by Ian Barclay
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “I think you might have something there.”
CHAPTER
13
When they met Leila she was in tears. Her purse had been snatched. An ordinary woman would have been upset at losing her cosmetics, her money, a love letter. Leila had lost an automatic pistol, a false Turkish passport, a pocket dictionary. She was already hopelessly confused among the languages she had been skipping through. Hasan tried to put his arm around her and she shrank away. He knew that she liked Naim and that Naim paid very little attention to her.
Now he was suddenly interested. What had her bag looked like? How had they taken it? What part of the city? He would get her a new bag, another gun. Here in Naples American dollars could buy anything.
Naim rehearsed them both until they had got it to his satisfaction. Then Leila and he went out looking for tourists, with Hasan dragging along behind. As they wandered around, people occasionally warned her to be careful, the scippatori might snatch her bag.
They wandered around dilapidated neighborhoods and went in and out of dark, cool churches in which candles sputtered before statues of suffering saints.
“Watch out for your bag,” she was reminded.
Things were never quite to Naim’s satisfaction or there were no signs of any purse snatchers when they wanted them. It was already hot in Naples. Leila dared not complain, but Hasan groaned loudly and frequently some distance behind them to show that he was feeling the strain.
When the scippatori finally did strike, they caught Leila and Naim by surprise. They were walking out into the Piazza San Francesco, Leila holding the bag by its handles at her side—as she had been warned not to—instead of held tightly under her arm. Neither of them heard the light motorcycle’s engine. Hasan shouted no warning, thinking this was deliberate. They came silently from behind. The first thing Leila knew, the bag was being pulled from her grasp by the man on the pillion seat as the rider sped on across the piazza.
She remembered Naim’s warning: “Don’t hold on!” She released her grasp and let them take the bag. The time earlier, they had wrenched her arm in its socket and knocked her to the ground. “They’ve got the bag!” she shouted to Naim at her side, who was still oblivious to everything.
He quickly turned about and nodded to Hasan. There were no tourist crowds around, as he had planned. Naim saw Hasan grin at something in the piazza. He turned to look and saw a luxury touring bus from Germany. The scippatori on their motorcycle would pass alongside it, the man behind the rider clutching Leila’s bag to his side.
Hasan beamed the radio transmitter, the wavelength activated the detonator, and the plastic explosives in Leila’s bag lifted the two riders and their motorcycle high in the air.
The sheet metal side of the bus crumpled inward and the glass windows showered into fragments on top of the bus’s occupants. In Naim’s estimation, it wasn’t as satisfactory as catching a group of tourists on foot, but he did find consolation in the fact that these visitors were German. He hoped they were from West Berlin.
Leila was becoming more difficult. She refused to stay in a hotel on her own and insisted on knowing where Naim was. Hasan’s rebuffed advances to her were a constant source of friction. The more Naim tried to cut her out, the more intensely she sought his attention. She would even flirt with Hasan sometimes in hope of making Naim jealous.
“Send her home,” Hasan suggested.
“Where’s home?” Naim asked. “That’s her problem. Now that Abu Jeddah is gone, she has started to cling to me. I don’t like it. We can’t just tell her to go away. She knows too much already about how we operate. Besides, of the three of us, she looks least like an Arab terrorist.”
Hasan, who of the three of them looked most like a terrorist, agreed. “So why don’t you fuck her then?”
“I need to keep my mind clear.”
This made no sense to Hasan but he accepted it as just another of Naim’s peculiarities. With Abu Jeddah dead, Hasan no longer had to accept Naim as leader, yet he continued to do so, just as Naim apparently never considered the fact that Hasan might not be willing to.
Naim had been very quiet after receiving word about Abu Jeddah, who had been drowned like a dog in his own swimming pool by the Zionists. Naim was scornful of the fact that the Western governments were keeping it secret, thinking they could control what he knew. All the same, their behavior was flattering to him. They were holding back the news because they were afraid of what he might do. They were afraid of him…. That had been the purpose of this whole campaign.
They had moved to Milan, where it was foggy and cool, when Leila knocked on his room door. It was almost three in the morning. Her knock was gentle. How had she known he would be awake?
He pretended not to know who she was, talking in Italian through the door to her. Forbidden to speak Arabic when she could possibly be overheard, she called back to him in a mixture of Spanish and Italian with two German words. She wanted to come in—she had something very important to tell him. She lay on his bed and sobbed, then wept. Nothing she said made much sense to him.
“If you’re looking for a nice boy to marry,” he said sternly to her, “you should stay away from freedom fighters like me.”
She threw something at him. As he recalled, he struck her across the face to bring her to her senses. It was possible that he went on beating her for some time, although he could not clearly remember doing so. He had been drinking a heavy, sweet liqueur to try to help him sleep and he was feeling nauseous at the time. He might have lost control and beaten her severely. It was possible.
When her bed had not been slept in and there was no sign of her next morning, Hasan insisted that they slip out the back way, leave their belongings, and find a new hotel. He was right when he guessed that Naim would refuse to leave Milan.
“We have to assume the worst,” Hasan said. “That is, she has changed sides and is helping to hunt us down.”
Naim shrugged. “What is the biggest, most important physical thing in Milan?” he asked.
Richard Dartley bet on Rome after Naples. He was certain that the attack on the German tourists in Naples had been engineered by Hasan and Naim. None of the bus occupants had died, but many suffered severe lacerations. Word was out that the terrorist gang was in Italy, and planes started coming in half-empty to the international airports at Rome and Milan.
He was reached early in the evening by the Berlin civil servant. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day. I couldn’t leave my name for obvious reasons. The girl has turned herself in. She’s badly beaten and hysterical. The doctors got to her before the police. They sedated her. She’s under too much sedation to be of much use as yet. But they are in Milan and intend to do something really big there to make up for their string of failures lately.”
“Anything else?”
“No. But keep in touch.”
On the flight north he wondered what the two Palestinians—for they were once more reduced to that number—had in mind. La Scala Opera House, museums and palaces, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the shopping streets and arcades, the stock exchange, the Duomo. That might be it. The Duomo, the huge Gothic cathedral which was perhaps more a landmark of Milan than anything else. Dartley knew the city fairly well. He was beginning to think that he knew these two men called Naim and Hasan too. Now that there was a massive manhunt underway for them in the city, they would lash out first before leaving.
A horseback statue of Vittorio Emanuele II stood on a large pedestal with a stone lion in the piazza in front of the Duomo. All the cathehdral’s carved stone spires, designs, and figures towered high above the street as a testimonial to an afterlife grander and nobler than that lived on earth. The men who conceived this had no doubt. Now it was a kind of Disney spectacle, too big to fit in the average camera’s viewfinder. Something on this scale had to appeal to two-bit terrorists.
He bought himself a standard Italian army automatic pistol, a 9mm Berett
a Model 1951, in an eerily sinister café on an empty back street. Then he sat in the sun on the steps at the base of Vittorio Emanuele’s pedestal. There was nothing he could do by way of preventive measures. He could only wait until something happened. Nothing did that day.
He was there again before nine the next morning. A policeman who had seen him yesterday gave him a close look. When Dartley smiled inanely at him and waved, the man turned away. He spent all morning there and ate lunch from a vendor’s cart. Well, at least if they weren’t doing anything here, they weren’t doing it in any other part of the ciy either. What he didn’t want to hear was that they were now in Rome….
Having moved to the shady side of the pedestal to escape the sun’s merciless rays, he was almost asleep when he heard two distinct pistol shots from inside the Duomo. He ran fast as he could in the central doorway and stood in the long middle section of the church with its tall supporting pillars.
Two men were herding a bunch of tourists like cattle into a niche before a side altar, shouting at them and striking them with their guns. The body of a man lay facedown on the church floor. Those two shots had been to show they meant business.
They hadn’t seen Dartley yet. He cocked his Beretta and kept coming at them until one turned and saw him. Dartley dropped to one knee, holding the pistol in both hands, and tried for a shot at one of the men. He would have hit the tourists milling behind them, so he had to be careful. Twice he almost squeezed the trigger, but eased off at the last second.
The two Arabs fired at Dartley. The bullets ricocheted off the flagstones around him, and he had to run for cover behind one of the fluted pillars that supported the roof. One of the terrorists broke away from the tourists herded into the side chapel, who were now screaming and trampling one another like penned animals. The second terrorist kept them trapped there by brandishing his pistol and pointing its barrel into the face of anyone who came too near him. Dartley still couldn’t get a shot at him.
Not sure exactly where the gunman who had broken away was, Dartley dodged from one stone pillar to another. He ran into the recess of the next side altar, which was semidark, in the hope of finding a way into the one where the tourists were being held. He startled an old woman who was hiding there from the gunfire.
She squawked with fright and dropped two net bags loaded with groceries. Bottles smashed on the stone floor, and their contents streamed out over the flagstones as the old woman scuttled off beseeching the Mother of God to protect her from the vermin that populated Milan these days.
No passageway connected the two side altars. Dartley was cautiously making his way out again, peering into the candle-lit gloom, trying to locate the lurking terrorist. For an instant Dartley saw him step from the cover of a pillar. The man was coming his way, into the recess of the side altar. Dartley eased himself behind a greater than life-size modern plaster statue of a monk with birds on his shoulders and hands.
The Arab gunman stalked him in the shadows. Dartley remained motionless, waiting for a clear line of sight. He intended to make one bullet do the job.
The American heard a curse and the sound of a body falling on the flagstones. He looked out quickly and saw that the terrorist had slipped on the liquid that had leaked from the smashed bottles in the two net bags. The man had obviously jarred his bones on the stone floor and still lay in the pool of liquid. Smells of anisette liqueur, olive oil, and wine assailed Dartley’s nostrils.
Dartley rushed out from behind the statue and flung himself against the big metal rack holding scores of lighted candles before the saint. The rack scraped along the flagstones for a few feet, then tipped over. It came crashing down on the fallen terrorist. The lighted candles ignited the poor of liqueur, oil, and wine.
The flames were only a few inches high, but judging by the terrorist’s screams, as he lay trapped beneath the heavy candle rack, they were hot.
The other terrorist, holding the tourists captive, could see his comrade being cooked alive. The man’s screams were now echoing throughout the great cathedral. The captor was about to desert his hostages and go to his comrade’s help, until he spotted Dartley standing in the shadows waiting for him. Instead, he raised his pistol and with a lucky shot put the burning man out of his pain with a bullet in the upper chest.
“Hasan!” Naim shouted, as he saw his comrade slowly crumple into the flames on the church floor. In his anguish he shot the two nearest women to him in the head and ran toward a carved stone archway in the wall. Instead of being an exit, this led to a steep flight of stairs. He kept going, knowing that holding a large group of hostages like that in an open space would have been impossible for a lone man. Taking a hostage would have slowed him. His best chance lay in his speed and mobility, simply losing his pursuer. He did not much care where he ran, so long as there were other passages and turns to make it hard for him to be followed.
He kept moving to one side and climbing staircases. Suddenly he emerged at the base of the roof, among many of those steeples and spires. He could see out over the city shrouded in automobile exhaust. For the past few days it had been cool and foggy. He had even seen fog among these spires.
Hasan had wondered if he should go back to the Bekaa and try to take up Abu Jeddah’s work. Hasan was dead, still warm but dead. And Naim had no energy. He was finished. It was all over now.
If he went to jail, some hijackers might be able to force his release and he would return a hero to his people. If not, he might rot for forty years in jail, remembered by no one. He could not stop fighting.
Naim suddenly realized he was being watched. He looked up and saw a big man with short hair, high cheekbones, and sea-cold eyes staring at him like one of the gargoyles of this cathedral.
This man hardly moved his head, his eyes just flickered over the edge. But it was a command.
Naim fumbled for his gun. Dartley fired.
The terrorist stood between two ornamental stone spires, high above the piazza, spewing blood. Clawing the air, he fell backward. Dartley walked to the edge and looked down, to make sure the man had hit the piazza. He had.
DEATH TO AMERICANS!
An entire American family cut down in the sleepy Dutch countryside U.S. tour groups shredded to ribbons outside Buckingham Palace’s stately halls and in Paris’ bustling marketplace. All courtesy oí the New Arab Social Front, a splinter group of the PLO determined to keep European countries from signing a treaty that could end terrorism once and for all. With lightning-fast, brutal strikes against American tourists, they’re on the verge of destroying the continent’s economy and murdering hundreds of innocent civilians.
For Richard Dartley, the world’s most select and expensive assassin-for-hire, it soon becomes a job he’d take for free when he’s targeted for a vicious Front death trap Through a tangle of few leads and many potential targets, he’ll ruthlessly track the killers across Europe to exact a million dollars’ worth of terrorist blood—and relentless vengeance…
THE CRIME MINISTER
