by Jack Freeman
After a few more sips of the strong Dutch gin, Max saw Ali Saeed coming into the room, through the thick tobacco haze around the bar, pausing at the counter and then strolling unhurriedly towards him with a glass of Amstel beer in one hand and an un-tipped Gauloise cigarette smouldering in his other hand.
“So, you made it ok, after all,” said Ali with a small smile, “I saw there was quite a bit of a commotion around the Sonesta hotel. Police tapes, sirens, road blocks, cops taking statements, all that sort of stuff. I guess that was all your doing?”
“Reckon so. I guess you were around to keep a watch on me. As it turned out, unlike last night, no help was needed. Anyway, I can truly say “mission accomplished”, which always feels good. I’m on a bit of a roll here. Two successful ops in two days! Now Makki’s gone there’s one less sell-out to confuse the People plus two fewer foot-soldiers on the wrong side of history. Cheers,” replied Max, adding “Is Azar ok? And what’s next on the agenda?”
“Yes, Cheers. Well done. The bosses will be really pleased with this. The Famous Grouse supplies at the safe house will be getting a beating tonight. That’s for sure.
So far, the cops are reporting no leads on who killed the two bobbies and who sprayed the nest of spies. Our people haven’t been rounded up or raided at all. Which is strange in a way, suspicious even, some might say. We’re the normally suspected in this sort of case and we expect to be rounded up, interrogated and kicked around a bit, so the higher echelons are worrying about why this hasn’t happened.”
“What are you saying? Are you suggesting that the Man got me to blast the Embassy and kill some of his guys as part of an infiltration set up? And come on over and kill Makki for you, too? That wouldn’t happen.
Why nobody from your group has been rounded up, I don’t know. Maybe they’re just keeping a tighter watch on you, us, even, Gathering intel from phone taps, surveillance. We’re not off the hook for the cop killings by a long way, I would say”
“Yeah, ok. You’re probably right.
Now, about Azar. She was fine when I left on the flight after yours. She was sent to go out leafleting again today at Oxford Street tube station. The weightlifters will be helping her with that…people tend not to refuse their leaflets.
Personally, I am especially glad you took care of Makki. We have enough to do fighting the Shah and his western backers, without also fighting people like Makki. You may know, he recently tried to steal a big heap of cash we had acquired for the cause. There was quite a gun fight and I lost friends thanks to Makki’s greed. He confused the people for years and effectively, by splitting the revolutionary movement has helped the Shah. Fact is, we suspect he was secretly in league with the Shah all along. Basically, we are sure he was a fake, actually a double agent on a grand scale. Good riddance!
The next thing for you, actually for us both, is to get back to Schiphol and catch a flight to West Berlin’s Tegel airport. I’ve got all the tickets. Again, as far as nosy customs and passport control people are concerned, you are an IBM executive and you have a meeting in a business development park near the Ku-Damn with a Research and Development consultancy called “Alt Solutions”. It is near our hotel there, which is the Bristol. The meeting part of the story is true and that’s when we’ll get our further instructions. I don’t know exactly what it will be about, but they have been saying that it’s something big. Also, it will be a two man job and I’m your partner on this one. That’s all I’ve been told.”
Max tried not to look too interested, but he had never heard of Alt Solutions and could not immediately see what relationship there could be between the RPI and a Research and Development consultancy.
“Ok,” said Max “but I would like to speak on the phone with Azar later.”
“A very brief call should be ok, later tonight. Short, of course, so it can’t be traced.”
Max nodded and Ali looked at his watch and said “Say, we’ve got about 3 hours before the flight. I’m kind of collecting visits to prostitutes. The idea is to try one in all the main cities of Europe. It makes these trips more interesting. What do you say?”
“Ha, ha, you’re full of surprises! I wouldn’t have guessed that was your hobby. Be my guest. This is the right place to try. It’s all legal here. You can pick them out of windows down in the rosse buurt district off the Damrak, near here. I’m told you get what you pay for so I wouldn’t go too down market if I was you. I’ll pass on this, as a married man, I don’t want to get into trouble with Azar on top of all my other troubles.”
“Ok, you can have a drink while you wait. I’ll be back in an hour. I’ll go for the palest girl I see. We Persians don’t like blacks or even dark browns too much.”
“Yeah, I know, you’re the original Aryans and you all rooted for Adolf.”
“So would you, if he was your enemies’ enemy. Enjoy the drinks. I’ll be back shortly.”
Ali left Max wondering if this was some sort of test. Going with Ali would open him up to blackmail with Azar. So it was best not to go. Not trying to stop Ali might be seen as going along with a breach of security; but, reporting Ali would indicate disloyalty to a colleague. Tired of wrestling with this dilemma Max turned to the International Herald Tribune and read of still further tensions over the Berlin Wall developments and strains between Syria and Egypt. The end of the United Arab republic was predicted, which, Max guessed would please the political bosses in DC.
After an hour and a quarter Ali returned, grinning, and indicated that they had to go now. Ali had hoped Max would join him in the brothel trip as it would have been a way of bonding with him by having a shared secret. He was pretty sure the bosses wouldn’t approve of this hobby, especially when indulged on their time. A man was vulnerable when with a prostitute and could compromise the mission by being distracted in that way. Now the test would be whether Max reported him to the bosses. Such snitching was not acceptable and even the bosses did not like informing on petty matters as it weakened team spirit and morale.
They went by taxi to Schiphol, had a quick meal of herrings on toast with salads washed down with more Genever and Amstel beer in the airport restaurant and then caught a KLM flight to West Berlin’s Tegel airport with no difficulties. The plane was almost empty and no-one apart from the stewardesses paid any attention to Max and Ali in the Business Class section. There was time for some champagne and canapés on the short flight to West Berlin. Sipping the dry Bollinger ’58, Max stared out of the window and down on to the German Democratic Republic some 30,000 feet below. It was somewhat unnerving to think that the Soviet Empire was straight down beneath the thin fuselage and that outside the narrow air corridor within which the plane must remain was Soviet airspace patrolled by MiG-21s. Just a word down the phone from Moscow and the flight would be blown out of the air. As the plane banked to begin its descent to Tegel, a loud crashing sound erupted and an intense flash of light seemed to fill the cabin, while the plane rocked violently from side to side. Ali looked worriedly at Max who shrugged and said “If that was a surface-to-air missile or a MiG cannon shell we wouldn’t still be flying. We’d be dead already.” The stewardess came over the speakers to be assure passengers that a thunderstorm had broken out around the plane but it would not affect landing times.
Soon they were on the ground of the western part of the divided city. The Federal Republic Border Police had no interest in them whatsoever and by 6 pm they had reached the offices of Alt Solutions which were in a small modern building near the Kurfurstendamm and were evidently built on a site that had been cleared by allied air forces some years previously.
While entering the building, Max noticed a men’s lavatory off the entrance corridor but decided not to use it now. Maybe, he thought, on the way out. A stocky guard at a reception desk down the hall phoned ahead and buzzed them through doors to the stairs that lead to the main office area.
On the upper floor was an open plan office full of desks with the latest push button calculating machines with LED displ
ays but there were no piles of paper or staff to be seen. Every so often there were whiteboards on stands or fixed to walls. The boards were all cleaned off, but faint traces of flow charts, organisational hierarchies and pie diagrams were still visible.
An Irish voice said, “Guten abend, mein herren.”
Max turned and saw a red haired man in a green tweed suit extending a hand in greeting. The man continued, “I am Joe Murphy and I’m boss of this little show. As you see, I insist on a clean desk every night. You never know who might come peering in, do you? So, you gentlemen must be Mr Blue and Mr Saeed, visiting us from London. Come on to my office.”
Murphy led them down a well lit corridor and round a corner on a plastic stackable seat they met a small man with bald head and a bulbous nose guarding the door to Murphy’s office.
“This is my associate, Mr Kilroy. He keeps an eye on things. General security round here. You can’t be too careful, you know,” said Murphy.
Kilroy nodded but said nothing as Murphy opened the door and ushered his visitors into his corner office which was furnished in tasteful modern Swedish style. The floor was polished wood and the guests’ chairs and Murphy’s large desk were mixtures of blond beech and shining chrome. Murphy’s own seat was inside a clear plastic hemisphere hanging from the ceiling by a thick brass chain. Steel Venetian blinds hid the view through the large bullet proof glass windows and spotlights lit up the desk and chairs. Murphy indicated that his visitors should sit and he went over to a bar area and poured large glasses of Bushmills Irish Whiskey which he passed over carefully to Max and Ali. Sobranie Black cigarettes were produced and when the conversational niceties about their travel and that day’s weather were exhausted, Murphy began to speak about their business together.
“Welcome again. London tell me that you are key men and I can speak frankly with you.”
“Sure. Would you mind telling us what you have to do with our bosses?” asked Max.
“Ok. It’s like this. To put it pretty bluntly, we offer a consultancy service to many organisations but our great specialty, our Unique Selling Point, as the ad boys say, is consultancy for organisations whose business is, well, armed struggle. I was with the Irish Republican Army for many years and was an area commander in Belfast for a while. However, due to politics and crackdowns in The North and in the Republic, the IRA stopped being very active a few years ago now. However, there was a lot of experience in our ranks and we kept getting queries and requests for help from newer, more active groups, like ETA, the Corsicans, the Greek Cypriots and now Iranian groups. I thought, hell, why don’t we sell our know-how, not just give it away. So that’s how this outfit got set up. We do regular R&D too as a cover. But the big money is in the armed struggle side. It doesn’t go through the official books, so it’s all tax free. Profits go half to me and half to the boys back home. One of our main things is generating operational plans from target selection, to method, time, place, logistics, recruitment of experienced personnel, detailed timetables, flowcharts and so on. Sure, it’s big business now and we copy big business methods. We use brainstorming, morphological synthesis, synectics and such like in producing option ideas. Then we do cost benefit and risk analysis to select and refine plans and finally apply operations research methods, critical path analyses and so forth to optimise the plans.
In the past we’ve worked on plans for bumping off De Gaulle, Franco, the Queen of England, and the King of Jordan, among others. Let’s take Franco, as an example. He is pretty paranoid about the Red Menace and half or more of his country hate him. He changes his security details and arrangements all the time and the close bodyguards are men who owe him everything. They are mainly orphans of Falangists killed in the Civil War and he rewards them well and gets them implicated in his crimes by having them filmed personally murdering opponents who come his way. After a bit of brain storming we favour shooting by a long range sniper when he attends the Day of Rememberance events at that huge and hideous Valley of the Fallen Monument near Madrid. We are just waiting for the customers to come up with the funds and it’s a “go”. In fact, most leading figures in Europe and the US have been subjects of our plans of one kind or another. They usually don’t come to anything. Don’t get “green lit” as they say in Hollywood. But we get paid no matter for writing the scripts, as you might put it. There’s a strange alliance of the American Mafia and Castro’s crowd that are seeking our services regarding Kennedy. I don’t much like that brief, what with JFK coming from good Irish stock, but, well business is business. Watch this space!
The present work for your bosses went through a few iterations. Where should it be done? Tehran, Berlin, somewhere else? How should it be done? sniper, poison, contrived accident, car bomb, under road bomb, bomb in building and if so which building?
The target, I should say, is no less a personage than the Shah himself.”
Max now knew what the “something big” mentioned by Jack Johnson and by Saeed was.
“What’s our role in this then?” asked Max.
“Well, it happens that the Shah will be here in Berlin in two days time on a private visit. Very hush-hush. But we know all about it. He is seeing various big oil people to sound out kickbacks or commissions for rights in some new fields they’re going to open up. Your man will be staying in the Hilton Penthouse suite. We’ve decided on a bomb in the cavity space between the hotel roof and the ceiling of the Penthouse suite. It will be on a timer and placed above his bedroom in the next 16 hours before his security goons get the place sealed up. We have the explosive. It’s a new plastic explosive just developed by those clever Czechs and we have arranged a supply. We also provide a timer and a detonator. What is needed is someone to assemble it and put it in place and your bosses want Mr Blue here to do that. They want someone they can trust and Mr Blue, you have given them confidence that you can be relied on and you have the right background for this job.”
An idea began to form in Max’s mind but his face remained unchanged.
“That’s nice. But I have a suggestion. To make sure the explosive goes off I’ve found in the past that it’s often best to have two timers and two detonators in case one doesn’t work. Belt and braces, as you might say.”
“Good thinking. Yes, we can do that.”
Murphy picked up the phone, dialled an extension number and quietly gave brief instructions in German.
Max’s command of German was excellent and he heard that there would be two timers and detonators in the package being prepared.
“Ok. The stuff you need will be ready in 15 minutes. We also have hotel maintenance men’s overalls, suitable badges to flash, torches and tools you might need, so you can get on to the roof first thing tomorrow. I gather your German is good and you can pass as native, Mr Blue?”
“Yeah, that’s right. In a previous employment, I had to master German with a specialism in the Berlin accent and dialect. So, I should be ok.”
“Mr Saeed, hasn’t had the benefit of your education, I’m afraid. We’ll say he’s a new Turkish guest worker, straight from Anatolia, with no German yet, and you do the talking, Max. When the bomb is planted, come back here and brief me on how the operation went. We will then dispose of the uniforms, tools and so on. We have access to special high temperature incinerators, so there will be nothing left of that stuff for any forensics types to work on.”
“Ok. Another thing. I want to check in with base very briefly. Can we use the phone?” asked Max.
Murphy agreed and quickly got an international connection. Max asked Ali to dial the London safe house and ask for Azar to be put on the line. Ali spoke rapid Farsi which Max followed and was re-assured that Ali was asking simply what Max had asked him to. Ali handed the phone to Max.
Azar was in their room at the farm house doing push-ups when a weightlifter came to take her down to the phone. She was relieved that Max was able to call. She found the uncertainty of the situation they were in with the RPI extremely troubling and she was growing conc
erned that she was now alone in the safe house with the weightlifters, who had begun sniggering and making indelicate gestures at her. The Inner Circle leaders had apparently left while she was out leafleting and the weightlifters were becoming boisterous.
“Hi, Azar? I have to make this a very quick call. Is all well? Good. Tell them I’ll be calling again later tomorrow to speak with you. I can’t say more now. Bye”
Max felt this call was enough to let the bosses know that he was monitoring Azar’s well being and that he would likely not be cooperative if she was not answering in good spirits. He suddenly thought that Ali might soon be a problem for him. Maybe Ali was to dispose of Max once the bomb was set? Max didn’t think he could let that happen. Luckily, he had not used all the bullets for the Luger that morning and so had a means to deal with Ali.
An aide of Murphy’s appeared and gave Max and Ali the bomb making materials in a smart attaché case and the uniforms and other equipment in a roll bag.
“Before we go to the hotel, I must use the toilet,” said Max in an urgent tone as they were leaving the building.
The Herren was on the ground floor and Max locked himself into a cubicle by the wall. He was glad to see that the cubicles gave complete privacy. No gaps below the door or at the foot of walls between cubicles. This could be useful. Even better, the ceiling was made of panels which could be lifted up and out of position quite easily. No sign of cameras or microphones. From the pattern of turns made getting here from the upper floor, Max reckoned these toilets were near enough directly under Murphy’s office.
After a suitable delay, Max emerged, looking less agitated and indicated to Ali to lead on.
On arriving at the Bristol Hotel Kempinski on the corner of Ku-Damm and Fasanenstrasse, Max found they had been both booked into the same twin room by their nominal organisation and this could not be changed as the hotel was full. Max suspected that the organisation had strictly instructed the hotel that they were to share a twin room. No easy escape from my minder, thought Max.