The Perfect Kill (A Creasy novel Book 2)

by A. J. Quinnell

  With strong financial backing from Syria and others, Jibril quickly built up a reputation for spectacular action. PFLP-GC became the best trained terrorist group in the Middle East and the most highly motivated.

  It was responsible for the bombing of Swissair Flight 330, en route from Zurich to Tel-Aviv. They were also able to plant a bomb on an Austrian Airline flight from Frankfurt to Vienna, but the pilot made an emergency landing. The bombing of civilian aircraft in flight became Ahmed Jibril’s trademark. In 1986, he proudly informed a press conference that there would be no safety for any traveller on US or Israeli airlines.

  During the mid-eighties, Jibril established several cells in European cities, including Rome, Frankfurt and in Malta. He also recruited a Jordanian national called Merwan Kreashat, who happened to be one of the world’s great bomb makers.

  He was leafing through various magazine and newspaper articles when the red scrambled telephone on his desk rang. He reached for it and heard the voice of Colonel Jomah, his direct contact with President Assad. Jomah was brief.

  ‘Our embassy in Paris has had a contact which claims to have information of benefit to you.’

  ‘What information?’

  ‘He didn’t say, but he mentioned the word ‘Lockerbie’. Then he said, if you were interested, you should insert a message in the personal column of the International Herald Tribune within seven days. The message should read, ‘Helen Woods call home soonest’.’

  Jibril thought for a moment and then said, ‘What do you think?’

  The voice at the other end of the phone sounded slightly sarcastic.

  ‘I think, Ahmed, that such a message would only cost a few dollars . . . do you want me to have it placed?’

  ‘I would be grateful,’ Jibril replied in silky tones.

  ‘Very well. I’ll get back to you if anything develops.’

  The line went dead. Jibril cradled the phone and for several minutes sat gazing at the small crystal jar on his desk. It contained a reddish brown grainy substance. It was soil, taken from a field in the village of Yazur, near Jaffa, brought reverently to him two years earlier by one of his own fighters.

  Chapter 11

  LEONIE PLAYED HER part perfectly.

  The panel comprised the bishop, Father Manuel Zerafa, another elderly priest and a Maltese woman from the social services department. They sat behind a long table in an office in the Curia. Creasy and Leonie sat in front of them. The panel had already examined all the relevant documents including proof of Creasy’s financial means.

  During the questioning the bishop had gently referred to Leonie’s dead son and asked whether Michael Said would be an emotional substitute. She had thought for a moment and then opened her handbag and taken out a tissue and wiped the tears from her eyes. At that moment. Creasy knew that the adoption would go through but he did not know whether the tears were genuine. Later, as they left the Curia, he decided not to ask her.

  They had settled into a routine. The boy would come up every morning at seven and swim and exercise with Creasy while she cooked them breakfast. It was always the same. Lightly scrambled eggs, grilled bacon, grilled tomato and a rack of almost burnt toast, together with freshly squeezed orange juice, percolated coffee for the man and lemon tea for the boy. She would eat her own breakfast an hour later and then drive into Rabat and do the shopping. For the rest of the morning, Creasy would be in his study working. She would lie by the pool reading and sometimes swimming. In Creasy’s study there were thousands of books, covering a wide range of topics both fact and fiction.

  She would make him a light lunch of salad and cold meat at twelve o’clock. After lunch, he would go off for two or three hours wearing old jeans and a denim shirt. He had told her that he was helping a friend build a house. On his return, he would strip off the clothes and go under the shower set into the wall by the pool and then swim a few lengths.

  The boy would arrive at about five o’clock and he and Creasy would talk for an hour or two. Sometimes sitting under the trellis drinking lager, but more often making endless circuits of the pool. The man did most of the talking. During this time she would sit apart, out of earshot, or work in the kitchen, or watch a film on the video. Often she would tune the television in to broadcasts from Italy. To help pass the time, she had decided to learn Italian. She had spent holidays in Italy and already knew a little. She had also bought a Linguaphone course. She was determined that by the time the six months were up, she would speak the language well.

  Two or three times a week, Creasy took her out to dinner. The restaurants were varied. A small bistro in Xaghra one night, with simple local food, the restaurant under Gleneagles, where Salvu cooked in the open kitchen, and at the ludicrously named ‘Pink Panther’, which was a simulation of an English pub, but which had a lovely alfresco dining-room at the back.

  At night they slept in the huge bed, but they did not sleep together. The bed was seven feet wide and as the weeks passed, during all the nights, he had not once touched her, not even involuntarily.

  After seven weeks, the adoption papers came through and the routine changed. She had driven with Creasy in the jeep to the orphanage to pick him up. There had been no ceremony. Michael had been waiting at the entrance, with Father Zerafa. At his feet was a small sports bag containing his possessions.

  She acted her part kissing him on both cheeks and giving him a hug.

  She had also kissed the priest on both cheeks and murmured, ‘Father, thank you for looking after him so well. Now I will look after him.’

  The priest’s face had held no expression. Then the boy had tossed his bag into the back of the jeep and climbed in after it.

  She had watched him walk into his bedroom, the one with the portraits of Nadia and Julia, watched through the open door, watched as he tossed the bag onto the bed, watched as he surveyed the room, watched as he moved slowly to the portraits and watched as he gazed at them.

  Creasy had immediately taken the boy out of school and had begun to educate him personally.

  After the exercises and swimming in the morning, and after the usual breakfast, they would disappear into Creasy’s study and not emerge until lunchtime. After lunch they would both leave the house and go to work on the house his friend was building, except two afternoons a week, when Creasy would go alone and when an elderly courteous Arab would arrive and give the boy lessons in Arabic. They were not written lessons, only verbal. The Arab had given his name as Yussuf Oader. All Leonie had learnt about the man was that he was retired in Malta but had originally come from a mountain village in the Lebanon.

  She noted that the boy respected the old man and was attentive to his lessons.

  She also noted something else, that an edge of competitiveness had developed between Creasy and the boy. It had started the day after she had arrived. The boy had come up in the afternoon and said to Creasy, ‘What about that race then?’

  ‘How many lengths?’ Creasy asked.

  The boy had thought, then answered.

  ‘Let’s make it ten.’

  She had sat at the table under the trellis and watched. By the end of the first length the boy was ahead by two feet. By the end of the second, by five feet. By the end of the fifth length, by ten feet. She had decided that Creasy was going to take a hiding and wondered how his pride would accept that, but on the sixth length the boy began to slow. Creasy had been swimming with a steady rhythmic crawl, never changing his pace. He passed the boy on the eighth length. He had finished the ten lengths about eight feet ahead of the boy. He pulled himself up and out of the pool and sat with his legs in the water. He reached down and pulled the boy out next to him. They had sat there for several minutes, talking. Mostly Creasy talked. He spoke in a low voice but Leonie could hear it.

  ‘What was your mistake?’

  The boy’s chest was heaving.

  ‘I started too fast,’ he answered.

  Creasy had shaken his head.

  ‘That was your second mistake. Your
first was in making a challenge that you were not sure of winning. Don’t ever do that, not in a race, not in life. Don’t ever strike a man if you’re not positive you can win the fight. Don’t ever battle, unless you know damn well you’re going to win the war. Don’t ever chase a woman unless you know you’ll get her.’

  There had been a silence while the boy had digested that, then Creasy asked, ‘Have you ever been with a woman?’

  The boy had answered with a trace of bitterness in his voice.

  ‘No. The local girls here are practical and orphans have few prospects.’

  ‘But there are plenty of tourists in the summer.’

  ‘Yes, and I see the girls down at Ramla beach and in the streets at Rabat but my pocket money is fifty cents a week. I’m told that the price of one drink at La Grotta Disco is fifty cents, and the entrance price is seventy-five cents.’

  There had been a silence, then Creasy said, ‘The day the adoption papers go through . . . the day you move into this house, your pocket money will cease. Your allowance will be twenty-seven pounds a week, which is the minimum wage in Gozo . . . but you will earn it, Michael, because you will be working like you’ve never worked before.’

  She had watched the boy turn his head and look up at the man and nod his head.

  ‘I will earn it, Uomo’

  ‘You know my brother-in-law, Joey Schembri?’

  ‘I’ve seen him around. He brought me and some other boys at the orphanage drinks at the last feast . . . I spoke a few words with him. He used to play football for Ghainselum, but injured his knee a couple of years ago. He was a good striker.’

  ‘OK, the Saturday after you move into this house Joey will take you down to La Grotta. Don’t be ashamed of being led by him, both in that or anything else, but don’t ever get smart with him. Don’t ever try and pull one of his girls. He’s got a wicked right hand. I’ve seen him in action.’

  The Saturday after the boy had moved into the house. Creasy drove him into Rabat to meet Joey. He had then taken Leonie out to dinner at Ta Frenc. They had returned at one o’clock in the morning and the boy was not home.

  She had heard him come back at four o’clock. Heard him smash into his bedroom door. Heard the thump, as he hit the floor. She had started to get out of bed, but Creasy’s hand had stopped her, gripping her by the arm. It had been the first time he had ever touched her in that bed.

  ‘Leave him,’ he had said.

  In the morning she had found him sprawled across his bed, fully clothed, snoring against the pillow.

  In spite of a monumental hangover, Creasy had made him do a hundred lengths of the pool before breakfast.

  It was now July, glorious long summer days and evenings. She spent most of her waking hours outside. All meals were now eaten outside. Many evenings Creasy would barbecue. He was an expert, always marinating the meat overnight in his own special marinade. She would make her salads. He taught the boy the art of how to do a good barbecue, of the way to cook different kinds of meat and the fish he would bring back from his fishermen friends at Gleneagles. He asked her to teach the boy how to make salads and prepare vegetables. The boy was quick to learn and she noticed that he enjoyed cooking.

  Once she had asked him how the orphanage was and he had grimaced and said, ‘They filled us up like putting petrol into a car and it tasted the same.’

  With the sun and the setting, the days and nights should have been idyllic for Leonie but as each day passed she slipped into an ever deepening depression. It was not just that the people of the island continued to treat her as though she had a communicable disease, nor because, as the man and the boy drew mentally closer day by day, she felt increasingly isolated.

  She was an intelligent, experienced woman. She was also sensitive. Apart from cooking, shopping and teaching the boy how to cook, she made no contribution whatsoever. She was never asked a question or an opinion. As the days moved through July, she dreaded waking up in the mornings and then it got worse, because she found herself unable to sleep. She spent hour after hour lying on the huge bed near the man, hearing his breathing, occasionally a muttered sound, as he talked in a dream.

  Her only thoughts centred on her mortgage and her clapped-out Fiesta.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Laura Schembri stood on the patio of her farmhouse and watched in the distance as her son and Creasy worked on a wall of the old farmhouse. That morning she had been shopping in Victoria. Her cousin was a gossip. She had told Laura that the woman living with Creasy - she had not called her his wife - shopped in the supermarket almost every day; told her with relish how she and everybody else had frozen her out.

  ‘I never talk to her,’ she had smiled. ‘Not a single word. Not since the day she first walked in.’

  At the greengrocer’s, the woman behind the counter had said similar things with the same relish. Laura looked at the two men working in the distance. Her son was on the wall itself. Creasy was passing up old limestone blocks to him. Her eyes swept across the fields, to where her husband was ploughing with a small tractor.

  She looked at her watch and made a decision.

  She went into the house and picked up her handbag and the keys to the Land-Rover, and wrote a note to Paul.

  Leonie was lying on a lounger by the pool when the old-fashioned doorbell rang. She glanced at her watch. It was too early for Creasy to be returning. Michael and his Arab teacher were under the trellis, deep in conversation. As she walked to the door, the thought crossed her mind that, as well as everything else, Creasy might teach the boy some manners.

  She opened the door and found herself looking at a woman, tall, well-built, almost statuesque. She had a handsome face, with ebony-coloured hair.

  The woman said, ‘Hello, you must be Leonie. I’m Laura Schembri.’

  For a moment, Leonie’s mind was blank and then the woman said, ‘Nadia’s mother.’

  The blankness in Leonie’s mind turned to confusion. She could not find any words. The woman smiled. A warm, pleasant smile. She held out her hand.

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you finally.’

  Leonie took the hand and said. ‘Please come in.’

  The woman shook her head.

  ‘Another time. It’s Thursday afternoon and on Thursdays they play Bingo at the Astra Band Club. I wondered if you’d like to come along? It’s quite a social occasion,’ she said. ‘A lot of the local women will be there . . . hundreds of them. We have a few drinks during and after, and we all get acquainted with the week’s gossip.’

  She looked at Leonie steadily and the younger woman gazed back at her, then nodded her head firmly and said,’ Thank you. I’d love to join you.’

  Laura Schembri had not played Bingo for twenty years but as they walked into the cavernous room, and as her eyes swept across the scores of tables and the hundreds of women, she recognised almost all of them and almost all of them recognised her. She was known for her forceful personality and short temper, her direct talking and her integrity. She was known as a woman who had lost both her daughters, one in a car crash in Naples and one in a plane crash in Scotland. She was known to go to Mass every Sunday. Her youngest daughter had died only eight months before but she was walking into the Astra Band Club, not wearing black, but wearing a brightly-coloured, red and blue dress and she was walking in with the woman who had recently married her dead daughter’s husband.

  At the far end of the room, a man sat on a high podium. In front of him was a huge transparent plastic bowl, containing ping-pong balls with numbers on them. He held a ping-pong ball in his hand and called out into the microphone, ‘Eleven, legs eleven!’

  But nobody was listening. Heads were turning, looking towards the entrance. A hush fell over the room and then a rolling murmur of whispers,

  Laura took Leonie’s arm, smiled and said, ‘Let’s get a drink at the bar first, and then I’ll introduce you to some people.’

  Leonie smiled back and said, ‘I think I know some of them already.’
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  Laura shook her head.

  ‘You don’t, but you will.’

  Chapter 12

  ON SATURDAY EVENING, Joey Schembri passed by the house to pick up Michael and take him to the disco. Michael was still in the bedroom getting dressed, in his faded new frayed jeans with holes at the knees, and his new Chris Rea T-shirt. Leonie was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Creasy brought a couple of lagers out to the table under the trellis and chatted to Joey about the house they were working on. All week they had been building a new wing, which was to be the dining-room and kitchen. They couldn’t decide whether to use arches or wooden beams for the roof. In fact they had had a couple of arguments over it.

  Joey drained half his glass, gave Creasy a very severe look and said, ‘I’ve decided, Uomo, and I don’t want any more fucking arguments.’

  ‘Decided what?’

  ‘It’s going to be arches instead of beams.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I like arches, it’s more traditional.’

  Creasy shrugged, non-committally.

  ‘Yes, but you have to think of the market. After all, most of these farmhouses are bought by English people, or lately, Germans. They like the old wooden beams, think they’re more rustic. Let’s face it, Joey, you’re not going to be living in the place . . . are you?’

  Joey gave him a narrow-eyed look. He drained his glass and stood up, walked across the patio and shouted through the wide-arched door in Maltese.

  ‘Michael, if you’re not ready in two minutes, I’m leaving without you, and that Swedish girl will be heart-broken.’