that will be spilled.
Jack Higgins
The Death Trade
IN MEMORY OF MY DEAR FRIEND
David Coleman
Above all things, cherish life while you can, for death is serious business.
SUFI SAYING
HELL ON EARTH
HOULA
SYRIA
1
The man who called himself Ali LeBlanc surfaced from a deep sleep to cries of anguish, screams, gunfire, exploding grenades, and the roaring of many engines. It was the stuff of nightmare, but rising from the bed above the little café and moving to the window, he saw that this was no dream.
The previous evening he had left Tehran on the night plane to Iraq using his Iranian passport. His shabby canvas bag had a false bottom containing three passports, and he had chosen the French one for the flight from Baghdad to Aleppo. At an extortionate price, he had obtained a hire car to take him to Homs, and from there he intended to cross the border and proceed to Beirut. Its population of two million, its multiplicity of races and religions, would swallow him up. His Lebanese passport in the name of Ali LeBlanc indicated that he was of mixed French-Lebanese parentage, and a doctor, which was true enough, although he had not practiced for some years.
He wore a dark suit showing signs of wear. He was sixty-four years old and seemed older, his eyes tired, his white hair uncut. Age had caught up with him, as well as the strain of traveling in the war-torn country, and he had stopped to rest at the café in the small town of Houla. As he stood by the window, the door opened and the café owner, Hassan, rushed in, beside himself with rage.
“Stay back from sight. It’s a butcher’s shop out there.”
LeBlanc peered carefully from behind the curtain and was horrified by what he saw. Automobiles of every type, and light trucks with machine guns attached, crisscrossed each other, shooting at anyone who moved. Across the square, men and young boys were being lined up against any available wall and machine-gunned. Even the mosque was being used for that purpose. Women were being dragged inside by the hair, their assailants in semi-military uniforms, looking more like brigands than soldiers.
LeBlanc said, “Who are they?”
“They belong to an organized gang culture a bit like the Mafia used to be in Sicily. Throat cutters to a man, they think nothing of killing children, the women after they’ve been raped. They’re supposed to be militia. The regular army tolerates them and lets them do the dirty work, which suits the government down to the ground.” Hassan’s face was wild.
“So what happens now?” LeBlanc asked.
“The doors are bolted, I’ve paid my protection. My wife and two daughters are locked in the cellar.” He shrugged. “There’s not much more I can do. Come down to the kitchen. With what’s going on out there, you won’t have much of an appetite, but there’s coffee and several stronger things under the counter.”
LeBlanc glanced out of the window. The shooting had abated considerably. Most of the vehicles had roared away, the men in them laughing and shouting to each other, with only the odd shot in the distance. “No one moaning in pain, not a sound out there,” LeBlanc said.
“The bastards take pleasure in finishing everyone off,” Hassan told him, leading the way downstairs and into the kitchen.
There was an eerie quiet, the aroma of good coffee from an electric percolator, an old AK-47 assault rifle lying on the table. Hassan went into the café and returned with a bottle of Courvoisier cognac, LeBlanc put his bag on the table and picked up the rifle as Hassan got the bottle open.
“May Allah forgive me.” He raised it to his mouth. At the same moment, the outside door was kicked aside and a brute of a man, bearded, long hair bound by a bandanna, slipped in. He was carrying a Mac 10 machine pistol.
“Drop it or I’ll drop you,” he told LeBlanc, who placed the AK-47 on the table at once.
“Of course,” he said.
The man reached for the bottle. “Cognac, eh? Are we celebrating something your old friend Hamid should know about?” He poured some into his mouth. “Good stuff. Seems a shame to keep it all for ourselves. Why don’t you let your wife and daughters out of the cellar so they can join the party.”
“No, damn you, I will not do it,” Hassan said violently.
Hamid raised the Mac, and LeBlanc cried, “No need for that! I have money, see?” He unzipped the bag, reached into the false bottom, produced a wad of currency, and dropped it on the table. “A thousand American dollars.”
Hamid was mesmerized and reached out to examine the money for himself. “Where did you get this?”
“Tehran,” LeBlanc told him. “And there’s more. Just let us go.”
“Show me,” Hamid ordered.
LeBlanc scrabbled in the bottom of the bag, but instead of pulling out more money, he produced a Russian Makarov fitted with a silencer and shot Hamid between the eyes, fragmenting the back of his skull and hurling him outside into the street through the open door. A dull thud was the only sound.
It was darker now, starting to rain on the dead, and Hassan kicked Hamid’s body. “Bastard,” he said, picked up the corpse by its long hair, and dragged it out to where the rest of the bodies lay.
He turned to LeBlanc, who had followed, and grabbed him in a huge embrace. “How can I repay you?”
“That your wife and daughters are safe from harm is thanks enough. It was fortunate I had the pistol. Normally I wouldn’t have such a thing, but it seemed prudent when I started my journey. These are bad times, and more to come, I think.”
“Then go with a blessing from me,” Hassan said. “Now I must join my family.” He returned to the café and closed the door.
When LeBlanc checked the yard at the rear, he found the Citroën intact. He found a water tap and washed away the blood that had splashed across his face as Hamid’s skull exploded, using a scarf he found in the car, then checked the contents of the bag. A little blood he had missed on his left hand smeared the Iranian passport, and that gave him an idea. What if his Iranian passport, his true identity, turned up on one of the victims in the street, a body so damaged it could not be identified? He got in the Citroën and drove across the square to the mosque.
The piles of bodies were truly shocking, and there were many badly damaged faces. As the rain increased, he knelt beside one old man, smashed beyond recognition, his white hair soaked in blood. He felt in the man’s inside pockets, removed a couple of letters and an identity card, smeared the Iranian passport with the dead man’s blood, and put it in the pocket. He said a short prayer, returned to the Citroën, and started on the road toward Homs, passing many refugees and a small group of United Nations observers in their blue helmets.
Several hours later, he left the Citroën in Homs and found a taxi driver willing to deliv
er him to Wadi Khalid on the border with Lebanon, walking through on foot, armed with his Lebanese passport, where he bypassed a crowd of Syrian refugees.
The commander of the border post examined his passport and said, “See anything of the troubles in your journey, Doctor?”
“I’m afraid so. I passed through Houla. A dreadful sight.”
“It must be good to be home after such an experience.”
“Yes, indeed.” Ali LeBlanc passed through and took one of the waiting taxis.
The approach to Beirut an hour later was astonishingly beautiful: the hot sunshine, the vivid blue of the sky and sea, the harbor crowded with ships, the whiteness of the houses jumbled together as they lifted in untidy terraces, climbing the hill of the old quarter together.
He left the taxi by the harbor wall and crossed through the open-air cafés, crowded with people of every race and color and religion and so very different from what he had come from. He climbed quickly through narrow cobbled alleys, turned into Rue Rivoli, and came to a building several stories high that was painted a vivid blue. Not surprisingly, a sign by the door said “Maison Bleue,” and he rang the bell.
The woman who answered was someone he knew. Sixty-five, of mixed blood, she was handsome enough, and wore a black silk robe and a white chador, the obligatory head scarf for Muslim women. There was astonishment on her face.
“Is that you, Doctor? How long since we have seen you?”
“Five years. How are you, Bibi?”
“All the better for seeing you.”
“And the apartment? Everything in order?”
“Of course. Your arrangements here have never failed.”
And everything was indeed in order: the cool white-painted hall, the ancient lift that took them five floors up, the penthouse apartment with its huge living room, the terrace with the blue-and-white-striped awning and the view over the city and the crowded harbor and away out to sea. He dropped his bag on the coffee table, took off his soiled jacket, and dumped it on the floor. She moved to pick it up.
“You look terrible, chéri,” she told him, and there was a certain tenderness in her voice. “I think you have come from a bad place.”
“From hell on earth. I would not have believed such evil could exist if I had not witnessed it with my own eyes.” He hesitated, then: “I killed a man for the first time in my life.”
She said calmly, “A bad man?”
“No, a truly evil man. A murderer of women and children.”
“Good,” she said. “God has already forgiven you. Sit down and rest. I’ll bring you a coffee with something in it perhaps, run you a bath, and see what’s available in the wardrobe. What you’re wearing will go out with the trash tomorrow.”
He sat on the couch by the coffee table, opened the bag and explored the false bottom, taking out further packets of dollars, the Makarov pistol, and a small electronic notebook of the kind that could only be opened by a code word. All these things he placed on the table, and last of all, he produced a mobile phone that looked like any other but definitely was not. It had unlimited range, a battery that never needed charging. With the press of a button, it was impossible to trace, and he did that now and entered the code of the person who had provided him the phone. She answered immediately, sounding breathless.
“You didn’t block your location,” she said. “I can see you’re in Beirut. Did you mean to do that?”
“No, I was careless,” he replied. “I didn’t expect to have to use the phone you gave me in Paris so soon. Where are you?”
“London, Hyde Park. So tell me, what’s happening?”
“I’ve done it. I’ve left Iran, left the nuclear facility. The nuclear bomb they’ve had me working on — in theory, it’s ready to produce, but they’d still need me to supervise the construction. I couldn’t stay any longer. I fled to Beirut, and I’m using an alias. They’ll come after me when they find there’s nothing on the computers.”
“You tried to wipe your research?” she said. “But they can still find it. There’s nothing that can’t be recovered these days.”
“I know, but it’ll slow them down. And I never put the most important data on the computer in the first place. All my calculations were worked out on paper and then destroyed.”
“But what about your mother and daughter? Your masters put them under house arrest to ensure your obedience.”
He was silent for a long moment. “No more. After Vahidi and I flew back from Paris, he disappeared. When he didn’t rejoin me at the nuclear facility, I asked questions, but nobody would tell me anything. Then I got an anonymous phone call. Apparently, he was driving them to an appointment when their car was hit. My mother, my daughter, they’re dead. Vahidi’s in a military hospital in serious condition.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh, I’m so very, very sorry. That’s terrible. And you mean to tell me the authorities are putting a lid on it? How stupid. They can’t keep that up for long. I wonder what they’ll do.”
“I didn’t stop to find out. I’ve been making preparations for years, false passports and money, in the hope that something would come up, although not something as dreadful as this. I left in the middle of the night, but obviously they’ll be after me.”
“So you haven’t left anything at all that could lead to a computer trail?”
“It’s all in my head, I told you.”
“Which means they’re going to try very hard to get ahold of you.”
“Then I’ll have to see that they don’t.”
They talked for a few minutes more, then he hung up.
Bibi, who had been standing behind the room screen listening with a frown, a striped towel over her arm, now smiled and entered.
“I’ve run a bath for you. You’ll feel much better after a nice long soak.”
He smiled. “You’re right.”
“I always am.” She ushered him into the bathroom, then came out again, closing the door.
A fantastic story. She’d always liked Ali LeBlanc. He was a decent man who’d looked after her well over the years, but what she’d overheard was too good to keep to herself, and there might even be money in it.
But who should she tell? The Army of God charity on the waterfront was a front for al-Qaeda, everybody knew that. There was the Café Marco next door. Its owner, Omar Kerim, was a genial thief interested only in money; his underlings were constantly stealing it for him all over Beirut. She knew him well, had once worked for him.
She made her decision, went into the kitchen, found a large linen shopping bag, and called, “I’m just going out to the market. I’ll be back soon.”
She stepped into the lift and went down, while in the bath, head raised and slightly turned, Ali LeBlanc slept.
TWO WEEKS EARLIER
NANTUCKET
LONDON
2
The wind roared as waves crashed in on the shore of the Nantucket beach but failed to drown the sound of the helicopter as it landed up at the house.
Former President Jack Cazalet said to his Secret Service man, Dalton, “Have General Ferguson brought straight down.”
Dalton nodded, cell phone to his ear, and Cazalet turned to meet the demands of his cherished flatcoat, Murchison. He picked up another stick to toss into the sea, and it was instantly retrieved and dropped at his feet as the jeep braked and Major General Charles Ferguson emerged.
“The salt is bad for his skin, Mr. President, he’ll need a good hosing. I’ve said that a few times over the years.” He held out his hand.
“So you have, old friend,” Cazalet told him. “Which can only mean that Murchison is getting a bit long in the tooth. You can cut out the title, by the way — there can only be one Mr. President.”
“Who offered me the use of his helicopter when he heard I was coming to New York, and suggested I drop in and see you on the way. I’m supposed to offer an opinion or two on the Middle East to some UN select committee or other.”
“Will the President
be there, too?”
“No, he’s on his way to the UK to spend a couple of days at the Prime Minister’s country retreat at Chequers. Then on to Berlin, Brussels, perhaps Paris.”
“Oh, the times I’ve spent at Chequers.” Cazalet laughed. “I used to love that place. I’ve been asked to put in an appearance at the UN myself — but I imagine you knew that.”
“Yes, I can’t deny it,” Ferguson said.
“I expected nothing less from the commander of the British Prime Minister’s private army. Isn’t that what they still call you people in the death trade?” He smiled. “You’ll stay the night, of course, and accept a lift in my helicopter to New York tomorrow?”
“That’s more than kind,” Ferguson said.
Lightning flickered on the horizon, thunder rumbled, it started to pour with rain. “Another stormy night,” said Cazalet. “Let’s get up to the house for the comforts of a decent drink, a log fire, and the turkey dinner Mrs. Boulder has been slaving over all afternoon.”
“That’s the best offer I’ve had in a very long time,” Ferguson said.
“In you get, then.” Cazalet smiled. “Let’s see if we can reach the point where I’ve flattered you sufficiently that you can tell me why you’ve really come to see me.”
* * *
The dinner was everything Cazalet had promised. The coffee and port were served, Murchison steamed on the rug in front of the fire, and Dalton sat at the end of the small bar by the archway to the kitchen at his usual state of readiness.
“Well, it’s an interesting situation,” Ferguson said. “It concerns a man named Simon Husseini. He was born in Iran to a French mother, his father an Iranian doctor who died of cancer years ago. Husseini followed in his father’s footsteps, and his work on medical isotopes has saved thousands of lives.”
“Good for him,” Cazalet said.
