by Ian Barclay
Dartley was used to looking for needles in haystacks. He tried the casino and lost a hundred dollars at baccarat before turning in for the night at the Westminster Concorde on the Promenade. He wasn’t disheartened by his unsuccessful search and was determined to repeat it the next day and the next, until some solid lead turned up.
Next morning a cool breeze blew in off the sea. The beach was deserted and only a few hardy all-weather types walked on the Promenade. Claudine was definitely not this sort, and the Palestinians probably weren’t fresh-air freaks either. The winding narrow streets of the old town were sheltered from the breeze and were filled with visitors. The major sight in the old town at this time of year was the flower market. Roses, carnations, and other flowers grown in the coastal hills were marketed here before being shipped, for the most part, by train to Paris. Tourists posed before huge colorful banks of flowers for their friends to photograph them.
Dartley prowled, weaponless and without much hope. And it was while he felt most strongly that he was only wasting his time, although determined to persevere, he saw Claudine on the sidewalk coming toward him. He sidestepped quickly into a doorway and watched her pass. She hadn’t seen him and appeared to be alone. He was just about to slip out of the doorway to follow her when he saw her turn and head back again. Had she seen something that aroused her curiosity or suspicion? She walked past the doorway where he stood without glancing once in his direction. In fact she seemed more interested in what was going on across the street, where flower market stalls stood next to each other and sellers shouted their bargains.
Dartley couldn’t stay in the doorway and hope she would come back. He needed to take her off the street fast, find out what he needed to know, and act on it. He followed her in a hurry, came alongside her, circling her waist with his left arm and showing her his right hand.
“Make one stupid move, bitch, and I’ll crush every bone in your face with this hand.” Dartley’s French accent was not good enough for him to make his words sound the way he wanted them to, but when she looked startled into his face. Claudine saw the cold killer’s eyes mercilessly examining her slightest moves.
He walked with her long enough to let her panic subside, but not long enough for her to think of her next move. “I’ll offer you a deal,” he said. “I want the Palestinians, not you. Give me them and I won’t hurt you.”
She seemed about to argue, so he led her firmly by the arm down a narrow medieval street, with buildings too close together for even the smallest cars to travel over its cobblestones.
“You have my word,” he said, holding her by the bare upper arms as she clutched her purse to the bosom of her flower-patterned dress. “I’ll let you go. I won’t hurt you. That much you’ll get. Nothing more.” He looked into her frightened eyes and felt her body shaking with terror. He said, “You have very little time. Talk.”
Jean-Paul and Marcel sat in separate cars, the engines idling. They were at opposite ends of a short street, in sight of each other. Beneath each man’s legs on the floor of the car, lay an Uzi submachine gun, along with six spare twenty-five round magazines of 9mm cartridges. Between the pair of them, they could account for a reasonable percentage of the lives in the old town flower market if things went wrong.
They stayed in the cars, engines running, while Claudine moved back and forth between them. She was an additional guard against the unexpected, ready to signal an emergency or even act as a diversion. She didn’t walk all the way to the cars each time, but tried to vary the pattern of her movements, stopping to examine the flowers on a stall, walking first on one side of the street, then on the other. The few people who noticed her, mostly stall merchants, who never missed a trick, assumed she was a hustler. One merchant even decided that she was so pretty, if his business was good that day and her price reasonable, an hour with her might be just what he needed.
Jean-Paul and Marcel both saw the man walk alongside her, circle her waist with his arm and talk with her. His back was turned to Jean-Paul and he was too far way from the bespectacled, somewhat shortsighted Marcel to recognize him as an American in the French clothes Dartley had bought in Paris. Marcel cursed, assuming that Claudine had accidentally run into an old flame, of which he was convinced she had several thousand. Jean-Paul was hit with a pang of jealousy for the same reason, although he would have put an estimate on her affairs at less than fifty.
Claudine seemed at first to be going willingly with him, perhaps hoping to talk him into leaving her now by making a promise to see him later. When the stranger steered her off the street into an alley, both men knew things were wrong. She hadn’t resisted leaving the street because she knew it would be a signal to them. All three were clear on her primary orders, which were not to leave that street for any reason but the most dire emergency. Suddenly both Jean-Paul and Marcel realized who the man with Claudine must be.
Marcel and Jean-Paul reacted the same way. They pocketed spare magazines, put each Uzi in a paper sack, and came at a half run. They reached the opening to the alley at the same time and saw Claudine pushed against a door by the American.
Dartley’s cold eyes sent icy tingles down the woman’s spine. His eyes were like what she imagined a timber wolf’s eyes must be as he slavered over his victim. Her mind was paralyzed.
She looked at the edge of the American’s right hand, which he was holding a few inches in front of her eyes. Was he going to hit her? No, no, not her face! She would tell him anything. Jean-Paul would be able to handle him. Marcel would shoot him in the back. She did not want to be hurt. The edge of the hand before her eyes had a long callus. She shrunk back against the wood door, her throat too dry with fear to utter a sound.
His hand moved too fast for her eyes to follow. She heard a door board crack like a pistol shot next to her left ear.
The knife edge of the hand, with little flecks of green door paint still attached, returned and hovered again in front of her face. The cold blue-green eyes looked into hers unwaveringly.
His voice was calm and icy as his eyes.
“Tell me where to find the Palestinians.”
Marcel raised the paper sack with the Uzi inside to blow away the American.
Jean-Paul pushed it downward with his free hand before Marcel could fire. “You’ll hit Claudine!” he shouted.
Claudine turned her face as she heard Jean-Paul say her name. Dartley saw the two men also. He jerked the woman out of the doorway and held her in front of him. He knew he was not being very noble, sheltering like his behind a woman’s body, but she had tried to arrange his killing once before and those two guys weren’t holding bunches of flowers in those paper sacks.
“Hold off, assholes, or the lady dies,” Dartley shouted to them. Then he muttered in her ear, “You’re not out of this until I let you go. Tell me first. Where are the Palestinians?”
She said nothing.
Dartley couldn’t tell whether she was so frightened now she couldn’t speak or whether she was playing for time, depending on Jean-Paul and Marcel to rescue her. She was still clutching her purse to her breast, so Dartley reached around her and wrenched it from her grasp. Without opening the zipper, he could feel the pistol inside through the soft leather.
The two Frenchmen were walking him down. Claudine still hadn’t said a word. They wanted to get near enough to pull her away and chop him up fine. He opened the purse zipper with his teeth and pulled the pistol out. It was a little Colt .22 automatic with pearl grips, a lady’s gun but deadly enough at close range.
Dartley pushed the weapon forward in front of him and Claudine, letting the purse drop. A lipstick fell from it, some coins and a ticket, at which Dartley took a half second to look. Nice–Barcelona on French railways. He cocked the pistol and squeezed off a shot at the one with the spectacles but missed.
The bullet spanged off the cut stone wall next to Marcel’s head. Marcel, the intellectual, had never been under direct fire before. The possibility of severe hurt was joltingly brought home to h
im. It was only Claudine’s little pistol and he had a submachine gun. He raised the paper sack with the Uzi.
Jean-Paul saw that Marcel was going to shoot. He tried to swat the paper sack with his free hand again. Too late. The end of the paper sack shredded, charred, and began to burn as the Uzi muzzle inside spat bullets and flame.
Dartley felt the shocks in Claudine’s body as four slugs hit her from the burst of fire. He now had to hold her sagging, lifeless form in front of him.
When Jean-Paul saw the bleeding shattered body of his lover, her chin fallen on her chest, arms sagging, knees buckling, a hideous expression of pain became set on his face.
“Cochon!” he screamed at Marcel and loosed off a burst from his Uzi.
Marcel was just about to explain or apologize when his comrade’s bullets cut the voice box out of his neck, along with his veins, arteries, and esophagus. He stopped trying to say something and looked down in amazement at the blood streaming from his throat. Then he fell in a heap, and his Uzi, only partly concealed now in the smoldering paper sack, rattled on the cobblestones.
Dartley had not been standing and staring while this was going on. He dropped Claudine’s cadaver and took the only exit offered him by kicking in a couple of door boards next to the one he had cracked with the side of his hand. The ancient wood was dry and brittle and shattered under the violent impact of his kick. He shouldered his way into the house, still clutching the little Colt .22. This was no great refuge, but it sure beat facing a man with an Uzi in a narrow alley.
He found himself in a storage area. From it he went into a large kitchen. Guessing that the front entrance to the house was in the opposite direction to the alleyway back entrance, he followed a dark corridor which opened into a hallway, from which rooms opened off. He saw a staircase and a street door, and he heard the surviving Frenchman somewhere behind him in the house.
Dartley opened and shut the street door softly after him. This street was nearly empty, with cars parked along both sides. He ran into the street, then ducked down below the level of the car roofs and ran crabwise, looking back for Claudine’s avenger to appear.
Jean-Paul stepped out of the doorway, the submachine gun held openly in his hands, a wild look in his eyes. Before the Frenchman reached the street, Dartley threw himself down and rolled under a car. He lay on his back looking up at the rusty underside, listening to the Frenchman’s approaching footsteps. There was no traffic or pedestrians—Dartley figured that maybe they changed their minds about using this street when they saw someone with a submachine gun walking down the middle of it. Every now and then, the footsteps paused. Dartley guessed his pursuer was looking into doorways or thought he heard something suspicious. Then the steps would come closer again.
Where were the police? Why couldn’t he hear sirens? France was on a state of alert. What the hell was delaying everybody? Two people had already been cut down by automatic gunfire. Surely someone would respond?
Dartley knew his sense of time was being slowed—what were seconds in reality seemed like minutes to him as he waited for those approaching footsteps. Surely this Frenchman, in spite of his rage, knew he had only limited time in which to act before the police came? Or was he so crazed by grief at Claudine’s death that he no longer cared, intending first to kill Dartley and then shoot it out with the police?
Dartley saw his shoes. He was standing in the street only a few feet from the car Dartley was under. He must have been looking around warily, wondering where in hell the American could have got to. Dartley was done waiting. He levered himself sideways so that his arm and half his face emerged from under the car.
Jean-Paul glanced down startled and lowered the Uzi barrel to sweep this sudden threat almost at his feet. But Dartley was already firing from beneath.
The first bullet punched through the Frenchman’s scrotum and came to a stop deep in his guts. The second and third little lead projectiles bored through his abdominal muscles and chewed up his intestines. By the time Jean-Paul hit the asphalt, he had twisted himself into a knot.
“Wait,” Naim said to Hasan.
They sat in the car Marcel had left with its engine running when he saw Claudine being abducted into the alley. They had headed for the car when they saw the two Direct Action men go in the alley, abandoning the getaway cars. Neither had seen what had happened to Claudine. Then they heard two bursts of automatic fire from the alley. Hasan was behind the steering wheel and wanted to take off.
“Wait,” Naim repeated.
They watched and waited for more than a minute. People were running from the market in all directions, many not sure from where the gunfire had come. Jittery from all the stories of terrorism, most seemed to be heading home by the shortest routes, like frightened dogs.
They heard three pistol shots.
“We have to go,” Hasan said urgently.
“There’s hardly anyone left in the market,” Naim pointed out.
“The longer you wait, the fewer there will be.”
They heard approaching sirens.
“All right,” Naim said, pressing the button on the small radio transmitter in his hand.
The blast in the flower market heaved up a giant fountain of roses and carnations like fiery red lava from a volcano. The blossoms plopped down in a hail over the old town.
CHAPTER
11
The six surviving recruits from Abu Jeddah’s training camp flew from Damascus to Rabat in Morocco. From Morocco they crossed by boat to Spain and were met by a wealthy Jordanian who took them to his villa at the luxury resort of Marbella. The five youths and one girl, all eighteen or nineteen years old, had never seen anything like this before. So this was what the degenerate West looked like—no rubble in the streets, no sandbagged barriers, no shell-pocked buildings…
The plan was for Naim to send for them when he reached Barcelona. They would take the train up the coast to Barcelona, traveling separately on three different trains. Each would bring as his or her baggage the armaments the Jordanian had kept in store for them. Until they heard from Naim, they were free to relax and enjoy themselves at the villa in Marbella.
Trouble started when the Jordanian made a play for Leila. The nineteen-year-old recruit was pretty and liked to laugh and chatter, but beneath this cheerful exterior lay a hard resolve, forged and reinforced by the deaths of her father and two brothers in the Beirut refugee camp of Shatila. The Jordanian was fat, soft, in his fifties, with an eye for young flesh. He came into her room early in the morning and slipped into bed beside her. She was sleeping on her back. He moved his right hand beneath the T-shirt she was wearing. The taut soft skin of her belly was warm beneath his touch. She stirred in her sleep. Then he felt her left hand encircle and hold his swollen cock. Just as he was about to move closer, he felt a stinging at the base of his penis. She was holding a knife blade to it. The Jordanian’s erection collapsed too fast for any real damage to be done, though she did jab him twice in the ass with the knife point as he hurriedly left her bed.
Unlike the other three male recruits, Mosbah and Mousa did not help themselves to the Jordanian’s brandy, infidel women, and unclean food. They did not interfere with anyone else’s enjoyment and made no remarks. This caused the Jordanian to mistake their quietness for shyness and rustic backwardness. They laughed politely when he played the jovial host trying to force worldly pleasures on them. They took everything in good fun until he made a remark about their fundamentalist outlook. Without warning, Mousa seized him from behind, gripping him just above the elbows. Mosbah beat him slowly and mercilessly until he lost consciousness.
The Jordanian treated them with wary respect after that. He was basically a weak, self-indulgent man, between wives, who was dabbling in revolution to add spice to the tedium of his life. He found that although it was easy to manipulate these ignorant young terrorists, they tended to make dangerous pets.
Naim stayed at the Avenida Palace and Hasan at the Hotel Diplomatic, both in the center of Barc
elona. Hasan found cheap rooms for the recruits in the Gothic Quarter, off the Ramblas. Hasan met them at the railroad station and took them where they would stay. He gave each of them pocket English—Spanish and French—Spanish dictionaries, since he knew that none spoke Spanish but had a smattering of the other languages. He forbade them to possess anything written in Arabic or to speak it unless they were sure they were out of earshot of strangers. He went through the possessions of each to make sure all identifying labels had been cut out. Their papers identified them as Turks. He refused to tell them where the others were staying, warning them to keep away from each other. Each was supplied with money, told to learn the layout of the city and some basic Spanish, and given a curfew of midnight to 8:00 A.M. When needed they would be contacted during those hours. He refused to say where they could contact him or when they would meet the leader of the commandos, whom they knew only as Naim, as they knew Hasan only by his first name.
Hasan met Naim for dinner that night in a restaurant on the Paseo de Gracia. “It’s been a long, hard day,” he grumbled, ordering a double Scotch whiskey before eating.
Naim smiled. “I telephoned our Marbella contact, a Jordanian, for his assessment. The girl tried to cut his dick off with a knife, and the two called Mousa and Mosbah beat the shit out of him when he spoke insultingly of the Ayatollah Khomeni.”
“Dumb kids. What the fuck are we supposed to do with them, Naim?”
“Shake Europe to its foundations.”
Hasan didn’t often laugh, but he thought this remark of Naim’s was funny. He ordered another Scotch. This time Naim joined him.
“What’s the girl like?” Naim asked.
“Good looking, very friendly. But I could see her reaching for her knife. I don’t understand these real young Arab girls today.”
“Any problems with the guys?”
