by Ian Barclay
“You’re quite right. Except this time we’re the ones asking the favors, and they’re the ones making the conditions. Look, the only danger we face from members of Direct Action is that of them describing us to the police if they get caught. I’ll keep them at arm’s length, you’ll see. I’m not arranging anything with them behind your back. You’ll be present during all my talks with them, Hasan. That’s a guarantee.”
“I suppose we need them,” Hasan conceded.
“Yes, we do. Abu Jeddah must not get the impression that we have weakened. First we will strike again, and only after that will we ask for a new man on the team. But we are not pleading for help. We two can operate alone. I don’t want to waste any time. You’ll see how much use I will be able to put these Direct Action people to. I think that’s them over there, carefully not looking in our direction. They will ask us for the rue de Rivoli. We will advise them not to go there. My name is Abdullah, yours is Ahmed.”
The three that Naim suspected finally came over and used the password. The big bearded one said he was Jean-Paul, the small one with spectacles Marcel, the woman Claudine. She was very pretty. Naim figured her as Jean-Paul’s wife or lover, which might have been what brought her into the movement. Jean-Paul was a leader, a doer. Marcel was the intellectual. Naim felt comfortable with them and saw that Hasan’s suspicions did not seem aroused by them in any way.
“You have the motorbike?” Naim asked.
Jean-Paul glanced at his wristwatch. “In fifteen minutes it will be dropped off to Marcel on the quainear the Solferino bridge. He will hold it for you. Maybe you had better be going, Marcel.”
Marcel nodded and left.
“And the gun?” Naim asked.
“It will come with the bike,” Jean-Paul answered. “It’s a Polish M63 machine pistol, 9 mm, twenty-five rounds, weighs under two kilos. It’s a bit awkward, but it’s the best we could do for a throwaway weapon. Cost us four hundred American dollars.”
Naim didn’t believe this for a moment, yet he did not hesitate to take out a wad of American bills, peel off twenty twenties and hand them to Jean-Paul. “Is the M63 tricky to fire?” he asked.
“If you want to use it as a submachine gun, lower the forward grip until it locks at a ninety-degree angle to the barrel. The butt is folded along either side of the pistol body, so you just pull it back and revolve the butt plate into position. You fire from an open bolt position. There’s no selector switch—automatic fire relies on finger pressure on the trigger.”
“It sounds like a piece of shit,” Naim said.
Jean-Paul shrugged cheerfully.
“I have someone I want you to look for. He is an American CIA man and he has been following us. He doesn’t know where we are right now, but as soon as we strike, he will come sniffing around. When we saw him once, he had his hair dyed gray or had a wig and wore false bushy eyebrows. But let me draw the outline of his face for you and his mouth and eyes.” Naim had a natural talent for sketching. In a minimum of practical strokes on a sketch pad from his pocket, he used a felt pen to catch an excellent likeness of Dartley’s face. “Look for the high cheekbones and blue-green eyes. He’s tall, very fit, muscular, alert. Don’t try to take him. Leave him to us.”
Radarman Jack Fogarty and Philip Larson were on a seventy-two hour leave from the U.S. Rhein–Main Air Base near Frankfurt, Germany. They hitched a ride on a plane to Paris and were promised a ride back on it next day. They had no place to stay in Paris. Maybe they would stay up all night or share a room in a cheap hotel someplace. Neither of them had been to Paris before, so they had a lot of sights to pack in during their brief stay. They could agree on the Eiffel Tower, bars and strip joints, but not on what else to see. Fogarty agreed to go with Larson to see Notre Dame cathedral and the Louvre museum if Larson went with him to see Montmartre and the tomb of Jim Morrison of the Doors at Père Lachaise.
They decided in military fashion to do everything from east to west. They went first to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. A uniformed custodian at one of the gates gave them for a few francs a map with a list of names of famous people buried there and the location of their graves. They found Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Isadora Duncan, Modigliani, Gertrude Stein, and some other names they recognized, but no Jim Morrison. When they tried their fractured French on the custodian and repeated the rock singer’s name several times in what they thought sounded like the French pronunciation, he gesticulated angrily at them and pointed to a part of the map.
“Fucking Frogs,” Larson said as they walked away, “you don’t speak their lingo, they’re mean to you.”
“When we’re not around,” Fogarty said, “when there’s no outsiders listening to them, they talk English among themselves, like you and me.”
Larson stared in amazement at him for a moment. It often took Larson a little while to catch on. Then he laughed and said, “Shit, you’re just joking, but maybe they really do.”
After a while they turned right, in the general direction the custodian of the gate had pointed. They began to see signs spray-painted in Day-Glo colors on the huge tombs: an arrow and the word Jim. No matter where they went, these marks directed them. When they came to Jim Morrison’s stone, they found that it was only about four feet high, a head and shoulders of the singer in his sixties-style long hair. The stone was Technicolor from multiple treatments with a rainbow of colors. Incense burned in the trees all around as silent teenagers stood about with lost or stoned looks. A lot of them seemed to be German and Dutch.
“This is sick, Fogarty.”
“It’s no sicker than the statues of those dead saints you want to see in Notre Dame and the Louvre.”
“I mean, this makes my flesh crawl.”
“Morrison would have liked that.”
They looked up in surprise when they heard a motorcycle tearing along the winding paths among the statues and monuments.
Hasan and Naim had only gone a little way when they were flagged down by a policeman on the quais. Hasan pretended not to see him and threaded his way through traffic in order to cross the next bridge to the Right Bank. They had no set plan in mind. Hasan’s instincts told him to head away from the center of the city. There were not so many targets, but there were not so many police either. He followed the Avenue de la Republique east, turned right into Boulevard de Menilmontant and, on a whim, roared through the gateway of a big cemetery on his left.
To their surprise they saw almost immediately what they were looking for—tourists. Three of them were watching a fourth photograph some statues on a tomb. Naim pulled out the M63 machine pistol from underneath his coat and pulled down the front grip. He held the gun so Hasan could see it.
Hasan yelled over his shoulder, “You want to go back and nail those four?”
“There will be others. Slow when you see them.”
Riding at random along the narrow paths bordered with yew and monstrous plinths, they kept watch. About fifteen people stood in the trees just to the left of the path ahead. Two were moving away and these looked like Americans! Naim fired at the lot of them, keeping his finger on the trigger until all twenty-five cartridges in the magazine were spent. He then tossed the weapon from his gloved hands while Hasan sped away.
The shooting from the moving bike was below standard. Naim was unfamiliar with the gun, and it was clumsy to handle. He only hit five of the people among the trees, but three of them were fatally wounded.
Fogarty knelt beside Larson, who had taken two slugs in the lower chest. The blood was streaming out of the wounds onto his T-shirt, as he lay on his back. Fogarty was shouting to him to hang on, that it was all his fault for having brought him there, to keep his eyes open and to keep breathing. Larson’s eyes were open all right, but the only breathing he was doing was in Fogarty’s imagination.
CHAPTER
8
Richard Dartley saw the news on television at Morton Schiff’s castle in County Waterford. Until that point he had received no indication that the
Palestinians had left Ireland. Schiff was being difficult. After the aborted attack at his trainer’s, the financier had gone to the Curragh to see his horse run in the big stakes. He exposed himself to all kinds of risks in spite of the best efforts of Dartley and his two bodyguards. He even stood in the middle of the parade ring with other owners and trainers. A child could have shot him.
When he saw the look on Dartley’s face, he smiled and said, “I like risks.”
“These aren’t calculated risks you’re taking,” Dartley said. “I could admire you for that. This is just reckless bravado. If you don’t get yourself killed, you’ll get me or your bodyguards hurt. I don’t admire that. If you did what you’re doing here on the stock exchange, you’d lose a lot of money.”
Schiff quieted down and said, “People don’t often talk to me like that.”
“I don’t work for you and I never will.”
The Wall Street man’s caution lasted until his horse won the big race. After that there was no holding him. Dartley quit looking out for him and hoped only to pick off any attacker after the first shot. The Palestinians did not materialize.
Schiff stayed on in his castle. The Irish police were notified only after the big race that a body had been found. The burned Audi was disposed of by the trainer’s men, and nothing was said of the attack earlier in the day.
“I’m sure it’s them,” Dartley said to Schiff, who was sipping a sherry and watching the television news between phone calls to New York and Tokyo.
Schiff nodded. “Better take my plane,” he said.
The pilot was summoned, and Dartley was at Le Bourget airport outside Paris that night. There were a lot of things to be said for the way Morton Schiff lived.
Dartley stayed at a small hotel on the rue de Rennes, not far from Montparnasse. First thing next morning, he headed for Père Lachaise cemetery. He knew that the police would still be watching there and that he could not risk showing up too many times at the scenes of massacres. However, he expected a big crowd of morbidly curious people to show up, so he would be only one of many. He really had no other choice but to go. He needed something to connect him with these two terrorists. Why had they struck at Père Lachaise? Perhaps something might occur to him while he was there. He doubted it. Yet he had to try since he had nothing else to go on.
The area was taped off by the police who were still doing forensic lab work on the ground. The onlookers were mostly French, with a sprinkling of English and German speakers. Dartley listened to the French. The general opinion was that this had been done by Arabs trying to frighten off the government from signing the Ostend Concordance. The European governments could play pretend and control the media all they liked, but they were not fooling the people.
Dartley asked some questions. Had they heard what the survivors had seen? Two Arabs, definitely. That had not been stated openly in the French newspapers that morning. It was the confirming detail that Dartley needed to be sure he was on the right track. He talked for a while with a pretty woman dressed in a pale blue suit. She was very nervous and knew next to nothing, so he left before his questioning of people became too obvious. This had been a dead end. It seemed like he would have to sit and wait for the crazy bastards to strike again.
He headed for the nearest exit. Catching a glimpse of someone walking through the monuments some distance behind him, he turned into a path to the left instead of going straight on to the exit. Pretending to find a tomb of sudden interest, he looked to one side and glimpsed the pale blue back in some trees. He turned left once more, heading back now in the opposite direction to which he had been going originally. He looked at another tomb and caught the pale blue in his peripheral vision. Dartley walked on a piece, then slipped behind a tomb shaped like a miniature Greek temple. He waited.
The footsteps came hurriedly along. When they drew level, he stepped out, his right hand already descending in a vicious chop. It was the pretty girl. She cringed and Dartley managed to ease off on his chop so that the edge of his hand no more than pressed firmly against the side of her neck. Dartley couldn’t complain about her being nervous now—she had good reason to be.
“You American men are so romantic,” she said accusingly to him in French.
“I hadn’t thought that romance was on your mind.”
“Is it too early in the day for an American man? You don’t do it during daylight hours? You feel you should be working?”
All the time as she challenged him verbally, her eyes were giving him a different message.
“You admit that you were following me,” Dartley said suspiciously.
“Certainly. Did you think I was going to rob you? I had it all planned. We were going to bump into each other accidentally and you were going to invite me to lunch. Who knows, the wine at lunch might have been good. Without realizing it of course, I might have got a little tipsy and you might have taken shameless advantage of me. One thing I can say for European men—you don’t have to spell everything out for them.”
She was back to challenging him again.
Dartley fell for it.
They took a taxi back to the fashionable part of town; he treated her to an expensive lunch and after it she went with him to his hotel on the rue de Rennes.
Dartley had hardly closed the door behind them when Claudine—she never gave him a last name—started undoing her clothes. She threw them around her on the floor in her hurry to let her naked body emerge to Dartley’s hungry gaze.
He shucked off his own clothes and looked at her luscious curves. Her nipples were rosy brown, surrounded by pinker areolae. She held a breast in each hand and playfully offered them to him, like a peddler holding honeydew melons. Then she released her breasts and caressed her nipples with her fingertips, gently and lightly, and smiled at him.
When he approached her, she turned her back on him, and he was struck by the beauty of the way her body tapered into her narrow waist above her perfectly proportioned hips and her smooth and rounded cheeks. He placed his palms on her waist and ran his hands softly up her sides, then beneath her arms, and reached up to cup a breast in each hand. He nuzzled the nape of her neck and breathed in the fragrance of her hair while he squeezed her breasts gently but firmly, and massaged and tickled her nipples, now grown erect and hard.
Dartley allowed her to slip- from his embrace, and he chased her around the room, catching her near the bed. He picked her up in his arms and placed her on the quilt. Then he sprang upon her.
Claudine screamed and giggled. He kissed her mouth, neck, and breasts. He let his engorged penis press against her as he nibbled on her tits, making her so hot she thrust against him repeatedly with her throbbing vagina, seeking for him to ease the desperation he had created there and bring her sweet relief.
He worked his way down her body with his tongue. As he reached her bush, he felt her pull his hips toward her head, felt her take his cock in her hand, felt the warm tight moistness of her mouth enclosing his member. He shivered as the tip of her tongue traveled across an area of extreme sensitivity.
Having wallowed for a while in the pleasure she was providing him, Dartley returned to the fray by fighting pleasure with pleasure, intending to vanquish her through her own sensual gratification and then surrender his victory to her by burying the huge head of his lust deep within her tight warmth, letting everything go by spurting forth his seed.
His nose parted the soft curls of her pubic hair, his lips playfully pulled on strands, and the tip of his tongue lingered on the edges of her palpitating opening. Her clit peeped out and wiggled to attract attention.
As he tormented her with soft touches and with his tongue, she swallowed his cock deep into her mouth and throat while she stroked his balls with tender fingers.
Dartley spread her legs and his tongue stroked the shell pink outer lips of her vagina. He fanned his tongue across the erect tip of her clit, circled its base, stroked its tiny length, tongue-lashing her to orgasm. In a little while her pelvis began to move
again, and her soft parts gained renewed life and responded to his attentions. He worked her up to a new pitch of ecstasy, and her passion ground to a second shuddering climax. This time she uttered a loud cry—a primitive, impersonal sound.
He patiently waited for her to recover in order to ready her for the next plateau of abandon.
Early that evening Naim Shabaan phoned the number Jean-Paul had given him. Jean-Paul said that Claudine had seen the American at the cemetery and had followed him back to his hotel on the rue de Rennes. She hadn’t told Jean-Paul anything else.
Naim turned to Hasan in the apartment on avenue du Maine. “This Yankee pig is staying in a hotel only five minutes’ walk from here.”
“I think it’s time we carved some pork,” Hasan said.
“Tonight,” Naim agreed. “He’s coming too close to us.”
They waited until 2:30 A.M. before heading for the hotel in order to be reasonably sure that the American would be there—asleep. The tall, thin Senegalese night clerk stared with terrified eyes at the muzzle of Naim’s pistol. Yes, he had a master key. Yes, he would be pleased to accompany them up in the elevator to room 34. It was while they were traveling up in the elevator that he told them he was a Moslem and had children back in Dakar who were dependent on the money he sent. He hoped to live long enough to see them again.
Dartley did not hear the key turning in the lock. The rattle caused by the door being pushed in against the bolt only disturbed his sleep a little. Naim tried to kick the door in, failed on his first kick, and again on his second. Hasan charged the door with his right shoulder and ripped the bolt out by its screws. He fell halfway into the room as the door gave way beneath his weight.
The first of Naim’s kicks woke Dartley, the second sent him rolling from the bed. He bounded across the room to where a glass-fronted wardrobe stood against the wall, a few feet from the door handle. He knew that in a matter of seconds that door was going to burst open and that he had no gun. He tipped over the wardrobe, a heavy old-fashioned one, on its two legs nearest the door. When the door burst open, he gave the wardrobe a heave.
