A Clear and Present Danger

by Buck Sanders

  “You are an art fancier, Mr. Slayton?”

  “I fancy anything artful, Mr. Winship.”

  “Have you any idea why you’re here?”

  “Of course.”

  Winship studied the young man in front of him. They were of two completely different generations, two completely different social worlds. And yet they saw something of each other in their opposites.

  “This is not simply to clear up any questions you may have about the Bush incident.”

  “No sir, I expect not,” Slayton said. “I would guess you wish to discuss Hurgett and Samuels.”

  “Do you believe their deaths are related?”

  “Of course. Don’t you?”

  Winship was pleasantly stunned.

  “What do you know about me?” he asked Slayton.

  “I know that your instincts are right. I know you are one of the very few in command of the intelligence network who understands the danger of outlaws in our midst, outlaws of our own making. I know that you’re unable to do anything about it. Just now, that is.”

  “You know a great deal more than most young agents.”

  “Elementary, my dear Winship.”

  The two men laughed. Winship got up from his chair and served brandy from a sideboard.

  “What makes you believe that the Hurgett and Samuels deaths are related?” Winship asked.

  “Both were assassinations. Different styles. The first was a textbook clean shot job. The second was most probably a matter of nicotine poisoning.”

  Winship formed a question mark with his eyebrows.

  “Samuels had a history of heart trouble, I seem to recall. If you were to give me a few cigarettes—better yet, cigars—I could extract enough pure nicotine through a heating and simple distillation process to kill a man like that with a few drops in his food or coffee.”

  “But the autopsy?” Winship asked.

  “First of all, I assume there was none. Second, an autopsy in no way guarantees that a chemical cause of death will be determined.

  “Most autopsies are pro forma. Even traceable poisons are not traced unless there is reason to suspect foul play, which, in Samuels’ case, there was not. Unless the forensic pathologist is on his toes and suspicious, a poison of the colloidal family that would simulate the symptoms of heart failure would be virtually untraceable. You’d be home safe using extracted nicotine, for example.”

  “And how do you come by this knowledge, Slayton?”

  “Perhaps in the same manner you did. And like you, sir, I would respectfully decline to reveal my sources.”

  “A respectful and respectable answer. I like you, Slayton. Tell me something of your beliefs in the purposes of intelligence work.”

  Slayton sat back in his chair and took a deep breath.

  “Properly conducted intelligence can prevent the sort of geopolitical incompetence we saw in the Carter administration, not to mention historical ignorance. Improperly conducted intelligence work reminds me of the pious humanitarian described by Emerson: ‘We mean well and do ill, and then justify our ill-doing by our well-meaning.’”

  Winship beamed.

  “It’s probably vital in either case,” Slayton added. “After all, the world isn’t run by the League of Women Voters.”

  “Yes, I like you very much, Slayton.”

  Winship slid open the center top drawer of his desk. He removed a box and folded his hands over it while he spoke.

  “Now, we’ve had two members of Congress slain in Europe in the past few months. Both assassinated, as you correctly note.”

  Slayton sipped his brandy. The excitement inside him was growing.

  “In the case of Hurgett, a Mannlicher-Carcaño was the weapon—”

  “The same rifle that killed Kennedy. President Kennedy.”

  “Yes… and you’re absolutely right about the nicotine poisoning.”

  “Then the death of Samuels—”

  “Yes. Colloidal family poisoning. Methods known only to those with connections to either C.I.A., K.G.B. or Mossad. We can rule out the K.G.B. and Mossad, I should think.”

  “Is there something that has been held back from public knowledge in these cases, as in the attempt against Bush?”

  “You are most perceptive, once again, Slayton.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not at all. Here, look at these.”

  Winship spilled the contents of the box he held, a rolled-up cylinder of paper retrieved from the spent shell of the Mannlicher-Carcaño, the telegram from Italy delivered to Samuels’ widow. The message in each case, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

  “It’s from Piaf,” Slayton said, looking up.

  “Yes, her theme song,” Winship said.

  “‘I regret nothing.’”

  Winship watched for signs of Slayton’s realization of the meaning of these clues.

  Slayton asked, “Vice President Bush would have been the third victim in this spree?”

  “That is one of the mysteries you are assigned to solve,” Winship said. “The other, of course, is who, exactly, stands behind this terrorism.”

  The hint of understanding showed finally in Slayton’s eyes. Winship read it.

  Slayton’s throat was dry as he said, “The man who escaped Sidi bel Abbès?”

  “Very possibly.” Winship’s voice was low. The two men completely understood one another. They were allied. “He strongly resembles the magnified photographs of an unidentified man in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, November 22, 1963.”

  Winship let this sink into the sensibilities of the young man seated at his desk. “What is he trying—”

  “That is precisely what I want to have you first find out and then halt, by whatever means necessary. Do you understand, Slayton?”

  “I understand the real world.”

  “Yes… and so do I. You are from this moment on assigned to report to no one but me. I want you to understand the importance of your mission. These two assassinations were warnings. And the Bush matter was almost the same. President Reagan will be the next target.”

  Slayton nodded mutely.

  “The planning is underway at the White House for a trip by the President to Tokyo. I must assume that word of this scheduling work has reached the C.I.A., and is therefore known to everyone in the terrorist underground by now.

  “I believe that he is out there now, planning the assassination of President Reagan.”

  “He?”

  Winship stood up. He replaced the papers with the Piaf song titles in the box, which he slid back into his desk. Before answering, he walked to the fireplace.

  “You know who I’m talking about,” Winship said.

  “Yes,” Slayton said. “The Wolf.”

  “Can you be prepared to leave in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  PART TWO

  Eleven

  ANDORRA, the Pyrenees, 15 March 1981

  He had been in the mountain city-state for a month, one more lone figure mingling easily with the drifting current of travelers who passed the tiny principality situated between France and Spain.

  It was an odd little nation, transformed in only two decades from a place of bucolic poverty to fabulous wealth, much of it amassed by suspicious means. It was the only place in the Pyrenees that one might find a traffic jam surrounding a bazaar, the only place in the world where real estate value is measured by the palm of the hand, a choice “square palm” in the capital fetching up to $85.

  Side by side with men of enormous fortune who spend millions of Spanish pesetas and French francs to sustain their compulsive privacies are the flotsam of the anarchist spirit of the 1960s, American and European men and women in advanced states of adolescence despite their mid-thirties ages.

  For both the questionably rich and the aimless, Andorra is a convenient way station, a way of life in which few ask questions of themselves or others.

  Andorra’s duty-free and virtually law-free status is a magnet to disparate sorts.
Nothing is illegal, therefore everything is legal. Smuggling through Andorra’s narrow, rugged mountain passes is an old-fashioned enterprise, requiring strong bodies and nimble minds, skilled capital and highly skilled labor. And little sense of the curious.

  Seven unregulated and highly secretive Andorran banks do a very brisk business of laundering Spanish pesetas moving toward Switzerland, and northern European currencies on their way to the Bahamas. There is no penal code, no land register, no customs service, and no regulations governing banks or foreign-owned companies. Those visitors unwise enough to commit anything so boorish as a felony are collared by someone from the forty-five-man police force and shipped off to a nearby town in France or Spain for cooling.

  The capital, which carries the name Andorra as well, thoughtfully provides a small slum in the old Catalan district, far removed from the great avenues of shops featuring high-quality electronics at prices thirty percent lower—or more—than legal retail rates in Paris or Madrid, Chivas Regal at prices below wholesale, French cheeses, more Mary Quant cosmetics than France and Switzerland combined would have available, and an embarrassment of Nikons and Sonys.

  In this slum, which in some other city would pass as a slightly gamey, somewhat down-at-the-heels working-class quarter, he had roomed for a month on the top floor of a four-story boarding house. Like others before him and those to follow, he had simply appeared one day in the street asking for a room, a cheap restaurant, and where he might possibly find a bit of work.

  In a few days, he was crating up color television sets, making sure they would survive the rigors of the smuggling routes southward into Spain, where the border could be bought from the guards.

  A Barcelona entrepreneur offered the American stranger two hundred pesetas per hour to start, and he had enjoyed the look of pleasant surprise in the American’s face until the man in need of the job calculated the wage at less than three dollars. When the television sets would reach their destination, on the backs of the wily smuggler soldiers, customers would be assessed on the poundage basis, currently seven dollars per pound, or about $175 for a television set—a peerless bargain for the consumer and a whopping profit for the Barcelona entrepreneur.

  Today he had worked a full nine hours, beginning at dawn. The Spaniard had given him the next day off and a thousand-peseta bonus for diligence. He was drinking some of it in his neighborhood saloon.

  His attention was drawn to a tallish blonde woman who sauntered into the bar, dressed all in denim save for a pair of Frye boots that looked rather new and a yellow cotton shirt with a green palm tree embroidered just above her left breast, which, like its mate, was unrestricted by a brassiere.

  She wore colored glasses of a violet tint, the kind that gave mystique rather than eye shade. Her hair was thick and clean and hung straight as a Dutch boy’s. Her narrow hips were boyish as well. He guessed her age at thirty-seven.

  The barman shuffled toward her and nodded in recognition. She said something he couldn’t hear clearly. The barman drew a draught of ale and accepted francs in payment.

  He had not seen her in the month he had been coming into the saloon, which was maybe four times a week, at quite varied hours. She was astonishingly beautiful, he thought, with an unmistakeable air of intelligence and independence. Was she a whore? He asked this of the barman, whom he had summoned to his end for a refill of his lager and schnapps.

  “In this neighborhood?” the barman snorted in fraternal ridicule. “With all that Andorra can offer to a whore? What would such a woman find here with the Catalonians? You make a joke with me.”

  The barman completed his order and explained about her, leaning closely to the American.

  “She is German. Her name is Sigrid. I don’t know the rest. All of the men would like to know her, but none have been able. Somewhere in the hills, outside the cjty, is where she lives. Maybe every other month she comes in here, for an ale or two. And she stares out the window to the street, like she is doing now, watching her car. You see it there?”

  He couldn’t possibly miss it, nor could anyone else in the scruffy neighborhood. A dark green Maserati was out of place in a street lined with ancient and heavily dented Volkswagens.

  He moved toward her, past the other mumbling men and the few other women at the bar, through the clouds of blue cigarette smoke cut by shafts of setting sunlight. She ignored him, keeping her eyes fastened on her car and on the small knot of neighborhood boys gathered around it.

  “A beautiful automobile,” he said to her in German, taking a spot at the rail next to her. He was quite close, but she wouldn’t turn to him. He said, “I love beautiful cars. And beautiful women.”

  With this she turned and, expressionless, examined him. Her eyes moved from his head to his feet, disdainfully. She responded to him in English, as if to insult his attempts at her native tongue.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Ben. I’m American, just passing through.”

  She nodded and smiled. It wasn’t an unfriendly smile.

  “Your name is… what?” He had switched to English.

  “Sigrid. And you want to buy me a drink?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you should do it.”

  The barman was not far away. He had watched the approach with admiration and would have whispered his congratulations if it had been politic to do so. But not with Sigrid about. She was too austere, too absent of assumable humor, too German.

  “Danke,” she said to him, lifting her glass in toast.

  They drank. Then Sigrid removed her tinted glasses, revealing large, clear eyes of emerald.

  “What did you do before you came to Andorra?” she asked, hurriedly. She didn’t wish to talk about herself.

  “I was a war criminal.”

  He had surprised her, as he intended. Her imperious defenses were shattered. Say the words “war criminal” to a German when you have the conversational drop on him—or her—and you can reduce a hun quite quickly.

  She was trying to speak, but her words came out in a stammer, a mix of German and French and English, betraying her sudden confusion. He looked at her, at her eyes and the subtle touch of maroon on her wide lips. Gott im Himmel, she was beautiful!

  “Vietnam,” he said to her before she could get sufficiently back in control to speak in sentences of any language. “I was a fighter bomber. It was a terrible time in my life. I suffered while I was there, and longer, years longer, when I returned home. I felt like a criminal. I still do.”

  Outside, on the street, the boys were moving away from the Maserati, going their separate ways home to supper. Sigrid could relax a bit.

  “Can we sit down?” he asked. He waved his hand toward a booth. “It’s got a good view of the street, as you can see. Your car will be all right, I’m sure.”

  Sigrid nodded, and they took the booth. Ben looked back over his shoulder for the barman, to order up more drinks. The barman formed an approving circle with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Drinks would be on the way.

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “I mean about the war in Vietnam.”

  “I enlisted,” he began, “during the early years, thinking I was doing the right thing, making the world safe for democracy and all. Besides, I thought that the air force experience would be useful.

  “But then I got sick. Not physically. But sick just the same, knowing I was killing by remote control. All bombers go through the same thing.

  “It got to the point where I didn’t feel any more. No feeling at all—subhuman. I was an automaton, a deadly robot. I just flew and bombed, flew and bombed. And I waited for the same fate for myself. Someone would get me soon.”

  Sigrid interrupted. “But did you not believe in your country’s leadership?”

  “I believed my country had taken leave of its senses. I hoped it would be temporary. I hoped the people of my country would one day remember that… remember that… ”

  He looked out the window and scratched
his head. If this was the woman he thought she might be, he would have to choose his words carefully.

  “Well,” he continued, “it must be kept in mind that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. One must look beyond the easy answers in the press and current history.”

  “I agree,” she said. She leaned forward. He could see the outline of her nipples through her shirt.

  “In this case, of course, it was Ho Chi Minh. I didn’t think of him at first as the personification. I thought only of the wonder of human survival, the dignity in it. And I thought, ‘What odds dignity must always challenge!’

  “There I was, piloting a gigantic American bomber, flying in low over peasant villages in the far reaches of a wretched little jungle country. I must have scared the be-jeezus out of them all. How many of them had ever even seen a plane close up? Too often. I was raining down death every hour of every day, week after week, month after month.

  “And what do you know? A little creature down there called man managed to survive even man’s genius for destruction. He managed to survive it because of his defiance, and thank God for defiance. And the one guy down there who shook his fist the strongest was this splindly little slope called Ho Chi Minh. Now there was a courageous man, so courageous he was mystical.

  “It was only an accident of birth that I fought against the guy instead of for him.”

  He stopped to sip his lager, and to let the theatricality of what he had said seep into his suddenly fascinated companion. Some of what he had said he believed. Much of what he said he had let drop around the Catalonian district. Malcontents were always in demand in Andorra, a city which would soon rival Zurich for laissez-faire capitalism and the old fables of Istanbul for international intrigue.

  He was happy to see that word had reached Sigrid, as he knew it would reach someone who had to be like her. Some self-styled vanguard.

  But would she lead him to the Wolf?

  Slayton watched the emerald eyes across the booth glow hot and cold—eyes that contained a passion for razor’s edge politics as well as a passionate curiosity about him. He was reminded just how sexy, how completely filled with raw sensuality, were the 1960s.