by Jack Freeman
Downstairs in a small room, Ali, wearing headphones, turned to Nasir and smirked, “Sounds like they’re having a joint shower, boss. Pity we don’t have a camera up there! Oh boy! Wait till you hear this, boss. Ok, that’s it. They’re done now. The tape recording will be good entertainment for the guys. Maybe I’ll let the weightlifter s have a listen later for a small fee! But, boss, they didn’t say anything about the job so looks like they’re still on side.”
Nasir poured two large glasses of Famous Grouse whisky and said “Yeah. Well, maybe it’s suspicious that they didn’t say anything about the job? I read an old story once where the main thing was a dog that didn’t bark. Why didn’t our dog, Max, bark about the action he’s been assigned? We’ve got to keep a close watch on this pair. I still think they could be plants, the shower business could be a way of avoiding our bugs. I just can’t trust them,” replied Nasir, “When I was in Italy, right after leaving Iran, we had to deal with a lot of double agents. Guys from other groups trying to subvert the cause, acting as provocateurs, would infiltrate and usually urge us to more and more extreme action. We even had an infiltrator from the Italian Secret Service, the SID. They were against the commies and we were seen as commie allies, which has some truth in it. I could just shoot provocateurs from other émigré groups and dump the bodies anywhere. The Italians didn’t care and it gave notice to our rivals not to mess with us. To deal with the SID man, well, we strung him up in a cellar for a few weeks and came to a deal with SID to let him go, if they would leave us alone. Anyway, that work, counter-intel, you might say, gave me a nose, a feel, for doubles, moles, and infiltrators and I have a bad feeling about the Mr. and Mrs. Blue.”
“What are we going to do with them boss?”
“Just keep a very close watch on them both. Max can be useful to us for a bit as he tries to prove himself. Azar is a good pawn for us to hold, to make Max behave. She is not much of an asset in her own right. We don’t go in for lady operatives much.”
“Except for honey traps, eh, boss?” said Ali with a grin, “she’d be good at that, ok!”
“Yeah, or maybe, just to provide a bit of R&R for our guys after the big op. Now, you’ve got an early start, Ali, so get to bed , and put thoughts of Azar out of your dirty young mind!”
“Ok, boss. Promise I’ll go to sleep thinking of the Revolution and nothing else.”
By 6.15 a.m. the next morning, Max was in transit, blindfolded again, and accompanied by weightlifters, as the van made frequent right and left turns through the dispersing mist. Max reckoned that the changes of direction more or less cancelled out, indicating they were going round in a circle. Then there was a straight run and the blindfold was removed as the van approached Heathrow’s British European Airways Terminal 1 drop-off zone and Max slid into the empty front passenger seat helped by one of the weightlifters who had also taken off Max’s grubby blindfold .
Max got out, checked his tickets and followed the signs to European Departures through a maze of dingy grey corridors carpeted with what appeared to be pre-stained linoleum. He joined a slow moving queue of passengers seeking permission from officialdom to leave Britain for the Continent. Anyone seeking to do so was automatically deemed worthy of suspicion. Reaching the head of the queue, Max found himself facing a gum chewing youth with greasy hair in a cheap suit. The youth wielded a rubber stamp and requested Max’s passport.
“So. You have the right to remain in UK. That’s good. Reason for your travel today, Sir?” asked the youth.
“Business in Holland. Computers, you know.”
“Ah yeah. Them new fangled things. How much sterling are we carrying, Sir? There’s a limit on what you can take out. I suppose you know that.”
“Well, I think I’m ok. Let me check.”
Max took out his wallet looked inside and estimated £150 in twenties and tens.
“Looks like I’ve got £30 today.”
“I see. Well the limit is £20 and ten shillings. I’ll have to check with my supervisor whether you are within our tolerances. Wallet please.”
The youth wandered off to a small office behind his booth with Max’s passport and wallet while from the queue behind Max came ever growing muttering. Max checked his watch and saw anxiously that the flight take off time was approaching. A thin sallow man with hair badly combed over a bald patch came out from the back office with Max’s passport and took the youth’s place behind the desk. The man leant over and spoke very quietly, so that Max had to lean right over and strain to hear what was being said. This also brought Max closer than he would wish to the man’s repellently bad breath which emanated from a mouth of crooked and blackened teeth.
“You are in breach of the Exchange Control Act, 1958. Now, you can stop here all day, in a holding cell, while we charge you, or you can take an on-the-spot fine, cash only, £50 and we’ll say no more about it. Just put the penalty in this folder here,” said the man pushing his wallet and a dog eared folder over to Max.
Shit, thought Max, a shake down.
“OK. Fair enough,” seemed the best thing to say, and Max slid a £50 note into the folder, making sure the passengers behind him could not see the transaction.
The man stamped Max’s passport and waved him through with an unpleasant smile.
After a sprint through hundreds of yards of dimly lit and stained corridors and up and down several flights of stairs, Max reached the gate and finally got on the plane for Amsterdam. He was the last passenger to board and the tightly suited steward said “Glad you could join us this morning, Sir” with a pronounced lisp. The small propeller driven commuter plane took off steeply and then followed the Thames eastwards towards the North Sea. Despite the early hour, Max ordered a double whisky for instant relaxation after the stress of the shakedown and the near missing of his flight.
The steward winked and said “Had a hard day already, have we, Sir?”
Max laughed and said “Yeah, your ground side buddies gave me a hard time. They like me so much, they didn’t want me to leave the good old UK. But, when I assured them I’d be back, well, they let me catch the flight after all.”
The Inner Circle would not understand any failure, he was sure. Any slip ups, like missing the flight would have been counted as a failure, and Azar would be liquidated and him next. Max barely registered the views of London laid out in the morning sun like a giant model city or later the grey sea with its toy like ships far below. Knowing that one had to kill a stranger in a strange town that very day at the behest of other strangers was distracting, he found, like the compulsive thinking of a white bear when asked not to think of a white bear. While sipping his morning whisky, Max tried to focus on a Zen meditation exercise, a koan. The action that was coming up required improvisation and spontaneity, so getting in the right frame of mind to act quickly and intuitively was most important. Soon he was lost in a koan puzzle, “What was his face before his mother and father were born?” and he became totally calm.
Jack Johnson woke up in his cot in the Embassy at 7.45 a.m. and wondered what the hell Max was up to now. How in God’s name to square the Brits over the cop deaths? He didn’t see any answer at the moment. Have to convince them to pin it on some usual suspect or if they would insist on suspecting the RPI, get them to hold off busting the known RPI places until after the RPI’s big plans were known and stopped. He would brief his MI5 contact Smith later that day and also spread the word to his Metropolitan Police contacts. Despite Jack’s frequently voiced criticisms of the Brits’ poor security, he had good relations with a trusted few in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Services and in the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch that handled threats from subversive elements in London and beyond. Jack had some tip offs that Irish American supporters of the currently dormant Irish Republican Army were gathering funds for a war chest to fuel a revival of IRA militancy and hoped he could trade this intel for cooperation with the Brits over Operation Double Payback and its unfortunate side effects on London’s streets.
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Jack had put tails on Max and Azar and they had followed them to the farmhouse. Pity, we couldn’t get a bug or two in there. Next, Max was taken to Heathrow and was last seen boarding the Amsterdam plane after a suspicious delay at Passport Control. Guess something is going to happen in Amsterdam today. We’ll find out pretty soon. Our assets in Amsterdam are to try tailing Max after he gets there.
Max went through Schiphol’s arrivals area without incident and was waved through Passport Control by two burly blonde female officers. At least the Dutch are still honest, thought Max, or at least these ones. Those girls didn’t suffer from the war time famine here, that was clear. Re-focussing on his mission, he caught a Mercedes taxi to the Sonesta hotel. He was dropped outside the hotel and noted it was then 10.50 a.m. local time. Walking down the stairs into the ill-lit underground car park, he found that the red Fiat 1500 car was there, as promised, with the keys in the exhaust pipe. Nobody else was in the parking area. He had a quick look under the car and saw nothing worrying. There was no sign of any bombs rigged up to detonate on opening the door or moving the car. Max opened the passenger’s side car door and found a weapon in the glove box, as arranged. From his Company firearms training, he recognised it as a historically interesting Luger Parabellum P.08, with eight 9x19mm rounds and a silencer attached. Cool, he thought, it had been good enough for Adolf’s SS, so it’s good enough for me. The gun certainly had stopping power. But you’ve got to get in close to be absolutely sure of a fatal effect.
Sitting in the car, Max came up with a few alternative plans. He could maybe cruise by in the car, slowly, as the target waited for the elevator and take a shot en passant, or be out of the car and loiter by the elevator and shoot as the target waited at elevator door, or maybe better, Max could be in the elevator and shoot the target as the door opened, then escape by car or take elevator again up to the lobby and disappear on foot. What if there were civilians about? Usually civilians in these situations didn’t do anything but maybe scream and go into shock. All I need to do, he thought, is to pull my homburg hat down low for the action and when I get away from the scene turn the reversible raincoat so the other side shows and then ditch the hat.
Max heard two large cars pulling in slowly at the entrance far back in the garage. In the rear view mirror of the Fiat, he saw it was the target, Makki, and his entourage. Clearing his mind of conscious options he made an automatic snap decision, got out of the Fiat and went over to the elevator. He pressed the button and the door opened. Lucky! The elevator was already at the garage level and it was empty. He put his foot just in the jamb, so the door would not completely close and as a result the elevator could not be summoned from above. He pressed and held the “close door” button. This closed the door as far as it could go with his shoe just preventing complete closure and now the elevator looked closed normally from the outside. The Luger was readied; the safety catch was off and silencer tightened on.
Within two minutes, Max heard the target and his entourage approaching the door and then the faint sound of impatient repeated pushing of the “up” button came from the outside. Max removed his finger from the “Close” button on his side of the door and took his foot from its position in the jamb, causing the door to slide open.
“Going down?” said Max as he put two bullets into Makki’s forehead, firing through the gap between the frame and the opening door . The body guard to Max’s right was taken by complete surprise and fell wounded from two more shots from Max, before he could react. The bodyguard on Max’s left had time to pull out his small calibre Berretta and fired point blank into Max’s chest. Max staggered backwards firing his Luger once through the now closing door and saw the other man fall from a shot that had struck through his left eye and caused a thick plume of blood to erupt from the back of his head. Max mentally thanked the RPI for providing a heavy duty bullet proof vest; it was incredibly uncomfortable but effective. He pressed the “Open doors” button to enable him to finish off the two bodyguards if need be. As the door opened, the first wounded body guard began firing from his position on his back on the floor, but being weak from blood loss, he was no longer accurate and his shots went wide and harmlessly hit the concrete wall of the elevator shaft. Max came out of the elevator and coldly executed the fallen body guard with a bullet through the left temple at point blank range. The second body guard and Maaki were clearly both dead already. Max hurried back into the elevator, pressed the “Up” button and exited swiftly at lobby level, as hotel security men pushed past him and into the elevator to investigate the noises from below. Not looking around, Max went straight out of the hotel’s revolving front doors and entered into a maze of narrow streets and canals where he was soon lost in the dense crowds.
At the same time, Azar was out leafleting at Oxford Street tube station with the weightlifter s. The weightlifters were even less communicative than Ali. She did notice that they seemed to take turns to disappear into Soho for an hour or so and came back smiling lasciviously. At lunch break they let her use a phone box to call the bookshop. She called the Mayfair number of the Embassy and left a message for Jack, as Max had asked.
Jack checked the files again. Comrade Alpha was the nom-de-guerre of Hamid Pasdar. He had been born in 1918 in Isfahan, trained as a medical doctor at Tehran University, 1940-45, and was a surgeon at the University of Tehran Heart Hospital, 1945-53. He had been sacked for pro-Mossadegh activities, gone underground, then joined the RPI, fled to France and now was wanted in Iran and France for politically motivated bombings and assassinations. His preferred modus operandi for despatching political rivals was poisoning. Nice guy, thought Jack. So much for the Hippocratic oath!
Comrade X was the nom-de guerre of Bezhad Aslan and he had been born in Tehran, in 1922. He had trained as an electrical engineer at Tehran University, 1942-1946 and worked for the Iranian State Electricity Board, 1946-53. As with Alpha, he was sacked from his job at the time of the anti-Mossadegh coup for pro-Mossadegh activities. He was jailed 1954-57. He claimed he had been tortured in jail. Probably true, thought Jack. He joined the RPI in 1957 and was exiled in the same year. He had been based in Italy till 1959, but was now based in London. He was suspected of involvement in factional murders in Italy and of the bombing of the Iranian Embassy, in Bonn, West Germany, in 1958. A massive car bomb had been planted outside on the Shah’s birthday. There had been 37 killed in that attack, mostly civilians in the street outside, in the wrong place at the wrong time. This action only cemented further the strong relationships between the West Germans and the Shah. From the RPI point of view, it was all good propaganda of the deed and had brought them added support from West German left revolutionary groups who were beginning to think about launching an armed struggle against what they saw as the repressive crypto-fascist Federal Republic. This Comrade X is another choice character, thought Jack.
After ten minutes weaving through crowded Amsterdam backstreets, crossing some of the innumerable bridges over the concentric rings of canals that go through the centre of the old city and dodging cyclists coming in unexpected directions, Max slipped into a bar that was already busy with lunchtime customers and went straight down to the men’s lavatory which was at the foot of narrow brown stained stairs. In a lavatory cubicle, he reversed his raincoat and stuffed the hat into an inner coat pocket. He then went straight out of the bar and now made directly for the nearby Marriott hotel. A few flecks of snow were in the damp air as he approached the Marriott and a bitterly cold wind was coming from the East, foretelling heavy snow later.
In the spacious lounge bar, which was on the top floor of the hotel, he ordered a large Genever gin and water and went to a window seat from which he ignored the city panorama below and kept an eye on the entrance to the bar to see who might be coming in to contact him about the next part of the RPI plan. He lit up a Chesterfield, inhaled deeply, slowly savoured the highly aromatic gin and reflected that Makki was no great loss to the world, given that his group were, in fact, as ruthless as the
RPI and only in the RPI’s view could the ILF be seen as “moderates” who were likely to sell out to the Shah and Western interests. Hadn’t Makki’s group blown up cinemas, hospitals, mosques, schools? There were rumours they had brought down a couple of domestic airliners in Iran but it had been covered up by Savak as too embarrassing a lapse of security to be publicised. How the hell these kind of attacks could be justified, Max couldn’t really see. Collateral damage is maybe ok, sometimes, when you are going for a major legitimate target, but the sort of targeting Makki’s crew went in for was sheer sick terrorism, mused Max. He was sure that his Company handlers and their political masters would have no problems with what he had done. On the contrary, he knew that there would be quiet satisfaction in the Chancelleries and Foreign Offices of many countries when the news got out that the leader of a group, which had been shooting and bombing with little discrimination around the world for years, was now out of the way. Overall, the morning’s action had gone as well as could be hoped. In fact, he thought it was a quality piece of work and really had been one that should go down in the annals of assassination. It had been an action of which his old trainers at Camp Peary in Virginia, would have been proud. Pity that Makki’s bodyguards didn’t survive to tell the tale in mercenary bars round the globe. Perhaps he should not have finished them off. There’s a good case for leaving a witness to spread the word that Blue must be respected, but time was short, and although he didn’t like killing the foot soldiers unnecessarily, this time it was necessary. Fortunately, no spatter from the targets had landed on Max’s clothes and now he simply looked the part of a busy executive enjoying a relaxing drink after a hard morning’s work spent boosting the free world’s economy.
In London, Jack took a call from a payphone in the Marriott, on a secure line, from the asset tailing Max in Amsterdam. When he heard the message, Jack whistled, and said to himself “Good work, Max, that Makki has been overdue for years. The bodyguards were players and accepted the risks. Too bad.”