by Ian Barclay
“Can I help you, sir?”
The harsh challenge in the voice startled them. Hasan’s right hand dived into the pocket of his raincoat. Naim stepped forward to meet the light-footed short man who had come up behind them unexpectedly. He had the battered face of an old pro boxer—or a jockey.
“My name is Abdullah al-Shatila,” Naim said smoothly, shaking the man’s hand. “My associates and I represent the interests of Sheik Ibn-Saud.”
That was all he needed to say. The man saw oil-rich Arabs with an interest in thoroughbreds, a welcome sight in this part of the world at any hour of day.
“The boss is out looking at a new filly, sir. He should be back in half an hour or so. Do you mind waiting?”
“Not at all,” Naim answered. “May we look around?”
“I’m afraid not, sir. Not without the boss’s permission. You’ll understand that, I’m sure.”
“You’re quite right,” Naim said approvingly. “If the sheik had horses here, he would not want strangers roaming around. We’ll wait here for Mr. Fitzpatrick.”
This was going exactly the way they wanted. They hoped the trainer would be in no hurry back. It was a clear, dry morning with a nip in the air. If what the magazine writers said was true, Morton Schiff should be along very shortly in one of his maroon Rolls-Royces.
While they waited, Naim detailed what they would do. “Hasan, you sit behind the wheel of the BMW. Any trouble, you come to our aid. Ali, you and I will let Schiff come as close to us as possible—wait until you hear me say the word now. Then we draw our pistols. You shoot the bodyguard on your side, I’ll take the one on mine. Then we both empty our guns into Schiff.”
“First we take out the bodyguards,” Ali confirmed.
“If there are more than two or if we bungle things,” Naim went on, “Hasan uses an Armalite from inside the car. If all goes well, we leave the same way as we came in, return to the farmhouse, and take the boat to France after dark.”
“Sounds good,” Hasan said and got behind the BMW’s wheel. He rolled down the windows fully.
After a short while they heard the thud of hooves from the field next to them and saw three horses thunder by, their riders standing in the short stirrups so that they were not actually sitting on the horses’ backs. The animals’ snorting and panting were even louder than the pounding of their hooves on the dirt. They moved away across the field again with amazing speed and grace, their manes and tails flaring.
The three men grew alert when they heard the sounds of tires on the gravel drive. Without pretending to be looking, they waited to catch sight of the car as it emerged from the trees lining the drive. It was a Land Rover—followed by a maroon Rolls-Royce.
The driver of the Land Rover got out and casually looked them over. Then the Rolls driver emerged and held open the back door. A gray-haired man with black bushy eyebrows and an aggressively thrusting chin climbed out. Morton Schiff was younger looking and stronger looking than his newspaper photos indicated. He was alone in the back of the car.
“Let them come closer,” Naim said softly in Arabic to Ali, who was getting jumpy.
Both of them stood holding their cocked pistols in raincoat pockets. It would only require a second to draw the weapons and another second to fire them.
Schiff and his two bodyguards, one on either side of him, came closer. When they were about twenty paces away, Schiff said something to them. In an instant the three of them had drawn revolvers and were pointing them at Naim and Ali.
“Freeze, you motherfuckers!” Schiff rasped. “Move one muscle and I’ll blow you apart. You in the car, let me see your hands.”
Naim and Ali stood motionless, their concealed right hands holding their pistols.
“Hey, I’ll nail you if I don’t see your hands in another second, bastard!” Schiff shouted to Hasan in the car.
An object flew out of the BMW’s side window and landed almost at Schiff’s feet.
“Grenade!” Schiff yelled. “Cover!”
He and the two bodyguards threw themselves behind their vehicles about a second before the grenade burst into a thick cloud of harmless yellow smoke.
Dartley, lying facedown in the dirt behind the Rolls, heard the BMW’s engine start. He yanked off one of the bushy false eyebrows which had slipped down over his left eye. He called to Schiff’s two bodyguards, “It’s only a smoke grenade. Don’t let them get away.”
As he ran through the blinding smoke in the direction of the engine’s sound, he heard the second car start up. This was nearer. He would have a better chance at it. He changed direction slightly and ran like hell so he could get out of the smoke and make visual contact with a target.
By the time Dartley found his way out of the smoke, the first car was already headed for the drive. The second car’s driver accelerated too fast and the wheels spun on the gravel before gaining traction. Dartley fired a slug through the rear window but missed the driver. He had only five shots left in his .357 Magnum and he couldn’t afford to waste any. He dropped to the ground, held the revolver in both hands, balanced on his elbows, and blasted off three shots just beneath the car’s rear fender. One or more bullets punctured the gas tank. The heat of the slug rupturing the steel tank wall ignited the gas, which expanded explosively in the tank’s enclosed space.
The Audi’s back end lifted off the ground on a ball of flame. The car crashed down and slowed to a stop as it burned vigorously. The driver opened his door and ran for the cover of the tree-lined avenue. Once more Dartley’s vision was obscured by smoke, this time pungent black smoke from the burning Audi. He began to run after the man but stopped when he saw the two bodyguards.
“Take the Rolls,” he shouted to them. “Go after the two in the BMW. I’ll handle this one here.”
The two bodyguards did what he said, having been instructed by Schiff to take orders from Dartley. Dartley’s transatlantic call from London had been to Charley Woodgate. Charley had contacts and managed to reach the financier by phone after the market closed and before he left for Westchester Airport, north of New York City. Charley told him to stay home and just send his plane and bodyguards. But Morton Schiff was made of sterner stuff than that: he wanted to see his horse race and no one was going to stop him from doing so. Dartley had some trouble persuading him not to come along to his trainer’s that morning.
When the fleeing Palestinian heard the Rolls come down the drive, he ran between the trees, climbed the white-painted wood fence, and cut across the field, heading for another fence and a wooded hillside. If he reached that cover, he would be hard to find and would have the advantage over the searchers.
Dartley saw him go and went over the fence after him.
Ali cursed himself for not having jumped in the BMW with Naim and Hasan. He did not want to be captured now—before they had really begun their campaign of terror against the treaty signers. Think what an honor it would be for the three of them to terrorize the twelve Common Market countries into obedience to the June 4–New Arab Social Front! Three individual freedom fighters against all the European colonialists, the pigs who had bled the Arab world dry all these years, who had stolen their oil while winking at the Zionists. They had helped the Israelis kill his brother—he was sure of it. He could not let his glorious struggle end so quickly. He must not be captured!
Besides, he was looking forward to some more good times. They would be back in the Montparnasse apartment the day after tomorrow, and it would be time to celebrate. Those girls were expensive, and so too was vintage champagne, fine old cognac and high-quality hashish. But Hasan and he didn’t have to worry about cash. Since they started reporting to Naim, money had been more plentiful than ever. That was too good to give up. He would enjoy it all the more after having nearly lost everything here. Ali was always like that. A thing had almost to be taken from him before he valued it. He must not be captured!
These thoughts went through his mind as he ran across the field, the blood pounding in his temples, gaspi
ng for breath. He knew he was not as graceful as those horses they had seen galloping earlier. In fact, he was a lot less fit these days than he had been after coming out of the training camp. The months of easy living in Europe had softened him. If only he could have gone on like that, without these stupid attacks which would gain his people nothing except everyone’s fear and dislike… He had never wanted to kill anyone. No, he must not allow himself to think like that. It was a true sign of weakness. He was becoming corrupt. He must be hard and pure, burn like a flame….
Dartley steadily gained on the man fleeing across the field. Although his line of sight was clear, the moving man was too far away for an accurate revolver shot. Dartley could see that he was not going to reach him before he made the cover of the trees and scrub on the small hill, but by then he would be no more than a hundred yards behind him. After that it would get interesting.
The Palestinian stopped at the base of the hill, just before he reached cover, and ran to the left. Dartley didn’t know why he did this. He cut across and gained further on his quarry. Then Dartley saw what had made the Palestinian turn. A small but deep stream wound around the base of the hill, almost invisible from a distance in its grass banks.
The Arab seemed headed now for a rectangular stone ruin that stood the height of a modern six-story building. Dartley supposed it was a Norman keep—certainly those who built it were expecting trouble from their neighbors. Its stone walls rose sheer from the ground, pierced by slits for archers and spearmen. The Palestinian ran into a small doorway at its base, stood there looking back at Dartley for a moment, then disappeared inside.
Going in that doorway would be suicide. Presumably the man was armed. Dartley raced for the walls before his opponent could gain a vantage point from which to pick him off as he approached. He came around one corner of the keep and saw in the next wall that the stones had fallen out in the one part, revealing a staircase. This hole in the wall was about fifteen feet above the ground. Dartley climbed up the fallen rubble and found toeholds in the massive building blocks. He crawled into the stone staircase on his hands and knees. The staircase wound tightly like a corkscrew, from left to right. It smelled dank and was cold, dark, and silent.
Dartley climbed the carved stone steps that wound in a spiral. Two openings led to passageways, and he followed one until he came to an opening that looked into the interior. The roof and floors were gone, the inside was open to the sky, grass and nettles grew at the bottom. The passageway in which he stood led through the thickness of the wall. He could see from other openings that it went around all four walls and returned to the staircase that he had ascended. Above him openings around the hollow interior indicated the presence of two more passageways like this. There was probably at least one other staircase as well—the one the Palestinian was using.
As Dartley searched with his eyes for any movement and listened for any sound, he did not realize that he was presenting himself as a target. Ali, on the same level and on the opposite side, watched him through a bowman’s slit carved through solid rock. He propped the butt of his Llama pistol on the bottom of the niche, squinted along the top of the barrel until he found the American’s chest, then squeezed off three rapid shots.
The three bullets cracked off the stone next to Dartley’s left shoulder, bounced off the wall behind his head, and sang over his right shoulder as they traveled back into the keep’s interior. He figured that this was unintentional hustler stuff—that the Arab hadn’t wanted to show off, only to plug him. And he had been dumb enough to show himself as a full-length portrait in a stone frame.
He raced back along the passageway and up the stone stairs, ignoring the next pair of passageway openings, and the next, climbing until he came to the battlements. These were no more than the flattened top of all four walls, bordered on the outside by a waist-high wall of foot-thick rocks. Opposite his position the other staircase opened on the battlements. There were only two staircases, but the Palestinian could change from one to the other on any of the levels, unseen by Dartley, through the passageways inside the walls. He could also sneak off along the fields, leaving Dartley king of the castle.
Dartley looked down over the outer wall at the green grass far below. He could see across the countryside for miles. The horse trainer’s mansion was visible and also the burning Audi beneath its column of black smoke. Workers were throwing buckets of water on it. Along a road far across the fields, he saw a large car of a distinctive maroon color. He guessed they had lost the BMW and were returning. Maybe they’d be in time to help out here. Dartley’s hands were busy pushing fresh .357 cartridges into the chambers of his revolver.
He waited, peeping into the interior, and then looking out over the battlements into the fields. He saw nothing and heard nothing. He might have been imagining things were it not for the haze of blue gun smoke slowly rising in the keep’s interior. Careful of his movements, because a number of the smaller rocks had become loose up here, he warily circled the battlements.
Finally he saw the Palestinian. He had come out of the entrance and was making his way furtively around the base of the keep walls before making a break for the open field or an attempt to cross the stream. A rock moved in the wall beneath Dartley’s left hand. He pocketed his revolver, picked the rock up with both hands, and moved quickly along the battlements so that he was a few paces in front of the man beneath. He dropped the rock over the side.
Considering its weight, about twenty pounds, it took a long time to fall. Dartley watched it drop silently down, close to the immense keep wall, and saw the man walking beneath, watchfully keeping close to the wall. The rock kept growing smaller and smaller as it dropped and dropped, and the Arab kept taking paces farther on. It seemed impossible now that rock and Arab would coincide.
But Dartley’s initial judgment had been sound. The plummeting limestone block hit, glanced off the Palestinian’s head, and rolled down his back.
Dartley charged down the spiral staircase so fast he could hardly stand upright when he emerged into the field. The Palestinian lay facedown, the back of his head pushed in. Dartley felt his spine. It was shattered. He did not move the body to look at the face. He found nothing of interest in the man’s pockets, apart from two spare magazines for his Llama pistol, all of which Dartley took. His raincoat and jacket had been bought in Milan, and the shoes looked Italian also. There was no wallet, no identity papers of any kind. He seemed to have nothing in his possession to identify him as an Arab.
CHAPTER
7
Naim found the Irish Times at an international newspaper stand in Paris. A brief account on an inside page mentioned that the body of an unknown man, possibly a foreigner, had been discovered at a ruin on the lands of J. J. Fitzpatrick, the well-known racehorse trainer. Mr. Fitzpatrick and many of his employees viewed the body. They stated that the man was unknown to them. It was thought that he might have been killed accidentally by a falling stone in the ruin. An inquest was to be held.
Naim wondered what had happened to the Audi. No mention of that. Or of Ali’s pistol. Somebody was hiding things. Morton Schiff’s men or the Irish government? He showed the news item to Hasan.
“At least he will say nothing,” Hasan said with relief.
“Do you think they got anything from him before he died?” Naim asked.
“Maybe.”
“I’m willing to take a chance that he didn’t. I don’t want to give up this apartment yet.” Naim smiled. “It’s too comfortable.”
“Let’s stay here. If the bastards come after us here, we’ll be waiting for them. I’m going to miss Ali.”
Naim nodded. “You think either of us will get out of this alive?”
“Depends how long we go on at it, I suppose. Sooner or later, no matter how careful we are, things will go wrong. How long do you think it will last?”
“Well, yesterday Greece announced it wouldn’t sign the concordance. That’s one down, with eleven to go. We don’t have to stop them al
l. We win if Britain, France, Germany, or Italy refuses to sign.”
“France is the most likely to back down,” Hasan said.
“I agree. Maybe we should do something about it.”
“Have you had clearance on that?”
“No,” Naim said, “and we shouldn’t wait for it. Abu Jeddah told me he does not tolerate failure. We failed in Ireland and lost one man. We need to show the Front we have not lost our nerve or our touch. When we have a string of successes to our credit, we will go back there to avenge Ali.”
“Maybe even get Morton Schiff next time,” Hasan said enthusiastically.
“We don’t have to wait to go back there to get Schiff. If he dares show his face in any country that we’re in, we will get him there.”
“Ali will smile down on us from Paradise,” Hasan said devoutly, which was unusual for a dedicated communist.
“Allah be praised.”
They were walking down the Champs-Elysees, beneath the chestnut trees with new leaves, close to the Place de la Concorde. They crossed the Place, with its charging streams of traffic, into the formal gardens of the Tuileries. They stood by a pond with a fountain at its center, on which small boys sailed boats. Neither were armed, because of frequent spot checks by the police.
Naim knew this was worrying Hasan. “They said there will be three of them, two men and a woman. I refused to meet with any more. The fewer that see our faces, the better. But as a group, Direct Action has proved its worth to our cause. We have nothing to worry about in meeting with them.”
Hasan only grunted and shot some wary glances around them.
“We’re a little early,” Naim said. “If they’re here, they’ll want to check us out first before approaching us.”
“I don’t like them coming up to us like this, instead of us being able to check them first,” Hasan grumbled.
