Retribution

by Ian Barclay

  The snow came down steadily and the road surface was slick. Traffic backed up a few miles north of Portland and Dartley crawled past a multiple-car accident. Everson’s was one of the cars. The door on the driver’s side was smashed in. Maybe the bastard was already dead.

  Dartley checked into a Portland hotel and watched the local evening news on TV. Nobody killed, but five people were in Mercy Hospital. No names given. At eleven next morning, carrying a bunch of flowers and a bag of grapes, Dartley arrived at Mercy and inquired at the desk for Mr. Everson’s room.

  At the semiprivate room with four beds, one patient was being cared for behind drawn bed curtains. When the nurse finished, she pushed an instrument tray to one side as she rearranged things. Dartley waited until she left, then quickly and quietly helped himself to a used syringe with a very fine needle.

  Paul Everson awoke and clearly recognized Dartley as the man he had seen at the Thunderhole. He rattled his plaster casts like an indignant turtle and tried to mumble from between his wired jaws. Dartley gazed calmly into his frightened eyes, then put the flowers and grapes on his bedside table.

  One bed was empty, the curtains remained drawn about another, the guy in the third bed looked tranqued out of his mind. Everson lay watching him from the fourth, unable to move. An inverted bottle dripped fluids through a clear plastic tube into a vein in his arm.

  Dartley pulled back the syringe plunger, drawing air into the barrel. He looked quickly out into the corridor. No one. He eased the fine needle into the plastic IV tube and used the syringe plunger to send in a bubble of air. He watched the air bubble travel slowly down the tube and through the needle into Everson’s vein. The next one he sent was about an inch long in the tube. Then he gave him seven or eight more, nicely spaced out by the liquid.

  The air bubbles clotted the blood inside Everson’s veins and the blood flow moved them to his heart, where they blocked the flow. While Everson suffered fatal convulsions on the bed, Dartley was in the elevator headed for the ground floor.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Ricard was something like Turkish raki. So was Pernod, but Naim Shabaan preferred Ricard and he stopped at various cafés and bars to have one as he walked along the Paris streets. Earlier he had taken the Metro from Montparnasse to Barbes Rochechouart and walked along toward Place Pigalle and then Place Clichy. He stopped at various places, regardless of whether they were gaudy tourist traps or rough bars on side streets. He ignored offers for various kinds of sex and faced down two hoodlums who were thinking about mugging him but changed their minds because he so clearly was not afraid of them. Mugging people is risky work, and Naim, although he was not huge, was young and strong—he might be dangerous.

  Naim was aware that he gave off an aura of potential violence in spite of the fact that his hair was neatly cut, he wore a tie, his shoes were shined, he was polite. He decided it might be his eyes. There was nothing he could do about that because wearing shades definitely made him look sinister. Even he could not deny that.

  When he tired of the honky-tonk bright lights, he walked toward the center of the city along streets nearly empty at this time of night, lined with closed stores. The few cafés that were open were dim, quiet, and depressing, but they did not seem to affect Naim in any way. He behaved in them just as he had in places with flashing lights and female companions for lonely men—hardly moving, staring in front of him, sipping slowly on his drink from time to time.

  He crossed the Seine by the Pont Neuf and followed the Rue de Rennes back to Montparnasse. He stopped at two more cafés, then made his way back to the apartment on the Avenue du Maine. The apartment belonged to an Iranian arms dealer who wanted them gone when he returned in six weeks. He had only loaned them the apartment in the first place so he could boast of it to a mullah who he was probably overcharging for weapons. Once the deal was made, the gunrunner had tried to get rid of them by sending a couple of his men to take possession. Hasan stabbed one in the arm, and they decided to back ?ff for a while.

  Naim ascended in the elevator to the top floor. He turned the key in the lock and walked in. Bottles, glasses, plates with food still on them, a hashish pipe, full ashtrays, no one about—it was the usual late night scene. He headed for the bathroom. As he passed a half-open door, he heard a moan from inside. He pushed in the door slowly. The soft light of a table lamp illuminated the room.

  A naked woman lay on her side on the sheets of the bed. Her neck was arched and her head was flung back. Her hair was stuck to her perspiring face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. She moaned softly with pleasure.

  Hasan lay on his side, facing her, moving his pelvis against hers. Her upper leg was thrown across his heaving buttocks. He massaged the flesh of her thigh and growled obscenities in Arabic.

  Ali was inserted in her behind, pumping vigorously. His body fitted closely against hers, and he reached a hand around to squeeze one of her breasts. All three bodies jerked together in spasmodic rhythm.

  Ali saw Naim at the door way and stopped. “You want to join us, Naim?”

  Hasan stopped too, and this made the, woman cry out in Paris slang, “Keep going, you fuckheads! Don’t stop now!”

  The two men returned willingly to their task and she moaned again.

  Naim went to his room and lay on his back on the bed, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. He was dropping off into a deep sleep sometime later when someone entered his room. Naim roused himself and looked to see who it was.

  The naked French woman stood at the end of his bed. She was supporting the weight of her breasts in her hands and looking down at him.

  “What do you want?” he asked, realizing immediately that this was a foolish question.

  “Do it to me,” she said.

  “I’m sleepy. Go away.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Can’t get it up?”

  A wave of rage swept through Naim. He tried to control himself. “I want to sleep. Go away.”

  She took her hands from her breasts, stroked her pubic hair, and thrust her hips forward at him. She said in a soft, seductive voice, “Don’t you want some?”

  “Get out of here.”

  She laughed and taunted him with her body. “Aren’t you able to screw?”

  Naim Shabaan’s lips stretched across his teeth in a mask of fury. He leapt off the bed, unbuckled his belt, and pulled it free from the loops of his pants. Holding the buckle, he lashed the naked woman across the breasts with its free end. She screamed, hunched to protect herself, and turned her back on him.

  With all his strength, he lashed her twice across her back before she managed to run out the doorway.

  The French television news said that Margaret Thatcher would announce in the next few days Britain’s intention of signing the Ostend Concordance. Naim Shabaan turned the television off and searched the radio dial for BBC news. If the government-owned radio carried the story, it would be confirmation enough for Naim. But the BBC did not mention any possibility of signing. Naim bought foreign editions of the Daily Express, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. All three ran stones on the probable announcement of Britain’s signing. If it was good enough for English newspapers, it was good enough for Naim.

  “We should leave today,” he told Hasan and Ali. “We’ll travel separately and go by ferry, where they can’t look at our papers so closely. We’ll use the Greek passports. No weapons, no drugs, no duplicate papers— there must be nothing in our baggage to arouse suspicion. Bring in whatever booze and cigarettes you are allowed, nothing more.”

  They knew all this but listened patiently to Naim. He would accept no excuses if either of them fouled up through carelessness or stupidity. He was going over things now so there could be no excuses. They had all heard stories of perfectly planned missions destroyed by one man’s stupid greed or inattentiveness to detail. Naim would be merciless if thwarted in this way. They understood that. He did not have to tell them.

  Naim S
habaan and Ali Khalef hurriedly packed a bag each and rode a taxi to the Gare du Nord. Naim took the 11:25 A.M. train for London, via Boulogne by Hovercraft to Dover, due at Charing Cross at 3:37. Ali took a train five minutes later, via Calais by ferry to Dover, due at Victoria at 5:31. Hasan Shawa would not leave Paris until he had received the all clear from Naim in London. All going well, he would travel overnight, taking the 10:36 from St. Lazare, via Dieppe by ferry to Newhaven, arriving at Victoria at 7:10 A.M. next day. All of them had previously stayed at the apartment on Redcliffe Square, just south of Earl’s Court. Naim knew where to pick up the keys and a wad of British bank notes.

  Naim looked out the train window at the mild green countryside north of Paris. Tree-lined ditches made orderly rectangles of green grass. Even the cows in the fields looked polite—they would never think of chasing anyone and driving their sharp horns into him. The French took so much for granted. Naim could not help comparing this landscape with the harsh, stony earth of Gaza, where he was raised. He knew that some of these fields he was passing through had seen some of the worst fighting of World War I and more battles in World War II. He wondered if Gaza would ever recover from its wounds and look peaceful again. Had it ever looked peaceful? Naim did not know. He was a child of war.

  In June 1967, Israeli troops drove the Egyptian Army from the Gaza Strip and went on to take the entire Sinai desert to the Suez Canal. The Israelis gave the Sinai back, but the Egyptians didn’t press too hard for the return of the Gaza. No one wanted the Strip, a twenty-nine-mile-long, five-mile-wide ribbon of desert along the sea. About 600,000 Palestinians were crowded in there, making it one of the most densely populated areas on earth.

  Naim was born and brought up in one of the eight refugee camps, housing 200,000 people, around the city of Gaza. His camp was known as the Beach, a spread of cinder-block huts with rusty corrugated steel roofs, next to white sands and blue water. He remembered the last time he was there—the barefoot children lining up for food, donkeys and goats feeding on garbage, open sewers in the sandy streets. The cinderblock walls were covered with splotches of white paint, which Israeli troops placed on them to cover the antiIsraeli graffiti painted each night.

  The Gaza Strip functioned as a labor camp for Israel. Naim had worked in construction there for fifteen shekels a day, about ten dollars, leaving Gaza by bus at first light and returning after dark. He was the youngest in the family and his mother did not want him to follow his three older brothers into Israeli jails. They were all active in the PLO. She arranged for him to go to the American University in Beirut. His father was dead, but she and his sisters still at home could survive on the thirty Jordanian dinars a month, about ninety dollars, which the PLO sent her for each of her three sons in jail.

  Naim guessed now what had really been worrying his mother then was the way he hung out in pool rooms, drank beer, and smoked dope. This was dangerous to do because of the extremist Moslem Brotherhood. Life was short for anyone who became a marked man with the Brotherhood. Naim often wondered later if the Brotherhood had warned his mother to do something about him, perhaps because of the anti-Israel record of his three brothers.

  Getting a passport to Lebanon was a problem. Unlike West Bank Palestinians, who qualified for Jordanian passports, Gazans were stateless and had to ask Egypt for something called a Travel Document for Palestinian Refugees.

  Beirut had not yet been destroyed then, and he was dazzled by its beauty and life in the fast lane. The university was founded in 1866 by an American misionary, and the city around it was said to be like the Montparnasse area of Paris, which he later found was true. He studied hard, not so much to be anything in particular, but so he would never have to scrounge for a living again in Gaza.

  As the civil war worsened, he became associated with a PLO group for his own protection. After Arafat’s men were forced to leave, the split occurred in the PLO. His group was anti-Arafat. They pulled him from the university, where he was contentedly studying modern languages, and put him in a guerrilla training camp in the Bekaa Valley.

  Naim feared for his life, did what he was told, and kept his mouth shut. He dreaded being sent on a suicide mission—and he feared the worst when he was assigned to a group led by Abu Jeddah. This man he knew to be a superintelligent, superviolent extremist that not even the regular terrorists at the training camp felt comfortable having around. Naim discovered that Abu Jeddah wanted him because of the languages he had learned: English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German, as well as Arabic. He denied knowing Hebrew, although he understood it, for fear of being sent, on a mission to Israel.

  He had just turned twenty-four when Abu Jeddah sent him to Rome. His task was to polish his languages, learn to live like a European, get to know all the major cities, kn?? how to order in a restaurant, who to tip at a hotel. Money was no problem. Sometimes he traveled as a student and stayed at cheap hostels. Other times he pretended to be a Lebanese businessman and went by limousine to the best hotel. He almost reached the point of forgetting that he was being trained for a certain purpose.

  Ali Khalef did not bother to look out the train window at the passing countryside. It didn’t interest him. Neither did the people around him. He spoke good French and good English, as well as his native Arabic, but he had not learned these languages out of any interest in foreign countries or people. Growing up on the streets of Beirut, selling smuggled merchandise from an early age, he had learned the hard way. Being able to read the information in Western-style characters on smuggled containers was an essential part of his trade. He could do it at twelve. For him English and French were associated with hair dryers, transistor radios, and cigarettes, not London and Paris.

  His father worked in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, and they saw him for a few weeks once a year. He sent money to his large family, but it was never enough. All the boys found ways of, raising money in the streets. Ali had been the most successful of them.

  He was proud to be a Palestinian, although he had never been there and, the way things were going, probably never would. The Burj al Brajneh quarter of Beirut, where he was born and grew up, was heavily Palestinian. The Palestinians were accused of acting superior in Lebanon and were never popular. This had been no problem when Yasir Arafat was in control. After he and many of his men had been driven out by the Israelis, things were not so easy.

  But Ali had never for a moment expected that life would be easy. In his late teens he got his hands on a battered yellow Dodge taxi with reinforced truck axles, which he used to run goods from the coast inland to Damascus in Syria. Prices were higher in Syria, and he could sell just about anything in the city’s big Hammadiya souk. From that he moved on to wholesaling smuggled goods in Shtaura, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and much closer to Damascus than Beirut. Before he turned twenty-one, he was making more money than he knew what to do with and keeping his family in such comfort that their neighbors stared at them in open envy.

  The Syrian government spoiled everything. Soldiers mounted serious campaigns to stop smugglers and were harder to bribe. Police examined goods in the Hammadiya souk. It was only a matter of time before Ali Khalef fell into the socialist government’s net.

  Ali had one brother unlike himself and the others in the family. He was a dedicated freedom fighter? what the rest of the world called a terrorist. When he heard of Ali’s arrest and the beatings he was getting in jail, he went to Abu Jeddah. Abu Jeddah had turned against Arafat and was pro-Syrian. When Ali volunteered to join his fighting group, charges which might have resulted in a twenty-five-year sentence for the smuggler were dropped and he was released from jail into a paramilitary training camp.

  Abu Jeddah was pleased with Ali, who was much more worldly and effective than his fiery dedicated brother. He sent Ali alone to Europe, supplied him generously with money and told him to tour around. Ali hoped that this might last forever—but he knew he was being fattened for the kill.

  His brother was killed by the Israelis in an air raid outside
Sidon. Ali wished they had got Abu Jeddah instead of him. But since Ali wished to go on living with his testicles still attached to him, he naturally did not express this opinion.

  After six months Ali was told to report to Naim Shabaan in Munich. Ali was twenty-three and was surprised to find himself obeying someone only a year older than him. He got over that quickly, because he was afraid of Naim and never questioned his leadership. Ali feared him instinctively. He had seen many crazy, violent men. Abu Jeddah was one kind. Naim Shabaan was another.

  “Good morning, General!,” the junior officer said to Gerrit van Gilder when he arrived at his office in The Hague. “Those photographs were beautiful, sir.”

  Van Gilder would hardly describe aerial photos of a freshly bombed building and some half-cooked corpses as beautiful, but he knew what the young officer meant. The Israelis knew their stuff. Colonel Yitzhak Bikel had delivered. The general’s mission had been a success. At the same time, of course, it was a failure. The terrorists had retaliated with a massacre on the sight-seeing boat in Amsterdam. There was no doubt about who had the last word.

  Would they go to England now that the television and newspapers claimed Maggie Thatcher was about to announce her willingness to sign the Ostend Concordance? He very sincerely hoped so. He didn’t wish any harm on the English—he only wanted these mad dogs out of Holland.

  He said to the junior officer, “Get me Group-Captain Bradshaw on a secure line.”

  While he waited, he pondered Bradshaw’s rank. He was not too familiar with the R.A.F.’s system, but he supposed that a Dutch army general would be about equivalent to a British air force air marshal or air commodore. A group-captain was definitely below that, although he was superior to a wing-commander. Van Gilder decided to treat Bradshaw as he would a colonel. Bradshaw had been designated as his British contact in the new antiterrorist cooperation, as Bikel had been his Israeli counterpart. The Dutch general was more than a bit disturbed to find himself equated with men holding a lesser rank than his. Really, his own government should be more sensitive about such tnatters.