Retribution

by Ian Barclay

  As Hasan scrambled to his feet to shoot into the bed, the heavy piece of furniture crashed down on him and pinned him beneath. His pistol fell near where Dartley stood. The American picked up the weapon and fired around the doorpost into the corridor outside the room. He heard a gasp, then a moan of pain. Dartley fired once more and stepped into the open doorway as much, as he could, with the wardrobe pinning the man to the floor. One of the men he had seen at the training stables in Ireland stood behind the drooping night clerk, whom Dartley had hit twice with his bullets.

  Using the wounded African as a shield, Naim fired twice at the American, missing the first time and hitting him in the right arm with the second shot. The American staggered backward. The backs of his knees caught on the end of the bed and he fell onto it, changing the gun to his left hand as he did so. Naim’s third shot would have drilled him in the gut if he had not fallen on his back. The American rolled so fast off the bed that Naim’s fourth shot buried itself in the mattress.

  At that moment the night clerk fell lifeless at his feet and Naim could not rush into the room because of his body and because of Hasan still pinned under the wardrobe. Naim made his way cautiously into the room. He saw a door opened about an inch at the other end of the room, which he guessed was the bathroom. He loosed two shots at waist level through the door’s plywood panels.

  Dartley was stiffened back against the wall with a small extension of tiles protecting him. Using his left hand, he fired once at the Palestinian and missed. The searing pain- in his upper right arm was making it impossible for him to see clearly and think straight. He had a better shot at the one on the floor. He fired again and missed again.

  Seeing that Hasan was in danger and that he could not easily dislodge the American from the bathroom, Naim pocketed his gun and used all his strength to push the wardrobe off Hasan’s prone body. He pulled him into the corridor by the ankles, over the African’s corpse. There were people in the corridor, but they rushed back in their rooms and slammed the doors when he looked at them. The elevator door was still jammed open. Hasan was getting his senses back and weaving unsteadily on his feet as Naim pressed the button for the ground floor.

  In the lobby Naim chased away a man from the telephone switchboard by waving his pistol. Hasan was walking well. A woman in a nightgown and two men in pajamas stood outside the hotel and called for help. Naim let them see his gun. They ran.

  Dartley pulled on his shirt, jacket, pants, put his feet in his shoes and headed down the stairs. He had heard the elevator leave and, according to the floor indicator, it was nearing the ground floor as he left his room. There were people on the staircase to whom Dartley shouted, “They’re in the elevator!” His gun was in his pocket and the blood had not yet soaked through his jacket.

  He had left nothing of consequence in the room. All his papers, which were false anyhow, were in his jacket. The clothes he left behind were untraceable. Dartley did not travel with laundry marks or items from small-town stores. A man at the telephone switchboard in the lobby dived beneath the desk when he saw Dartley coming. There were three jokers in their nightclothes hopping up and down outside. Up the street a way he saw the two Arabs get in a taxi.

  He hailed one himself and was gone before the police sirens had started to sound.

  Dartley had told the driver to go to Gare du Nord in order to get him moving quickly. Now he pushed a twenty-dollar bill into the driver’s compartment and said, “Find me a woman.”

  The driver went to Gare du Nord and cruised the area. It was after three in the morning and nobody could be expected to look their freshest, but the women on the street and alone at tables in all-night cafés looked none too good to Dartley as he peered out the open taxi window.

  “No addicts, no drunks,” he said to the driver.

  The man laughed. “They’re all addicts or drunks, monsieur. That’s why they’re on the street at this hour.”

  Dartley settled on a chunky woman with an open country face who seemed steadier on her feet than the others. She tried to quote him prices for various services, but he hushed her and sat her in the cab with him.

  “Money is not important,” he said. “I have plenty. I need you all night. But first I must go to an all-night pharmacy because I need French letters.”

  “Here we call them English letters.”

  “Right. Do you know one?”

  She directed the driver and they waited outside while he went in. He bought the condoms just in case, although he did not think he would be needing them. They would not sell him penicillin but he did get a disinfectant salve and adhesive waterproof bandages which would keep the blood in. Having paid in French money and ignored the sales clerk’s remark that blood was soaking through his right sleeve, he went back to the taxi and told the woman to have the driver take them to a place where the rooms had private bathrooms. She was pleased at the choice of an upscale hotel. Dartley gave the driver another twenty-dollar bill. There was no way to make a taxi driver forget him more quickly than to wildly overpay him in dollars—enough to make it look like the American visitor might have been victimized by the Paris driver.

  He gave her French money to pay for the room and stayed in the background himself because by now his whole right shoulder was soaking in blood. This was the kind of hotel where male guests tended to be furtive. They were in the elevator before the woman noticed the blood.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered urgently.

  “A scratch.”

  His judgment proved good. She was a no-nonsense sort who insisted on dressing his wound after washing him down. She then rinsed the blood from his shirt and jacket after he had emptied its pockets.

  “They may not be dry by tomorrow,” she said, “but better have them wet than stained with dried blood.” She pointed to the pistol he had removed from the jacket. “Did you kill anyone?”

  “Why?”

  “The police could say I was an accessory to the murder.”

  Dartley gave her an icy smile. “The police will be the least of your worries if you open your mouth to anyone about this.” He could see from the expression on her face that he had frightened her. He pulled out five onehundred-dollar bills, tore them in half and held out five pieces to her. “You get the other halves tomorrow.”

  She took them willingly and looked him in the eyes as she nodded that they had a bargain. “I have pills,” she offered, rooting in her purse. She handed him a small plastic cylinder.

  They were penicillin tablets, six altogether. He swallowed the lot and decided not to ask why she needed them. “You get these from a government doctor?”

  She shook her head. “A young doctor just starting out. He’s poor and not a bastard to working people.”

  “Maybe I’ll give him some dollars in the morning.”

  “I’ll take you to him,” she said.

  “All right. Lie on the bed. Get some sleep.”

  In two minutes she was snoring and Dartley began to think over his situation for the first time. He knew how they had found him in his hotel room—he had been horny and therefore stupid about Claudine. His whole right arm was now one throbbing ache, his wrist hurting more than the actual wounded part. The bullet has passed clean through the flesh on the outside of his upper arm. It had not been a .45 or a 9 mm slug, more probably a .38 from another Llama pistol like the one he had picked off the hotel room floor—and like the one he had taken from the dead man at the ruined castle in Ireland. He had dumped that gun before taking Morton Schiff’s private jet to Paris. But the two surviving Arabs had held onto theirs, no doubt since they had not passed through customs. According to Frankie Grady in London, they had been taken to Ireland by fishing boat. They were probably transported to France the same way. Well, he had taken one of their lives and two of their three guns. They had to be feeling the pressure. They had plenty more guns. It was their lives they would be worrying about.

  Naim and Hasan saw the bar on a side street off Pigalle, a place small, dirty, an
d threatening enough to keep the tourists out.

  “I’ll go in first,” Hasan said. He did better in places like this than Naim, who had a kind of stiff air in them which made people wonder if he wasn’t a policeman or some kind of informer.

  “She’ll have a black sweater, big boobs, smokes American cigarettes, and drinks Kronenbourg beer.”

  “I remember,” Hasan said and headed for the bar.

  Naim looked after him and let his right hand drift to the coat pocket which held his gun. This was not the way Naim had wanted to do things. He had given Jean-Paul and his Direct Action friends a lot of money in a lump sum, instead of piecing it out by performance. That had been a mistake. Jean-Paul hadn’t backed out on his part of the agreement exactly, but he was saying how things would be done. Naim intended to change that.

  This nameless woman whose description he had repeated to Hasan for maybe the tenth time had brought something from Germany for them. He was not sure what, but any military-grade weapons would be welcome, since it seemed almost impossible to find anything for sale in Paris. Jean-Paul said he would find it much easier in Marseilles, and Naim intended to try there. It was frustrating to have plenty of money and find nothing to buy.

  This woman in the bar had bought stolen stuff near a U.S. base in Germany and crossed the border into France. Naim had not wanted to meet her, saying Jean-Paul should collect and deliver it. Jean-Paul could see no good reason to take such an unnecessary risk. If Naim wanted the stuff, the woman would be at this bar. If he didn’t show up, that was all right—they could use it themselves. Knowing the possibility of a trap, Naim anxiously watched the bar front from a doorway across the narrow street.

  Inside Hasan looked over the whores and they ignored him. They seemed to be mostly lesbians having a good time together, with no wish to let some dumb john spoil their fun in here. A few dull-eyed men gave him a careful stare—junkies wanting to buy or sell. A few faces that turned his way showed they didn’t want Arabs here, but none were inclined to push the matter with someone as rough and tough as Hasan.

  He ordered a marc and bought a bottle of Kronenbourg for a lady with large breasts and a black sweater down the bar. After a few moments he joined her.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “A friend of Jean-Paul’s. You have something for me?”

  “All the way from Germany.”

  “Give it to me now,” he said. “I have to go.”

  She leaned across the counter to the bartender, who appeared to know her, and said to him, “Hold my drink. I’m going outside for a minute.”

  Hasan followed her outside, this time drawing curious looks from both the hookers and addicts, who were wondering what kind of transaction was taking place. She spotted Naim immediately.

  “Friend of mine,” Hasan assured her.

  So she pulled up her black sweater to reveal a large-cupped pink bra. From each lace-trimmed pink cup she lifted out a green grenade and handed them to him. Hasan stood astounded on the sidewalk while she went back inside the bar without a word.

  Naim argued at first, however Hasan persuaded him to stay away from airports. Even if they reached Orly before word of the latest attack spread there, they might still be netted by the permanent watch maintained there, at every other airport, and at major ports and train stations.

  “We would deserve it too, for being too lazy to drive,” Hasan said. “Who’s going to believe two Arablooking men with Greek passports headed for Marseilles? For Athens, maybe—except we don’t speak Greek. Not Marseilles. And if we come up against anyone who can talk Greek to us, it will be at an airport. You fly, I’ll drive.”

  “It’s a long way,” Naim complained. “About eight hundred kilometers.”

  “Better that than thirty or forty years when they check your fingerprints and visual descriptions at airport security.”

  Naim shrugged. “As you say. It’s not worth the risk.”

  He was afraid to insist on his leadership over Hasan in a matter where he was clearly wrong, although he would have liked to. Too often Hasan seemed to be going along with his instructions in a kind of half-amused way, like an older man approving à younger one’s progress. But Naim knew that Hasan was too dangerous to bully—one mistake and he would make Naim pay for it as painfully as he could. Besides, Naim needed his support, not his opposition. He gave in gracefully. They would drive.

  Having cleared their things out of the Montparnasse flat into a rented Peugeot, they toured the Left Bank looking for a likely spot. The Café Arizona on the Place St. Michel looked right. Naim left the car and walked past twice to make sure. The Café Arizona was at the hub of the student and tourist sector, its sidewalk tables presenting its customers with a privileged view of the passing world. Affluent students and foreign visitors formed the clientele—the sky-high prices kept everyone else away. It was trendy, all chrome and glass and natural wood. The people were talking about clothes, films, rock stars, outrageous new restaurants, themselves.

  Naim smiled to himself and walked toward the Peugeot a little distance away. Hasan had the two grenades in the car, two American M26s. The thin sheet metal of the M26 contained 155 grams of Composition B, a TNT-based mixture, wrapped in a prefragmented spirally wound steel coil. Hasan was being ultracautious, which decided Naim on taking a risk. He knew Hasan expected them to hire or steal another car so they could use it for the attack and change from it to the Peugeot at another location.

  “Give me the two grenades,” he said in the car window to Hasan. “Pull over onto Boulevard St. Michel beneath those trees. I’ll do it on foot.”

  Hasan looked at him for a moment in silence, then reached under the seat and handed him the grenades.

  “If things go wrong, you take off,” Naim said.

  Hasan’s sardonic smile made it clear that this was exactly what he intended to do.

  Naim wasn’t worried. He held the two grenades inside the car for Hasan to pull the safety pins. Once the pressure of his palm on the spring-loaded side lever was released, the charge would go off in four or five seconds. The M26 had a casualty zone with a diameter of about a hundred feet, which Naim estimated at about thirty meters. He withdrew his hands from inside the car and pushed them into his raincoat pockets. After carefully looking around to make sure he had not been seen, he nodded to Hasan to move the car and he began his stroll along the sidewalk toward the Café Arizona.

  He passed other cafés on the way, all crowded but none quite so expensive-looking and trendy as the Arizona. Naim felt like some kind of god walking along with so much death clutched in his hands. If he chose, he could change his mind at any time and kill these people here instead of those over there. He was deciding. He was choosing. He… He…

  Naim was enjoying himself so much that he thought about walking around for a while. He abandoned this notion when he saw two policemen with submachine guns slung on their right shoulders pass along the far side of the square toward the river. Also, Hasan might have to move the car because he had pulled in where parking was forbidden. Better get it over and done with.

  With his right hand he lobbed the first grenade into the interior of the café. Before it exploded he had already tossed the second grenade from his left hand among the sidewalk tables. He ran for the Peugeot on the Boul’ Mich.

  Pieces of sheet metal casing and hundreds of hot steel barbs tore through skin and flesh at supersonic speeds. Shards of flying glass speared people, plaster dropped from the ceiling onto them, metal table tops smashed bones, and the force of the two blasts themselves hit the nearest bodies with the impact of a speeding car.

  Smoke filled the interior. Those who could run ran, some of them trampling the injured in their blind panic to escape. Bodies lay everywhere, some of them cut almost in two and leaking their lifeblood in ghastly quantities all over the floor and on the sidewalk.

  One student, apparently otherwise unhurt, sat on the roadside curb looking in disbelief at his right arm. His hand was gone.

>   CHAPTER

  9

  Twenty-five miles east of Beirut and twelve miles from the Syrian border, Abu Jeddah had established his headquarters inside a walled compound. The house had been a wealthy merchant’s who had fled abroad with his family. It was not far from the mostly Christian town of Taanayel, in the eastern Bekaa region, which was largely Shiite Moslem and controlled by the Syrian army.

  Two guards with Kalashnikovs sat on hard-backed chairs outside the locked wooden gate of the compound. On the flat roof of the house, a third guard with binoculars and a .50-caliber machine gun lay beneath the shade of an earth-colored nylon sheet tied between the roof’s radio aerials. Coils of blade ribbon ran along the top of the compound walls. Angled floodlights were fixed at each corner.

  Abu Jeddah wore sandals and an open bathrobe over his swimming trunks. His thick body was covered with curly black hairs. It was not long after dawn, and he sat in the warm early morning sunshine, sipping the first of the many black coffees laced with whiskey that he drank every day. He read the overnight radio messages and reports brought in by hand. A heavy roll of European newspapers purchased in Beirut lay beside his chair.

  At last he had a message from Naim Shabaan. Naim had lost one man and wanted him replaced by one or two more. In the meanwhile he would proceed as planned. Abu Jeddah had known that much by following the international news from Europe. He was pleased that Naim, on taking his first setback, had not radioed urgently for assistance or advice but had persevered to demonstrate to all concerned that the loss of one man in no way weakened the resolve of the others.

  The attacks at the cemetery and at the Café Arizona had shown the governments how weak their defenses were. At last count the Arizona death toll was fourteen, with thirty-eight other casualties. The June 4–New Arab Social Front could not be stopped.