Dirty Harry 10 - The Blood of Strangers

by Dane Hartman

  But more important than clothes and visuals, was the story itself. And that was the real reason she accepted invitations from these veteran correspondents to dine and drink with them. Most of them had been in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East for years, reporting on coups and massacres, air strikes, hijackings, and wars. Certainly, Kayyim’s name would have come up in a variety of situations over the years. Ellie, far from making a show of her knowledge, feigned a kind of naiveté, confirming in the minds of the men who met her their original opinion of her—that she was beautiful and charming and good company, but hardly much of a reporter.

  “Kayyim?” one of them, a LeMonde correspondent, asked. “How does it come that you know of him?”

  Ellie explained that she had seen him deliver a speech in L.A., adding that several million dollars went with this speech.

  “Notorious, très dangereuse,” was the Frenchman’s verdict. But he would add nothing to this. Ellie was already aware of how notorious and dangerous he was.

  More forthcoming was the representative of The London Telegraph.

  “Kayyim, bloody Kayyim,” he said. “Is he in town? Last I heard he was home in Tripoli.”

  “No, he came over here from the U.S. Any idea why he’d be here?”

  The Telegraph man threw up his hands. “It could be any number of reasons. Kayyim is always coming through here. The word is he’s a middleman, buying weapons from some bloke here, then seeing that they’re shipped to whatever part of the world Qaddafi wants to stir up trouble.”

  “You wouldn’t have any idea who this arms dealer might be?”

  The Englishman shook his head. “I’ve heard rumors, there’s nothing but rumors in Beirut, rumors and blood, but that’s not generally the sort of thing I cover. No one’s interested actually. Not with so much killing going on. But there is someone who might know.”

  “Can this person be found?”

  “With no problem. Tomorrow, if you’d like, we can go to him. He should be on the golf course at the usual time, around nine.”

  “Golf?”

  “Yes, of course, a jolly good player he is too.”

  “But golf in the middle of this madness?”

  The Telegraph man seemed surprised at the question. “Nine holes every day. You’ve got to stay sane somehow, you know.”

  Ellie agreed to meet him in the hotel lobby at eight so that she could talk to this indefatigable golfer and perhaps discover who Kayyim’s Beirut contact was. She dearly hoped she could get to him before Harry did. Although Harry had made a few concessions to her, she was certain he still regarded her as a nuisance. She meant to prove him wrong.

  Politely, she declined a nightcap with the gentleman from The Telegraph, insisting that she was exhausted, what with no sleep, jet lag and all the wine she’d consumed.

  She got herself back to her room, discarded her clothes, which were damp from so much running about, pulled on a robe, and went into the bathroom to take a shower—that is if the hot water was still working.

  The hot water was working, unlike a great many other things in Lebanon. With the water running, Ellie succeeded in blotting out the rumble of artillery that again threatened to disrupt the peace of Beirut’s night just as it did its day.

  Not only could she not hear the artillery outside the hotel, she could no longer hear what was taking place in her own room.

  David Whittier thought that at any moment he might start hallucinating, he was so tired. It was hard for him to believe that he had actually reached his destination and was standing in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel. He only prayed that Ellie was here and hadn’t changed her reservations or gone off to some other part of the world in endless pursuit of war and insurrections.

  The clerk behind the desk gazed up at him with puzzlement.

  “May I help you, sir?” he asked in correct English that reflected an education abroad,

  “Yes, I am looking for a Miss Ellie Winston, she’s a U.S. citizen and I understand she’s registered here.”

  With so few guests, the clerk had no difficulty recalling her. “Yes, sir, she is here.” He checked the room number. “Would you like to see if she’s in her room?”

  Whittier was so relieved he had not come all this way for nothing that he temporarily forgot his plan to surprise her and signaled the clerk to do so.

  The clerk stood for a while with the phone in his hand. Then he said, “I’m afraid, sir, she is not in her room. Would you like to leave a message?”

  “Better than that, I’d like to have a room if one is available,”

  It was probably not wise, he thought, to assume that she would want to share a room with him while she was on assignment. Still he requested a double in the hope that once he talked to her, she would come around and move in with him. He’d pictured this reunion so many times on the three airlines he’d had to take to get to Beirut that he no longer had any idea what to expect. Maybe she would greet him with open arms, grateful that she had such a bold and passionate lover who would follow her halfway around the world; or maybe she would upbraid him for intruding on her life and complicating an already messy situation.

  No matter. He was here and she would just have to deal with it. Before he was ready to follow the porter up to his room, he asked the clerk if it was possible to purchase a bottle of champagne.

  Tired as he was, he still meant to celebrate with Ellie, no matter what time she got in.

  “Of course, sir. You may order from the bar. Alcohol is always on hand for our guests. Sometimes there is nothing else to do here but drink.”

  It was his only allusion to the internecine struggle going on in the city.

  Whittier then leaned forward and thrust an American banknote into the clerk’s hand. “You wouldn’t mind telling me Miss Winston’s room number, would you?”

  The clerk appraised the denomination of the note and said that he wouldn’t mind at all.

  Neither the clerk nor Whittier realized that their entire exchange had been monitored by a man who sat in an overstaffed chair pretending to read a copy of the international edition of Time.

  But as soon as the American had disappeared with the porter into the elevator, he sprang up from his chair and, using the stairs, hastened to Ellie Winston’s room.

  He might never again have an opportunity to bug the room and he intended to exploit it to the fullest. All the necessary electronic equipment had been provided to him on the stopover in London by Alpha Group’s English based operatives. The Small Man had had plenty of practice installing miniature devices that could pick up both whispered conversations and discussions over the telephone.

  There was no one in the hallway. From a room way off to the left, he could hear the raucous voices of bored journalists playing yet another round of poker.

  On the off chance Ellie had come back in the brief interval since the clerk had called up to her room, he rapped lightly on the door. Hearing no response, he easily tripped the lock with a credit card—a false one, naturally—and let himself in.

  It was only then that he heard the shower running. His first impulse was to return later. But then he decided he would stay and insert the bugs. There were only three of them and he was convinced he could plant them in just a few minutes.

  He went about the installation of the devices as silently as he could in the event that she should suddenly shut off the shower. The phone would take the longest; to plant the bug, he had to partially disassemble the receiver. And so he put this off for the last. The other two were simply dropped into convenient locations—one behind the bedboard, the other on the underside of the bureau.

  As he prepared to twist off the speaking component from the receiver, he stopped, at the sound of footsteps. It was too late to do anything. There were voices, a key was turning in the lock.

  Instinctively, the Small Man understood what had happened. Whittier—for he had in the course of their long journey learned his name—had been too impatient and had decided on waiting for
Ellie in her own room. As he had bribed the clerk to tell him his lover’s room number, he had undoubtedly bribed the porter to admit him into her room.

  There was nowhere to hide. Certainly not in the bathroom. His only consolation was that the shower was still on and that Ellie was so far oblivious to the fact that her room had been invaded. He was under strict instruction not to give himself away. The tail was supposed to be discreet.

  The door was open, the porter was gesturing the American inside. The Small Man took up a position behind the bureau where he would not immediately be seen.

  Whittier thanked the porter and shut the door behind him. He stepped over to the bureau and set down a bottle on top of it. Champagne to celebrate their reunion.

  It was only then that he heard the shower and realized that she was there after all.

  He called to her, but not loud enough so that she could hear him over the surge of water.

  At that point, the Small Man acted. The PK Walther he held in his hand possessed a silencer—which was ironic in a city where people announced their intention to kill with the thunderous discharge of mortars, machine guns, and howitzers,

  “What the hell . . . ?” Whittier managed to get out. He was pale enough from the interminable flight. Now the sheets, turned down by the maid for the night, looked healthier than he did.

  “Goodbye,” the Small Man said. Never having shown any hesitation before, the Small Man did not start now. Before Whittier could do so much as lift a finger, the Small Man fired twice—right into Whittier’s head.

  The first bullet probably did not do too much damage; it entered his right cheek, but was deflected somehow by his teeth so that it ended coming out the left. An unseemly mess, but certainly not fatal. The second bullet, however, was better targeted and penetrated above the ridge of the nose, finding a home deep within the occipital lobe of the brain. The whites of his eyes clouded with blood and he fell to the floor.

  With no time to concern himself with the telephone, the Small Man set about opening the door and dragging his victim out into the empty hallway. Despite his diminutive size, he possessed considerable strength in his wiry arms and he managed this task with a minimum of strain. Shutting the door behind him, he pulled the body halfway down the hall, careful to keep his head up so that he would not produce an unsightly trail of blood in his wake.

  At the end of the hall, he found a door marked Incinerator and it was there he consigned his charge. Sooner or later someone would discover Whittier—without his papers which the Small Man had made certain to remove—whether whole or charred, but it would be of no consequence. Corpses were always turning up in Beirut, who would bother to worry about one more?

  Then the Small Man went on his way.

  Ellie felt refreshed now that her shower was over. It had been a long shower, but she felt it had been necessary to purge herself of the sweat and grime that had accumulated after more than twenty-four hours in this unholy capital. Wrapping herself in a towel, she opened the bathroom door and stepped into her room.

  It was only when she seated herself before the mirror that she had the sense that something was not quite right, something in the room was out of place, but she would be damned if she could figure out what it was. Then she looked over to her right, close to the door that led out into the hallway, and saw the fresh bloodstains there. She suppressed a scream and went to the phone.

  There was something wrong with the phone. So she threw on her robe and hurried down to the lobby to demand another room. She was matter-of-fact about her reasons for doing so. She told the clerk her room had been broken into and blood left on her carpet. She assumed it was some sort of warning.

  The clerk was apologetic and offered her her choice of rooms. In this season, with this war on, he said, finding a room was no problem.

  The clerk believed nothing of her story. He assumed that her angry outburst had something to do with the appearance of the American registered in Room 617. That was why he failed to mention Whittier’s arrival to her; he feared that he would only provoke her further and wind up being blamed for interfering in her personal life. Let the Americans handle it their own way, he figured, there were too many other conflicts going on without concerning himself with their domestic squabbles.

  Although the break-in had thrown a scare into her, Ellie remained undaunted, and the following morning, promptly at eight, she was down in the lobby to meet Doug Lawson, the Telegraph correspondent. He had a cart full of clubs with him and a scrawny Lebanese boy whom Ellie assumed to be his caddy.

  “Might as well get some playing in myself as long as we’re going to be out there,” he said.

  Ellie shook her head but said nothing.

  There might be a war on, and might be scars on the landscape from mortar shells, but the greens were still nicely kept up. Under an early sun that had already driven the thermometer up to eighty degrees, several golfers were making their way to the ninth hole. The city was relatively quiet at this hour, the only sounds were those of clubs thwacking balls and sprinklers jettisoning water over the lawns.

  “Ah, there’s our man!” Lawson said, pointing out a dour-faced man of indeterminate age. “And right on time too.”

  They hurried over to him, with the Lebanese boy trailing behind.

  The man wore khakis and a bowler hat and had the air of a colonialist kept too long in a backwater province. He looked up to see who wanted him. He regarded Ellie in her chic white sleeveless dress with interest.

  “Who is this you’ve got here, Lawson?”

  “Miss Ellie Winston, San Francisco’s contribution to anchorwomen.”

  “Ah, an anchorwoman,” the man remarked. “That odd American phenomenon. The name is Vincent Hull.” He took her hand in greeting; Ellie was surprised to find that his grip was unsteady. Maybe palsy, more likely drink.

  “Miss Winston is interested in running down Kayyim.”

  “Oh?” Hull turned his eyes back to the ball on the ground and with one elegant motion swung his club and sent the ball up into the air. It seemed to disappear into the blue of the horizon, but Hull apparently knew where it had gone—right into the rough. “Shit,” he muttered and began marching to recover it. The others followed behind.

  “Why are you so interested in Kayyim?”

  Confidently, Ellie replied that she was pursuing a lead and that she hoped to discover how he financed an international terrorist network on behalf of his government.

  “That could get you into trouble,” Hull said.

  “It already has.”

  This stopped him. He studied her for a moment. “Yes, I believe it has at that.” He continued on until he came to the rough, then started his search for the ball. “You might say that I am an old Lebanese hand. Been around here for years. Was even here in the days Eisenhower sent the Marines landing on the beaches. I was here for the civil war in ’75. Been here ever since.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Which makes me a damn fool, don’t you think?”

  It was a rhetorical question, he didn’t want or need an answer.

  “So you want to find Kayyim,” he continued. To Lawson he said, “You remember the old Pickwick?”

  “The pub, yes, why?”

  “Two doors down from it, on rue Makdessi, there’s a building that in the last few months has been converted into a warehouse. Whenever Kayyim’s in town that’s where he eventually ends up,”

  “And what’s in this warehouse?” Ellie asked.

  “Why, Miss Winston, I am surprised at you. I would have thought you’d already guessed. Arms, Miss Winston, enough arms to blow the entire Levant sky high.”

  “Could you take me there?”

  Hull looked positively aghast. “Do you think I am mad? I haven’t survived in this part of the world this long by going where I don’t belong. You are welcome to commit suicide. Me, I prefer a slow fading into the twilight, if you don’t mind,”

  They left him there, scouring the rough for his lost ball. Ellie now posed
the same question to Lawson that she had to Hull. But Lawson was no more inclined to visit the warehouse on rue Makdessi than his acquaintance had been. “I think I prefer to play my nine holes and spend the afternoon over a few bitters actually. And I would recommend a similar schedule for you, Miss Winston. I shouldn’t go much farther with this, it could get rather sticky. If you know what I mean.”

  But Ellie, knowing full what he meant, had every intention of paying a visit to the warehouse. She thanked Lawson for helping her get this far and left him at the first hole.

  She had just gotten off the green when the first artillery barrage of the morning began. It was furious and loud—quite close. The answering fire, from Syrian peacekeeping forces, was equally loud—and equally close.

  Directly overhead, there was a painful shriek as a rocket slued down toward the green. Ellie had been in Beirut only a day and a half, but it was long enough for her to comprehend the danger she was in. She threw herself down, her hands over her head, though this protective gesture was, she realized, a rather futile one.

  The rocket landed several hundred yards downrange, producing an enormous roar and a black cloud of smoke. The battle continued, but no other rockets came near the golf course that morning. The fact that this one had hit the green was probably a mistake, an error committed by an artillery commander, a slight maladjustment in the sighting.

  Whatever the case, this error had left a vast crater where the first hole had been, and nothing but a few shreds of clothing and charred bone to indicate that Doug Lawson and his caddy had once been among the living.

  C H A P T E R

  T e n

  Harry opened his eyes. He wasn’t sure whether he had dozed off or not, but one thing was certain: he was fully conscious now. The lunatics were at it again, filling the air with gunfire and lobbing shells back and forth.

  Peering out through the slats of the barrier, he renewed his vigil. He could not be sure that he hadn’t missed Kayyim, but he decided he would wait another few hours before giving up. Having been in this abandoned grocery store for some fifteen hours, he was terribly thirsty. Hunger was there too, but he did not feel it nearly as acutely.