Reprisal

by Ian Barclay

  Dartley was unshaven and wore a straw hat and dark sunglasses. He looked like a hungover tourist the morning after a big night in the fleshpots of Cairo. At least he looked different than he had the previous day, and the hat concealed his American-style, short-clipped hair. He carried no weapons.

  He reached the cafe about ten minutes before noon, having taken a taxi within several hundred yards of it to cut down on the chance of another sidewalk incident. Gottlieb was already there, sitting before a coffee and leafing through an Arabic newspaper. Dartley ignored him, sat two tables away, ordered coffee and glanced through the Cairo Press Review, a government-controlled, English-language digest of newspaper articles, these days mostly devoted to abuse of the West and what was described as “the lair of the Devil,” otherwise known as Washington, D.C.

  At twelve precisely, Dr. Mustafa Bakkush entered the cafe and sat at a table near the two men. Dartley was amused at the startled look on Gottlieb’s face, and it was clear that the Israeli agent knew who Bakkush was. The Egyptian scientist had hardly glanced at them and now ordered a coffee with an abstracted air. Then he sat staring out into space without touching it.

  Dartley had observed before how the mullahs herded what looked to be a group of scientists and technicians several times a day out of the Citadel to a nearby mosque, presumably to point their heads toward Mecca and pray. Bakkush was adept at giving the group the slip before it reached the mosque and slipping into this cafe for a spell. Dartley could have spoken to him on the street, but saw no reason for not doing it in more comfort.

  Dartley kept his voice low. “What process are you using?”

  The Egyptian nervously twisted his head toward Dartley at the sound of English. “Pardon?”

  Dartley wasted no time. “A while ago your wife and kids were put in big boxes. I’ll chop ’em up and put ’em in cans if that’s the way you want it.”

  “What do you wish to know?” the scientist asked in quiet desperation.

  “What method are you using?”

  “Plutonium.”

  Dartley had his answer. Ahmed Hasan was making a bomb and using French reactors to process the nuclear charge.

  “Forget you ever talked to me,” Dartley told him and left the cafe.

  Gottlieb followed him out after a minute, got in a small gray Peugeot, and stopped to pick up Dartley farther down the street. “What now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s it? You’re ready to return to America?”

  “Mission complete,” Dartley confirmed.

  * * *

  Gottlieb and Pritchett sat on wooden chairs in a nearly bare, one-room apartment in an odorous Cairo slum. They could hardly hear each other with the noise from the street.

  Gottlieb looked about him at the floorboards and unadorned green walls. “I didn’t want to have to set up a meet with you, but I thought the information on your middleman, Omar Zekri, was worth our getting together. When will he get here?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  After a pause Gottlieb asked, “How good is your source on the wheat expert?”

  “Good. The best. Langley says he isn’t one of ours.”

  “Have they any reason to make you want to think so?”

  Pritchett shrugged. “Maybe they have. But if so, why tell me to track him down and okay my working together with you?”

  “I admit it sounds like he’s not CIA,” Gottlieb conceded. “I’d place my bet on the Pentagon then.”

  “No. They’d have come clean with us. I tell you he’s State Department. And it pisses me off that they send him in right under my nose and think I’m not going to notice.”

  Pritchett was genuinely mad about this, Gottlieb decided. In fact, the embassy CIA man seemed a great deal more upset about this mysterious, so-called wheat expert who went by the name of Thomas Lewis and claimed to be CIA than he was about the treachery and double dealings of Omar Zekri. Pritchett had surprised Gottlieb when he had suggested a meeting with him by calling him back right away on a secure line and telling him that the CIA had cleared their cooperation with the Mossad already. Pritchett had been waiting for his call. Gottlieb knew that if permission for them to work together had been granted, there was probably a coded message already waiting for him at his drop-off point. He would check tomorrow. In the meantime, he’d help any way he could.

  “You checked all exit points?” Gottlieb asked.

  “He certainly hasn’t left Egypt under the name of Thomas Lewis. I wouldn’t be doing all this if I didn’t think he was staying on. Now that he knows the bomb is to be made with plutonium, his next move could be anything. Except go home, like he told you he was going to. By the way, I should add that your people have denied he’s one of theirs.”

  Gottlieb grinned. “I was beginning to think of that possibility.”

  There was a rap on the door. Gottlieb pulled a ski mask over his face. As he went to the door, Pritchett wondered idly where in Egypt the Israeli had been able to obtain a ski mask.

  Omar Zekri stood in the doorway with a nervous, ingratiating smile on his face. He shook Pritchett’s hand with a soft, damp palm and tittered at the sight of the man wearing the ski mask. Pritchett looked out into the stairwell, then closed the door and bolted it. The American left the Egyptian to stand uneasily before the masked man sitting on a wooden chair in the bare room. He pulled the wooden shutters over the windows, which caused the street noise to lessen and the room to grow dim. Then he came back and sat in his wooden chair and stared at Zekri. The Egyptian looked about him. There was no third chair. He took a cigarette from his pack, then thought to offer the pack to the two seated men. They shook their heads, but said nothing. Omar touched the flame of his lighter to the cigarette tip and anxiously eyed his surroundings.

  Pritchett spoke one word: “Talk.”

  “What about?” Omar flicked some ash from his cigarette and waited.

  Pritchett climbed to his feet and went to a back corner of the room. He turned on the single faucet over a deep porcelain sink and plugged its drain with a wadded paper bag.

  Omar moved toward the door.

  “Come back!” Pritchett barked.

  Omar stopped.

  The man in the mask spoke for the first time. “We want to hear all your dealings. Everything you’ve been doing. Name everybody.”

  “Only Mr. Pritchett and the contacts he knows about,” Omar said. “No one else.”

  Pritchett looked behind him. The big sink was nearly full. He nodded to Gottlieb.

  The two men moved swiftly toward Zekri, seized him by the arms and dragged him to the sink. Pritchett forced his head under the surface of the water, which ran over the sides of the sink onto their shoes and the floorboards. Pritchett seemed to be counting to himself. After about a half minute, he let Omar raise his head, exhale and gasp air into his lungs before pressing his head under the water again for another half minute. The CIA man allowed Zekri to fill his lungs each time he raised his head and did not lengthen the periods during which his head was under water. All the same, it wasn’t long before the Egyptian’s gasps and rasping intake of air became louder and more desperate.

  Then he vomited half-digested food onto the surface of the water. It splattered on all their pants legs. Pritchett displayed no anger or disgust as he calmly forced Omar’s face into the floating vomit and down into the water beneath.

  The next time up, Omar threw up clear water between hysterical sobs. Pritchett allowed him a few deep breaths before ducking him under once again.

  This time Omar began to struggle wildly in their grip, heaving his shoulders from side to side and attempting to force his head up into the air. Pritchett let him struggle until he panicked.

  Then he dragged the Egyptian’s head out of the water for a little more than a second and splashed it back under as Omar was taking a breath.

  A few seconds later, Pritchett nodded to Gottlieb, and they released the Egyptian. Omar lifted his head from beneath the surface and lean
ed against the sink for support as he upchucked water, wheezed from the water in his windpipe and lungs, tried to swallow huge mouthfuls of oxygen for his starving blood. He did not have to be told again to start talking. As soon as he was able to, he began chattering on at length about everything he knew.

  The fact that the Egyptians were previewing and presumably altering military information from Omar’s informants before he passed it on to the American Embassy was news to Pritchett and Gottlieb. They had been careful not to press Zekri for specific information or give him any opportunity to limit what he need tell them. Omar knew that if he held back anything they knew about, he was headed for the sink again—or maybe something worse.

  He told them about Awad and Zaid, what they had done to Ali, how they had told him they would wait for the American on Zamalek Island.

  “I want you to apologize to Thomas Lewis,” Pritchett said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Find him.”

  Omar nodded. He was good at finding people in the vast mess of the city. “You want me to learn more about him?”

  “If you can,” Pritchett agreed. “The main thing is for you to locate him. Warn him about Awad and Zaid, but not about me.”

  The soaked Egyptian beamed with gratitude at this definitive sign he would not be killed. “I can do it,” he said cheerfully.

  “As for this Egyptian military censor,” Pritchett continued, “pretend to go along with the arrangement. But before you take stuff for him to see, bring it to us first, then take it to him so he can change it, then bring it to us again as if we knew nothing.”

  Omar laughed and wrung water from his shirt. “That makes me a triple agent,” he said with satisfaction.

  Getting to Ahmed Hasan, president of Egypt, was going to be a bigger job than cornering Mustafa Bakkush. Although Richard Dartley had no particular plan in mind and had no knowledge of Hasan’s movements—which he assumed would be deliberately made unpredictable for the president’s safety—he was not feeling overwhelmed by the difficulties. Experience had taught him not to make too much of difficulties. In the first place, things never worked out as planned and unexpected opportunities usually cropped up, which if taken could change everything.

  When Dartley had first started out as a professional assassin, he had been a meticulous planner down to the last detail. He still made detailed plans when he could, at the same time realizing he would only rarely be able to predict and plan an operation with blòw-by-blow accuracy. The chance encounter, the unexpected coincidence, the lucky break or persistent bad luck, an unforeseeable event… in Dartley’s experience these were the things which rendered any but the simplest plans into wishful thinking—daydreams.

  But just as the unexpected usually upset a complex plan and made it useless, so too could unexpected events be relied on to make what looked nearly impossible happen. What it took was persistence and readiness to move at an instant’s notice when the opportunity presented itself. From what Dartley saw of the chaos around him in Cairo, he guessed that Ahmed Hasan and his administration were hanging loose rather than buttoned down. Anything could happen here. And it probably did several times a day to Ahmed Hasan. Richard Dartley was determined to make himself one of those unexpected things that happened to Hasan. In the very near future.

  He saw the president fairly often, since the country’s leader seemed to rush back and forth from his presidential palace to the Citadel in a demented way at all hours. Dartley never saw him as a person because his guards and assistants stayed close to him when he traveled through the streets. The president was most vulnerable when he traveled in his yellow, two-seat Jaguar—there he had to be either the driver or the passenger. More often he simply piled into an army Jeep or Range Rover, or even a truck, along with everyone else. Occasionally he used a black Mercedes limo.

  Whatever vehicle Hasan used, it was always preceded and followed by open Jeeps or closed Range Rovers, loaded with teenagers in camouflage battle fatigues. Some were pretty girls who somehow evaded the dress code for women that the mullahs were demanding against much resistance. Occasionally, one of the presidential guards fired his or her automatic rifle into the air to help clear a traffic jam. When the presidential cavalcade was underway, the sirens screamed, the flags fluttered and the drivers performed high-speed maneuvers through the city streets.

  This setup was hardly an assassin’s dream.

  Dartley could now find his way around Cairo with ease. He kept to overcrowded thoroughfares, where he would be hard to spot in the throngs of people and crazy traffic. It wasn’t hard to find these streets in Cairo. He avoided all the places that foreigners and tourists frequented. Each day he was stopped by police, usually in plainclothes, who asked to see his passport. This never happened less than three times a day, and on one day he was stopped eight times. He took to leaving a five-pound Egyptian note folded inside his passport. The note was always gone each time he got the passport back.

  Dartley assumed that, like government agencies everywhere, the Egyptian police forces did not properly communicate with one another because of rivalries and so forth. While one group was hunting him, others were letting him slip through their fingers several times a day. He came to depend on such bureaucratic fumbling for his freedom.

  In addition to interdepartmental foul-ups, the cop on the street often had no way of knowing the priorities of his superiors. The man on the street had his own realities and his own problems, which were usually very different from those of highly placed administrators. A man whose job consisted of watching for pickpockets and motor scooter thieves at the suqs, bazaars and marketplaces could not readily tell one foreigner from another. He was not about to mess with foreigners in the first place because they spelled trouble. Their consulates would complain about police brutality, dirty cells, lack of food, demands for bribes—there was no end to what foreigners thought they could complain about and raise hell to try to change things, sometimes bringing all sorts of unwelcome attention and pressure from superiors who pretended not to know what went on. A man who brought these kinds of things down on his colleagues through his mistake of an unwise arrest would be a man without friends. Why take the chance with these unknown foreigners? Let them be. Pickpockets and motor scooter thieves played by the rules.

  So Dartley reckoned he had little to fear from regular cops on the street. Yet his trained eye kept watch for special squads. His run-ins before had not been with regular cops. These men were secret police or members of an intelligence group. They looked no more like cops than a CIA operative resembled a cop on a beat. All the same, they shared one thing with policemen everywhere in the world—the habit of always scanning their surroundings with watchful looks. Every cop and intelligence operative developed this habit unknown to himself. The really good ones were careful to conceal their watchfulness.

  It was the watchfulness of two men on the street which attracted Dartley’s attention to them. Most passersby gave a foreigner a look of frank curiosity, then lost interest. These two men each gave him a fast appraising look and then studiously avoided looking at him again. Danger. At first Dartley could not be sure they were together. They were walking toward him, one maybe ten paces ahead of the other. They both fixed him for an instant with the same piercing look, followed by studied indifference as they passed by.

  Dartley walked on. He knew that if he looked behind him now, he would see that both of them had reversed direction and were following him. But to look back at them would be to acknowledge their presence and invite arrest. Were they following him? Or was he becoming paranoid? Paranoia was a risk for everyone in his line of work. While paranoia was taking suspicions too far, a hitman who did not take his suspicions far enough would not survive long.

  Were they following him? He turned into a narrow side street and followed it across several major streets intersecting with it, walking purposefully but unhurriedly and never looking behind him. Three hookers stood in a doorway. As he neared them, they twisted their h
ips, batted their eyes and said hello in English.

  Dartley pointed at the prettiest one, said, “You,” and pushed her in the door ahead of him. Surprised at his sudden response, the two left behind made loud remarks in Arabic, which made the girl he was with giggle. Dammit, Dartley thought, I should have taken all three of them.

  He pushed the woman out of his way in the dark, smelly hallway and ran up a flight of stairs to a window looking out on the front. He waited and watched, ignoring the woman’s demands for money. She grew curious, quieted down and watched also.

  Dartley wasn’t getting paranoid. His two tails had worried looks on their faces, looking this way and that, alternately hurrying and slowing down. They were on opposite sides of the narrow street, on sidewalks so narrow they had to step off when they met someone else. Occasional cars shot by at sixty miles per hour, grazing the pedestrians’ shoulders in typical Cairo style.

  He saw the two women in the doorway withdraw inside. They too knew cops when they saw them, and the law had been hard on female prostitutes since the Light of Islam mullahs had gained power. Dartley had read about how some mullahs were demanding that they be stoned to death.

  The men stopped outside the door. The near one beckoned the women out. They reluctantly obeyed. Dartley watched the man’s mouth moving as he spoke to the women and he saw the nodding of their heads. One pointed farther along the street, and the two men moved on fast.

  The woman next to him giggled. Dartley sent her downstairs with a twenty-pound note for each of them, knowing that it wasn’t him they wished to protect, but their colleague, yet figuring that a bit of generosity hurt no man.

  As he waited for her to return, he measured his own reactions to the incident. He felt cold and rational. If the women had given him away, he would either have escaped or walked away after having left both men dead. He was not sure how he would have killed them, but he was calmly convinced he could have done so if necessary. Dartley was pleased with his own attitude. Any man could psyche himself into thinking he was ready to handle any situation; Dartley knew that it took an actual confrontation for the truth to out. Pressure was the only test. Any wimp could feel he was a hotshot when there was no threat on the horizon.