A Clear and Present Danger

by Buck Sanders

  Slayton doubted that the nation at large was unduly upset by the deaths of Barlow Hurgett and Richard Samuels, however they went. As yet, the nation was unaware of the Bush assassination attempt. The first two sorties into international terrorism were perhaps shakedown missions, Slayton considered, designed only to test one’s own abilities and to monitor the retaliatory actions of the other side.

  The Wolf would have to make his move on President Reagan if he was to make a mark in the world, if he was to impress terrorist organizations in other countries with whom he wished to ally. Anyone could kneecap an Italian ex-politician. It would take a real leader among terrorists to bring down an American President. Or so it might make sense to someone like Slayton.

  Of course, the Wolf was someone quite apart from Slayton.

  “I notice that Reagan is still in office,” Slayton said. “I assume you mean to do something about that to promote yourself?”

  “You are too insolent to be a good spy,” the Wolf said. “Perhaps you are not, after all. Perhaps you are too insolent and too stupid, like most Americans.

  “You ask about President Reagan. Let me tell you this: your people believe it is safe for the President of Hollywood to travel to Japan. And that is exactly what we wish them to think.

  “So he will travel to Japan, as scheduled. Oh yes, we know of the schedule, even if most Americans do not. He will be able to leave the country.

  “But the question is, will he be able to return?”

  She had hit on a plan of action as they drove back from the city into the hills.

  During the entire trip, Anthony yammered at her, nagged her about her meeting Slayton at the bar, demanded to know of any intimacies. God, the man was no better than the Wolf! Men wanted only to possess women. They didn’t want to love them, to honor them; and they certainly wouldn’t obey them. They only wanted to possess them, to Show them off to their friends—other men.

  Maybe the American was different. She had never spent any time to speak of with an American man. Perhaps Ben wasn’t representative. What did it matter, anyway—a man’s nationality? She knew only that this American, Ben, was a man for whom she had looked for a long time without finding. She knew that if given the opportunity and the time—time away from this dreadful prison life with the tyrant she once somehow thought so dashing, so exciting—she could fall desperately in love with Ben. In fact, she thought, she was already in love with him.

  But there were two enormous obstacles: the Wolf and Anthony.

  She had met the Wolf when she was only a girl in Hamburg, a student at the Polytechnic. The Wolf, who was using the name Rene Laclerc at the time, was much younger, too, of course. Still virile.

  He was simply a man who spent a great deal of time in the public libraries when she met him, a seemingly wealthy man; at least, a man who didn’t need to work for someone each day. Whenever she had to use the library, he was there, always reading from some ponderous work, as if he were on some desperate cycle of inhaling knowledge, as if deprived of books most of his life.

  They would chat amiably in the library, not too familiarly; after all, she was German and he was French and there was still quite a social gulf to span. But in time, they were meeting for meals and drinks together in the pubs of Hamburg.

  It was at these times he would spin his adventurous tales: the time he nearly drowned in fesh-fesh, the Arabic word, he taught her, for a desert sand so fine that it can suck you up like a swamp; a battle somewhere in Morocco, the French forces pursuing the Moroccan rebels for day after day, neither side having adequate supplies of water.

  She remembered, as she drove, of that particular story, more for the strange delight in his telling it than the story itself.

  “… Three of us had been eaten by the desert jackals as we slept. We woke to find their bodies, and to find that the enemy had pulled out. They had a large lead on us. Later that day, we literally fell across them in the desert, never expecting we would,” the Wolf, Laclerc, had told her.

  “They had been set upon by the jackals themselves. Nearby was a well, left by nomads. We rushed to it. It was stuffed with corpses, Moroccan corpses. We never knew why. The water had turned crimson.

  “All of us took our cups from our belts and drank the red water. We drank to our fallen enemy. And then we buried them, with their shoes off and their heads facing Mecca. A sign of respect to Islam and their combativeness.

  “I shall never forget the words of our commander: ‘This day, you have done honor to France.’”

  It was this compulsion with honor and glory, two words the Wolf used frequently every day she had known him, that eventually replaced his passion for her. By then, however, she was traveling the world with him, to lands far from her small world of Hamburg, West Germany. She had no home except that which he made for her.

  That would be no more, if the rest of the day went well for her. She might have a man to help her out of the increasingly insane and frightening existence in the Andorran mountains… and she might have someone to go to, someone special to her, if only he could be touched after so many years’ separation by so vast an ocean. But… would he be insane, too?

  Sigrid looked to the passenger side of the Maserati. Anthony leered at her. She spat in his face.

  Slayton managed to read part of the letter on the Wolf’s desk. The Wolf was rummaging through a bookshelf, searching for some volume of legal text to buttress a lesson he was giving Slayton at the moment. When his back was turned, Slayton stole a long glance at the letter, which he had earlier noticed—couldn’t not notice—as the Wolf fingered it, occasionally glancing down at it.

  Slayton read the final words of the piece, written in English, as they appeared to him, upside down:

  “… amazing the things you learn with a library card. Love, Edw.”

  The Wolf found his volume. Slayton sat back in his chair. His snooping had gone undetected.

  “Here it is,” the Wolf said. “The words of our enemies, with whom we will deal harshly when the time is correct, when we have our visibility and our consolidated power.

  “Look, only last year, Charles Hernu, a ‘defense expert,’ so he says. Nothing but a Socialist party hack. He calls for the Legion to be abolished, even the weakened Legion that we know today. And of course, the Communists. They call the Legion an ‘instrument of colonial conquest and repression of the people.’ Lies!

  “But the most hurtful of all our enemies’ criticism comes from Antoine Sanguinetti. He says, ‘Once upon a time there were the Three Musketeers, and the Pope had Zouaves. The Legion’s time has passed.’

  “This Sanguinetti will pay for those words with his life.”

  “And his death will be a killing rather than a murder?” Slayton said, mocking him.

  “You will shut your mouth! You’re a man on trial!”

  “And you’re a man who is mad.”

  The Wolf struck him again with the butt of his revolver. This time, Slayton managed to grab his wrist. He was nearly in position to send the Wolf flying over his back onto his own. But the door to the study opened.

  Anthony scooped up the revolver, which had slid across the floor during the brief struggle. He shouted to Slayton, “Halt, or I’ll shoot!”

  Slayton stopped, released the Wolf.

  “Thank you, Anthony. You have possibly saved the world a grievance. Now you mav do me one more service, Anthony. I want you to take a close look at this man with me, the man you found trying to kill me. Talk to him if you wish; tell me if he is an American spy.”

  Anthony was both shocked and honored. He walked in a circle around Slayton. Sigrid, meanwhile, had taken a position near the Wolf and was whispering into his ear.

  The Wolf’s complexion went scarlet.

  “Stop it!” he shouted. “Anthony, you are the traitor! Sleeping with my Sigrid!”

  He waved his hand at Anthony, accusing him with his finger. Sigrid moved closer. She slipped a small pistol from her belt and put it into the Wolf’s ha
nd. In a rage, he pulled the trigger.

  He caught Anthony in the bridge of his nose. His face was a bright blob of bone-spattered blood. He dropped instantly to the floor, a bullet fatally lodged in the front of his brain.

  “What?” the Wolf shouted. He moved about the study, as if dazed. “What?… what?… what?”

  Sigrid tapped Slayton on the shoulder. Never had he seen more pleading in a human face.

  “You must, please… Ben, oh Ben, you must get away from this place. You must help me escape it, too. Here, finish it off.” She took the small pistol from the Wolf’s hand and gave it to Slayton.

  Then she knelt over Anthony’s fallen body. Near his pulpy head was the Wolfs own .45-caliber revolver. She picked it up in both hands and aimed it at the Wolfs head.

  “Wait!” Slayton told her.

  He crossed the room to her and took the revolver from her hand. She was quaking uncontrollably. Tears streamed from her eyes.

  “Too much noise,” Slayton said.

  The Wolf stood, paralyzed. Saliva began flowing from one corner of his mouth. An eye went bloodshot. His temples pounded visibly.

  “Your Maserati,” Slayton said to her. “Is it outside, around the other column?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go there. Take this’ with you.” He handed her both handguns. “Don’t let anyone see them. No one has come in here, so I don’t think the shot from your pistol was heard outside this room. We have to rely on the quiet.

  “Now move!”

  Sigrid did as she was told, woodenly. Her plan was working. It was working! Soon she would be free!

  Slayton approached the Wolf, who was oblivious now to anything real happening around him. He easily removed the small knife in a leather sheath hanging at the Wolf’s belt. Then he walked the Wolf around behind his desk and helped him sit down.

  He pulled Anthony’s body to a place of concealment behind the desk. If someone were to look in from the doorway, all would appear normal. Then Slayton stepped behind the Wolf and ran the length of his knife blade into a lung.

  None of the men milling about the plain outside had reason to suspect anything wrong had occurred inside the Wolf’s study. No one had seen the two men argue. In fact, there had been a public display of respect when the men first met.

  Slayton walked calmly, deliberately, around the inner edge of the plain, to the side of the first castle column. He crossed over the moat bridge to the Maserati.

  “Move over,” he said to Sigrid. “I’m driving.”

  She obeyed him. As she shifted, she caught sight of one of the castle guards, standing high atop a section of the castle tower, his carbine raised to the hip level. He was watching the two of them in the car, watching their hurried movements as they believed they were out of sight.

  “Ben,” she yelled as he fired the engine and learned the feel of the gear box, “we’ve got to move, fast. Up there!”

  Slayton didn’t look. He could guess her meaning and her urgency.

  He clamped down hard on the accelerator, spinning the wheels wildly in the dust and stone surface of the mountain road. The shots were finding their mark on the rear deck of the car. He held the wheel firmly, swerving the car to the right and to the left, trying to confuse the marksman with a fishtail course.

  “Faster! It will go faster!” Sigrid shouted.

  Slayton punched the floor pedal and the Maserati leaped over small piles of loose rock and bits of pine branches strewn over the granite. The damaged car crashed back down to the road, but Slayton held the powerful car to his course, preventing its going out of control.

  The shots kept coming. And Sigrid kept screaming. Then he heard her no more above the low, fierce growl of the Maserati’s engine. He couldn’t look at her, though he imagined the worst. The driving required his total effort.

  When he finally reached the highway, Slayton put the Maserati at flat-out speed. Then he was able to glance over to Sigrid.

  He saw her shining blonde hair flying lushly in the wind. She was so terribly beautiful.

  And dying. Blood trickled from an ear. Her neck was bent backward, like a broken doll.

  He braked the Maserati and brought it still at the side of the highway. Sigrid’s eyes still had some life. Her final energies were put into words. Slayton strained to hear them:

  “My Edward… my… Oh, Ben, stop him… the power plant… Oh, stop my baby… ”

  Life left her then.

  She had almost made it to freedom, to normalcy.

  And Ben Slayton had escaped death.

  This time, he thought.

  Seventeen

  PARIS, 17 March 1981

  Slayton, numb and shaken, stepped off the DC-10 Air France jet at Orly Airport. He carried no luggage, which he knew would make the customs agents suspicious.

  He needed to clear French customs as quickly as he could. It was only two days before President Reagan’s trip to Japan. Winship would be going crazy with worry, wondering when Slayton would make contact via the Parisian brothel.

  He took a deep breath and proceeded from the plane to the baggage carousel in the Customs Building, where the passengers from Andorra began milling about, waiting impatiently for the conveyor belts to begin spitting out their bags and parcels.

  Slayton stood slightly behind a family group. A father, his overweight wife, and three children. They would be sure to have plenty of luggage.

  He stood with his hands in his pockets to keep them from sight. They were trembling. He was more nervous about the prospect of stealing someone’s suitcase than he had been about slipping a knife into a man’s back in his own office. With the man’s own knife!

  And he was trembling because of Sigrid. By now, someone would have found her body. He could do nothing but pitch her out of the car. He had rolled her body into a culvert at the side of the highway into Andorra. A woman he had made love to only… how many days ago… how many hours? What was the day? The time? Slayton felt quite faint. He closed his eyes and bit down hard, forcing blood up into his head and face. The last thing in the world he needed just now as to keel over.

  At last the luggage began appearing, making its agonizingly slow crawl down a chute onto the carousel’s conveyor belt. Blue bags and brown, black and yellows. Fortunately, one could tell pretty much what might be inside a bag by seeing it. In the old days, everyone—men, women, and children—traveled with the same brown and black square valises. Today, a man carried brown or black, women and children owned the colors. Thanks for small favors.

  The man in front of him lifted a passing suitcase from the carousel, and, just as Slayton expected, set it down beside him and watched for others. This time around, it was entirely unsuited to his purpose, which was to clear customs with a bag full of jockey shorts, socks, and a change of shirts. When a standard brown bag came up and the man set it down with the four others he had already hoisted off the carousel, Slayton deftly picked it up and walked away, quickly.

  He had his American passport ready, along with his visa papers, as he approached the customs agent. The functionary rubber-stamped his passport a few dozen times, for whatever reason customs agents are possessed by, and ordered the suitcase opened.

  “Hope you don’t find any contraband,” Slayton joked, just to prove he was a regular sort. The customs agent kept his sour face.

  Slayton clicked open the fasteners and opened the lid. To his utter amazement, the suitcase was filled with a sea of Spandex undergarments, definitely for a woman big enough to be told by a cop to break it up while standing on a street corner all by herself.

  The customs agent twitched his upper lip. His mustache, a little bit of a thing, rode up and down as if caught in a fit of apoplexy.

  His eyebrows shot up into the air, requiring a fast explanation from Slayton.

  “You see,” Slayton began to say in English. He corrected himself and continued in French: “You see, my wife and I always fly separately. She’s coming in on the next flight. We have matching bags
and, would you believe it, I took hers instead of my own. Well, I don’t suppose it makes a whole big difference, does it?”

  The customs agent was sputtering, but Slayton sensed he didn’t see anything as ludicrous as his stealing someone else’s luggage. Slayton quickly considered that his best route out of the situation was to make it even more ludicrous. He fished out a pair of oversize panty hose and held them up to his chest.

  “Doesn’t suit me, does it, Pierre?” he said to the agent.

  The man bought it. He waved him through the customs gate, giving a Gallic shrug of his shoulders, meant to convey his long-held mystification over anyone and anything American.

  If he had the time, or the heart, Slayton would have delayed his return to the States for several days’ rest and relaxation in the French capital. But on this trip, even the spectacular beauty of Paris was not enough to keep his mind off the events of the past few days.

  As his taxi took him down the Avenue Grand Armée, beneath the Arc de Triomphe and on to the Champs Elysées, Slayton grew increasingly depressed. At the madness of the Wolf, whoever he was; at the horrible loss of a woman with whom he had been intimate but had not known, a woman to whom he owed his life, a woman he had only a few hours ago thrown out of an automobile like a sack of rubbish.

  He shut his eyes to the beauty of Paris.

  Slayton had given the address of the bordello to the driver. It was in the Montparnasse district, south of the Eiffel Tower and Les Invalides. He slumped back into the taxi’s seat, overwhelmingly exhausted.

  Facts swam through a mind too wired with recent action and split-second decisions to find rest and peace . . consnections and discrepencies… try to fit the facts together, to make all the connections as tidy as possible.

  … Congressman Barlow Hurgett was assassinated in Munich, more than likely by the Wolf, who was more than likely some manner of C.I.A. operative who conspired to assassinate President Kennedy; Senator Richard Samuels died in Turin of a massive coronary, more than likely brought on by tobacco poisoning, more than likely performed by the man he knew as Anthony, a suspected C.I.A. operative or former operative; the attempt on Bush’s life was carried out by someone posing as an American backpack tourist, and Slayton himself had prevented the London murder try; the Wolf and Anthony were dead…