The Big Book of Espionage

by The Big Book of Espionage (retail) (epub)

  The leader had been haranguing his men. Now he slung his assault rifle across his back and headed for the latrine. Paco, who knew his habits, waited. The leader hiked up his robes, swirling the layers of cloth around his body, holding up the robes with both hands and both elbows. Straddling the ditch, he was absolutely helpless. Paco smiled at the man’s buttocks, fish-white, and fired all eight rounds from the Makarov between his legs. The slugs, traveling at the tremendous velocity of 1,023 feet per second, zipped into the earth. Paco had known there was no chance of a ricochet with this weapon.

  The leader fell over sideways, more afraid of the filth in the ditch than of death, clawing for his slung weapon, swaddled and tripped by his robes. Paco put another clip into his Makarov, just in case, and began to laugh uproariously. The fallen man, tearing at his VZ-58, now looked up at Paco. Paco put on his mirror sunglasses.

  “It’s you,” said the Bedouin leader, “you turd conceived by a jackal on a syphilitic whore rutting on a dung heap.”

  The other members of the band were running toward them, assault rifles and machine pistols at the ready. Paco pulled the leader to his feet.

  “You’d better tell them who I am,” said Paco. The leader gave a hand signal and the advancing tribesmen halted.

  The leader introduced Paco, never mentioning the name by which the world knew him. He spoke first in Arabic, for he was a Palestinian from Jerusalem, and then in English, German, and French, for the tribesmen were men and women, all in their early twenties, who had come from the cities of Europe to learn how to do all the things that Paco already did so well. They knew perfectly well who their visitor was: Paco could see it in their eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Paco ate the spartan dinner, almost as bad as the rice and yoghurt he had been given in Qum, and kept an aloof silence. The young terrorists, apprentices, watched his every move. It was hard to tell what the girls looked like under these robes, but he sat next to the one with the prettiest face. When she put down her plate, he tossed his dirty Makarov into her lap. “Clean this,” he said.

  Of the dozen bands of terrorists, disguised as Bedouins, that were now training in the Libyan desert, Paco had chosen this one because he knew that his old friend would have trained its members well in the use of weapons and in the making of bombs, and trained them even better in the most indispensable weapon of all, blind obedience. Paco, speaking to them, a legend speaking in the desert with the firelight flickering in the mirrors of his sunglasses, did not tell them that.

  “Some of you have been chosen for a historic job,” Paco told them. “I am leading. I expect we will all die, but before we do, we will accomplish our objective. I need two Germans, four Italians, two Spanish-speakers, two explosives experts from the IRA Provos, one American. Amir will tell you which of you is chosen. That’s all.”

  Later, lying beside the girl who had cleaned his pistol, Paco advised her, as a sign of his satisfaction with her, never to carry any pistol other than the Makarov. “I shot a Jew in London with a Browning,” he said, “and the bullet was stopped by his teeth. Not enough muzzle velocity. In Paris, a round from the Makarov went through a French DST man, through the floor, through a table in the room below, and then into the floor boards under the table. Or so the newspapers said.”

  Paco placed the cold gun on the girl’s flat stomach. She put her hand over the gun. That was all the invitation he needed. While he had her, she shuddered and said wonderful things in Spanish.

  “I thought you were the prize American,” he said to her afterward. “How do you speak such…learned Spanish?”

  The girl explained. She had gone to Cuba to work with the Venceremos Brigades, cutting sugar cane for Castro. The DGI, the Cuban Intelligence service, had picked her up. She’d been trained in one of the camps outside Havana before she was chosen for Libya.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Layal.”

  “Not your gamename. Your name.”

  “My name is Rosemary Kadowaki.”

  “Rosemary?”

  “I was born in Los Angeles. Are you really who the others say you are? They said you were dead, that you had disappeared, that you had left the movement.”

  “They say what they like. I act,” said Paco.

  Paco loved to talk; he had always loved to talk. He lifted the girl’s hair, it was damp with sweat, and whispered into her ear. “Shah mat,” he whispered. “Do you know what that means?”

  The girl looked up at him with adoring eyes. He had only been in bed with her for an hour—less—and she was willing to die for him. Paco knew from experience that this was so.

  * * *

  —

  The Israeli whose workname was Eleazar closed the file and looked across the desk at his control.

  “Carlos is going to kill the shah?” he said.

  “Someone who is perhaps Carlos has been hired to kill the shah,” said the control. “There is a report that the holy man personally gave him the contract.”

  “Do we have a description of this Carlos?”

  “He’s using the name Paco. The story is that his appearance has been altered by plastic surgery. He has all of Carlos’s behavior patterns—ego, lust, recklessness, loquacity, contempt for women and the opposition.”

  “Fingerprints? Did they blood-type him when he entered Libya?”

  Each terrorist who entered Libya for training gave up a smear of blood; other smears were taken at every subsequent meeting and the DNA was compared. It was an ingenious, foolproof method of identification: the East German touch.

  “What good are fingerprints?” asked the control. “The fingerprints Carlos left in Paris and the fingerprints he left on the plane after the OPEC kidnapping were not the same.”

  “Do you think he was bought on that plane?” asked Eleazar. “Did the Saudis and the shah buy him with $50 million in a Swiss account?”

  “Anything is possible. Hans Joachim Klein, the German terrorist who was wounded with Carlos in Vienna, swears that he was bought.”

  “So,” said Eleazar, “maybe it’s Carlos and maybe it isn’t, but they are going to kill the shah.”

  “They are going to try. Do you think we should let fools murder a friend of Israel?”

  “What about the Americans?”

  A droplet of contemptuous silence formed in the stale air of the windowless room. “The Americans,” said the control. “Impotent.”

  Then he said, “Eleazar, I want you to get your team together again.”

  Eleazar’s Wrath of God team, Israelis trained as commandos, had reached into the rat holes of Europe—Germany, Scandinavia, even Poland—to liquidate, in a cold fury of revenge, the Palestinians who had murdered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and all who had helped them.

  Eleazar picked up his medical bag. “I’ll contact the team,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  With Paco at his side, Colonel Muammar al-Kaddafi watched impassively as Amir’s team carried out an exercise. They handled all the weapons of the Soviet arsenal, up to the RPG-7 portable rocket launcher and the shoulder-fired SAM 7 Strela anti-aircraft missile, with consummate skill. Paco did not like these heavy weapons; he had tried to rocket an Israeli airliner at Orly Airport in Paris, and later had attempted to bring down a passenger jet with the Strela. Neither operation had gone right. These clumsy battlefield devices were not for terrorists. They gave too much warning.

  Kaddafi wore his usual outfit: starched safari suit, British-style officer’s cap, burnished buckled shoes without socks. He was always ready to dart, barefoot, into the mosque to pray. He carried a swagger stick.

  Revolution makes strange bedfellows, thought Paco. Here he was, an atheist whose millionaire father, a cafe Communist from Venezuela, had named his three sons Vladimir, Ilich, and Lenin, after the first Soviet saint,
standing on a dune with a fanatical Moslem who had gone to Sandhurst, watching a crowd of children from good bourgeois Christian homes shoot up the landscape with guns made in Russia and Czechoslovakia.

  Paco followed Kaddafi down the ranks of terrorists. The colonel asked each where he, or she, had come from. “Red Brigades, Milano!” they replied. Or “Red Army Faction, Hamburg!” Or “Euskadi to Askatunsa, Bilbao!” Or “Provisional IRA, Belfast!”

  To Layal, standing at attention with her assault rifle across her chest, Kaddafi said, in English, “And you are from the heroic Japanese Red Army.”

  “No, Brother Colonel,” said Layal. “I was born in California. In 1942, because we were Japanese, my family was robbed of its little farm and put into a concentration camp by the two-faced U.S. liberal imperialists. I have come here to help build the people’s prisons where the American oppressors will pay for their crimes against humanity.”

  “Good,” said Kaddafi. “Very good.”

  Kaddafi led Paco to his helicopter. The interior, like every interior belonging to Kaddafi, was decorated in shades of Islamic green: green bulkheads, green upholstery, green Perspex; the Brother Colonel drank tea from a green glass. He had left the machine guns blue-black. Kaddafi was in the middle of one of his long philosophical soliloquies. Paco sipped his tea, sickly sweet and minted. He liked the sweetness but hated the tea itself. It was hard enough following Kaddafi’s ravings when you hadn’t drunk a liter of tea. With your bladder bursting, it was next to impossible.

  “You can do this?” Kaddafi asked.

  “Yes. The plan is good. We have the people. Now we have your blessing, Brother Colonel, so we have everything.”

  “One thing only I demand,” said Kaddafi.

  Merde, thought Paco.

  “The shah has one friend in the world, this swine Sadat,” Kaddafi said. “In the end, he must run to Sadat, in Egypt. Kill him there. Kill him before Sadat’s eyes. Humiliate Sadat. Let him see how long my arm is, that it can reach into his very house and kill a king.”

  “At your orders, Brother Colonel,” said Paco. And again he thought, merde. How am I going to get around this piece of madness?

  * * *

  —

  After fleeing from Iran on January 16, 1979, the shah had gone to Egypt, then to Morocco, then to the Bahamas. Now word came to Paco that the shah had rented a villa in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca, Mexico.

  The word came at night. It was June, and cold in the desert. Layal woke and listened in her silent way as Paco talked to the courier. He and the courier, an officer of the Cuban Directorate General of Intelligence, spoke in Spanish. It did not matter if she understood, here in the middle of nowhere.

  “It’s a tough target,” said the Cuban. “We have a man inside the shah’s household, a survivor of the Communist League 23rd of September movement.”

  “Training?”

  “He took our course in Havana, then the GRU picked him up and shipped him to Doupov.”

  Trained in Czechoslovakia by Soviet military intelligence, and smart enough to survive the brutal Mexican search for the Communist League 23rd of September after it had massacred 40 Mexican policemen, kidnapped the daughter of the Belgian ambassador, and killed the son of the Mexican ambassador to the United States. A light came into Paco’s eyes. He could use such a man.

  “No,” said the Cuban, who had been reading Paco’s eyes since Paris days. “He’s our last operative in Mexico who isn’t scared shitless. You can’t have him.”

  The Cuban told Paco about “La Villa,” the shah’s rented house in Cuernavaca. It was located at 100 del Rio Street, on a steep hill near the river, screened by trees. “No chance of using rockets, of course, because of the trees,” said the Cuban. “There is a watchtower, ramproof steel gates, the usual electronic stuff—infra-red intruder detectors, temblor alarms to pick up footsteps.”

  “How many guards?”

  “Twenty Americans, thirty-four Mexicans, six Iranians. Very well armed, very well paid. Oil company thugs.”

  “You’re telling me nothing cheerful.”

  The Cuban grinned. “I saved the best for last. There is a tunnel, dug just before the shah arrived, that leads from La Villa to another house.”

  “Good. We can mine it.”

  “That’s not all. The shah’s men buy books about Trotsky at the local bookstores. He’s fascinated with the details of how Stalin had Trotsky killed in Mexico. Second, a green station wagon brings in supplies twice a week and is not challenged at the gates. Third, the shah has been talking about going out to dinner.”

  “Going out to dinner?”

  “To show he’s got balls. He hears that Las Manitas is a good restaurant. Peacocks stroll in the grounds. He’ll like that—the Peacock Throne.”

  * * *

  —

  Paco was in command now. He had separated the team into national groups, forbidding them to associate with each other or to speak each other’s languages. The kids, thirsty for their chance to be a symbol of the revolution like Paco, gladly put up with this pointless bullying.

  He routed out the two Germans. Klaus (Paco had stripped the band, except for Layal, of their Arab gamenames) was a typical Baader-Meinhoff type: sullen, fanatical, intellectual, the son of a man who manufactured cars that he sold to Americans for $50,000 apiece, dressed his wife in sable and his teenage mistresses in Wehrmacht uniforms (black lace underneath), and was now as good a democrat as he had once been a Nazi. Which was to say, in both cases, not awfully good, because money was what he was interested in and there was very little money in ideals unless, like Paco, you provided certain unique services idealists could not do without.

  His son Klaus wanted to believe in something, he wanted to live like a soldier, sleeping rough and eating frugally, he wanted to die for a cause. His friend, Bernhild, was just as sullen, but simpler: she just wanted to kill. Anyone would do. Gabriele Krocher-Tiedemann, Paco’s teammate in Vienna, had been like that. “Are you a policeman?” she had asked an old man during their raid on OPEC headquarters. “Yes,” the old man replied. She shot him in the back of the neck and sent him down an elevator. Later, she shot another security guard, and wanted to shoot more.

  In Paco’s experience, Germans were useful people. So operatic in their love of themselves and in their love of death. They’d kill themselves if there was no one else around to murder.

  Klaus and Bernhild, trying not to shiver in the frigid desert air, awaited their orders. Paco, as he spoke to them, faced the dawn, and they saw the big yellow Saharan sun come up in his sunglasses.

  “I have a very important job for you,” Paco said. “Everything, I mean everything, depends on your success.”

  “We will die for the revolution,” said Klaus.

  “Probably. But first you will help others to do so,” said Paco.

  Two weeks later, a man and a woman, posing as German tourists, were arrested in Cuernavaca. They had been observed loitering near La Villa. When the Mexican police followed them home, they found grenades and automatic weapons.

  There were rumors that the Germans had in their possession a list of prominent Mexican citizens who were going to be assassinated if the shah was not thrown out of the country. It was said that under questioning by Mexico Federal Security the Germans had told everything about a plot to murder the shah.

  No one asked the Germans, because they disappeared.

  Miguel Nazar Haro, director of Mexico Federal Security, would not confirm that the Germans had ever existed. “We do not deal lightly with terrorists in Mexico,” said Nazar. “That is why we have none.” He added that the shah would always be safe in Mexico, and that his agency was on the lookout for German and Japanese terrorists especially. He smiled a confident smile.

  When the green station wagon came through the gates of La Villa, after the Germans had disappeared, it carried,
among the groceries, a copy of a book about Trotsky. One of the security men picked it up.

  “I thought we had a copy of this one,” he said.

  The book exploded, taking off both his hands and most of his face.

  This was Paco’s way of saying, “Time to move.”

  * * *

  —

  Paco, lunching in Las Manitas, watched the man beside the shah taste his master’s food before it was chewed by the royal teeth and swallowed by the royal esophagus. The shah drank vodka on the rocks and ate a steak.

  There were thugs with walkie-talkies all over the place. “Someone could kill him,” said the woman with Carlos. She trembled at being so close to a king, never knowing how close she was to the Makarov strapped to Paco’s right leg.

  Paco could have killed him then and there—and died romantically a moment afterward. At home, the shah was always accompanied by two Dobermans and a huge wolfhound. No man trained, like Paco, in the KGB technique (press the gun against the flesh before firing, no cowboy stuff) could have got close enough to shoot him. Here there were no dogs.

  I am the dog, thought Paco, the wolf, in sheepdog’s clothing, herding this royal sheep to Egypt.

  He giggled. The woman gave him a puzzled look. Had he no regard for royalty?

  * * *

  —

  Paco looked down on the snarled, braying traffic on Sixth Avenue. The big cars and the yellow taxis glittered in the unswept street—New York was having one of its garbagemen’s strikes—like gems in the feces of a capitalist trying to escape from a revolution. Carlos drank what was left of the Lafite-Rothschild 1962 he had had with lunch, and padded in his bare feet across the living room of his suite at the Hilton. He loved Hiltons: the shrimp cocktails, the steaks you didn’t have to chew, the jolly bars, filled with girls.

  He slapped the sleeping girl in the bed on the buttocks. She woke with a snarl. Carlos undid the belt of his Sulka dressing gown and started to turn her over. The girl put a cold hand on his hairless chest.