The Long Shot (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  Cole Howard read through the FBI file on Ilich Ramirez Sanchez on the direct flight from Phoenix to New York. Coach Class was almost empty and he had a whole row to himself, so he stretched out and put his briefcase on the seat next to his. A stewardess asked him if he wanted a drink and Howard caught himself about to ask for a whisky and Coke. He ordered an orange juice instead.

  The file on Sanchez was about five times as thick as those of Matthew Bailey and Mary Hennessy, and included reports from virtually every intelligence agency in the world. The first page contained a list of the aliases the terrorist had used: Carlos Andres Martinez-Torres, Ahmed Adil Fawaz, Carlos Martinez, Hector Lugo Dupont, Nagi Abubaker Ahmed, Flick Ramirez, Glenn Gebhard, Cenon Marie Clarke, Adolf José Muller Bernal, and his real name – Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. He was born on October 12, 1949, in Caracas, Venezuela, the son of a millionaire lawyer, Dr José Altagracia Ramirez. The lawyer, whose politics tended towards the extreme Left, named his three sons after Lenin: Ilich, Lenin and Vladimir. The boys spent most of their childhood travelling around Latin America and the Caribbean with their mother, Elba Maria, who was separated from their father. When he was seventeen, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was sent by his father to a Cuban guerrilla training camp near Havana, and in 1969 he enrolled in the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, regarded by many as a terrorists’ finishing school, and the following year he joined one of the world’s most notorious terrorist organisations: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

  The stewardess returned with his orange juice and Howard thanked her. He rubbed his eyes. Reading under the artificial lights was a strain, but there was still a huge amount to get through. He sipped his juice and began to read again. In 1971 Carlos was invited by Dr Wadi Haddad, the operational chief of the PFLP, to a guerrilla seminar at a PFLP camp in the south of Lebanon along with young terrorists from the Japanese Red Army and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and shortly afterwards he was assigned to the PFLP’s foreign operations bureau, assisting in the machine-gun attack at Tel Aviv Airport which killed twenty-five and injured seventy-seven.

  In July 1973 he took over the organisation’s European terrorist cell, the Commando Boudia. In December of that year Carlos tried to assassinate Edward Sieff, the president of British retail stores chain, Marks and Spencer, because of his close links with Israel. He talked his way into Sieff’s London home and shot his target in the face at point blank range – his favourite method of assassination. Incredibly, Sieff’s teeth absorbed most of the bullet’s impact and he survived. In 1974 Carlos threw a bomb into the London branch of the Israeli Bank of Hapoalim. A typist was injured. He moved to France and with Commando Boudia planted car bombs in front of the offices of various Jewish magazines, and threw an M26 fragmentation grenade into a newspaper kiosk on St. Germain-des-Près, killing two and injuring thirty-four. The following year Carlos and his team managed to get hold of Russian anti-tank bazookas and a three-man team flew out from the Middle East to help operate them. In January 1975 they fired one of the RPG-7s at an El Al plane at Orly Airport. They missed, and instead hit a Yugoslav plane. Later that year Carlos masterminded the kidnapping of the OPEC ministers in Vienna, taking them at gunpoint on a hijacked plane to North Africa where he was paid an $800,000 ransom before setting them free. Carlos was also linked to a whole series of terrorist attacks, kidnapping and murders, including the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the bombing of a French nuclear plant, and helping the Japanese Red Army attack the French Embassy in The Hague where they took the ambassador and his staff hostage.

  The French counter-espionage service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, came close to arresting him in Paris two years later, but Carlos killed two unarmed DST agents and a Lebanese informer. A French judge sentenced him to life imprisonment in his absence in 1992, and there were murder warrants for his arrest issued by the authorities in Austria and Germany and still on file.

  By the late Seventies, Carlos had by all accounts retreated from the terrorist scene, and the world’s intelligence services were having a hard time keeping track of him. He was seen in London in May 1978 but there was no trace of him leaving or entering the United Kingdom at that time. Howard wondered if the IRA had helped him.

  Satellite surveillance photographs taken in 1983 suggested he was at a Libyan training camp instructing terrorists for Colonel Gaddafi, though the same year he claimed to have killed five people in bomb attacks in France. He forged links with the Hezbollah in Lebanon in their fight to end the French military presence in the country, and, in October 1983, fifty-eight French soldiers died when their barracks were bombed. There were reports that he was in India in 1985, and in 1986 stories circulated in Middle Eastern newspapers that he had been killed and buried in the Libyan desert.

  The opening up of the Communist bloc provided evidence that Carlos had spent time in the early Eighties in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other Communist regimes, but after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Carlos found himself with few friends. In 1991, after relations between Syria and the United States improved following their co-operation during Operation Desert Storm, Carlos was asked to leave Damascus by the Syrians, who sent him to Libya. The Libyans refused to allow him into the country, fearing US and British reprisals. Relations between the US and Libya were already fraught in the wake of the Lockerbie bombing.

  Eventually the Yemen offered him sanctuary, but Carlos later moved to the Sudan. Home was a ground floor apartment in the capital, Khartoum, and it was from outside the three-storey apartment block in August 1994 that he was kidnapped by France’s anti-terrorist service, the DST. The DST had drugged Carlos and flown him to Paris where he was placed in solitary confinement in the basement of La Santé prison. The events that followed had been so well publicised that Howard didn’t need to read the end of the file. Carlos’ escape from French custody was still under investigation, with the French blaming the Iraqis, Iraq pointing the finger at Iran, the Iranians accusing Libya, and the Libyans saying it had been the Palestinians. Even the IRA had been mentioned, along with the suggestion that they had masterminded his escape in return for favours he had done the Irish terrorists in the past.

  The report was incredibly detailed, but it also contained contradictions. Carlos was said to despise Arabs, yet often countries in the Middle East were his paymasters. Dr Wadi Haddad was a mentor in the early Seventies, yet Carlos was later implicated in the Palestinian guerrilla leader’s assassination. He was not a Communist yet there were suggestions that the KGB were behind several of his operations and he spent long periods hiding in Communist countries. He was the world’s most successful terrorist, yet he also had a reputation for taking chances and for being unreliable. As Sheldon had said, Carlos was one of a number of terrorists who visited Baghdad between August 1990 and January 1991 prior to an Iraqi-sponsored terrorist campaign against Britain and the United States. Yet just ten years earlier he was paid by the Syrians to come up with a plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He was prepared to work for the highest bidder, but had been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth and had never been short of money.

  Howard dropped the file on top of his briefcase and rested his head against the back of the seat. He felt almost light-headed as he realised that he was on the trail of the world’s most wanted man. If he could capture Carlos there would be nothing he couldn’t achieve, inside or outside the FBI. His hands began to shake and he gripped the seat rests. The excitement was almost painful, and so was the apprehension. He wanted a drink. A real drink.

  Darkness crept up on Joker as he sat under the chestnut tree watching the brick building which housed Farrell Aviation. There was no point at which he was aware that day had given way to night, it was a process so gradual that it came almost as a shock when he realised that stars were twinkling in the sky and that the moon was hanging overhead, so clear that he could see the individual craters on its surface. A succession of people had entered
and left the brick-built building during the afternoon, but there had been no sign of Matthew Bailey. He’d come to recognise two young men in blue overalls bearing the green propeller logo; they’d made several visits to the building and Joker assumed they were mechanics working in the Farrell hangars. Throughout the day several small planes had taken off and landed on the grass strip, including an old biplane which had been towing an advertising banner.

  Lights were still on in one of the offices and a blue Lincoln Continental stood alone in front of the main entrance. Joker was waiting for the last person to leave before calling it a night. Stake-outs were nothing new to him. He’d lain in the hills of the Irish border country for days at a time with nothing more than a camouflage sheet to protect him from the bone-chilling winter rain, soaked through to the skin and shivering with the cold. Catching IRA terrorists as they crisscrossed the border between North and South was a matter of infinite patience and concentration, days of inactivity followed by frantic seconds of gunfire. Sitting under a tree on a pleasant evening was a breeze by comparison.

  The light in the office went off and Joker put the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the entrance. After thirty seconds or so the glass door opened and a large man stepped out, a briefcase in his hand. A lone light was on above the door and Joker could see that the man was in his early sixties, grey-haired with ruddy cheeks as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. He was wearing a red polo shirt and white shorts, with knee length socks, and he had a beer drinker’s stomach which hung over his shorts like a late pregnancy. Joker assumed that he was Patrick Farrell Senior, but as he had no way of identifying the man he kept an open mind. He could just be a hired hand. The man locked the door and climbed into his car. A few seconds later he drove off and Joker heard the engine fade away into the distance. He listened to the sounds of the forest: the clicking of insects, the hoot of an owl, the faraway howl of a wild cat, and tentative rustlings in the undergrowth. Joker waited a full thirty minutes until he was sure that the man wasn’t returning. He moved quietly through the trees and out onto the airfield, heading first for the hangars to satisfy himself that all the mechanics had left.

  The sliding doors to the hangars were locked and Joker couldn’t see any lights inside. He slipped silently through the shadows to the Farrell building, careful to keep away from the light above the main door. There was an alarm bell high up on the wall and he could see that the windows were wired, but it was a simple system and one which he could by-pass with little trouble. Around the back of the building there was a drainpipe which ran by a small frosted window, probably a bathroom. It looked climbable and when he pulled at it he could feel that it was strong enough to bear his weight. He hoped to get what he wanted without resorting to breaking and entering, but if it proved necessary he wouldn’t have any problems gaining entry to the offices. He headed back to his car. He’d already earmarked a motel a couple of miles away from the airfield where he could catch a few hours’ sleep.

  Kelly put up the collar of her long green cashmere coat and kept a wary hand on her bag. She walked quickly, her heels tapping on the sidewalk like a blind man’s cane. She looked over her shoulder, left and right, more to check that there were no potential muggers nearby than because she feared she was being followed. She found Filbin’s and stood for a while looking through its murky leaded windows. Behind the polished wood bar stood a diminutive barman, polishing a glass like he expected a genie to appear and grant him three wishes. Kelly pushed open the door and walked into the warm and smoky atmosphere of the bar. Several customers looked up to see who the intruder was and their gazes lingered. Even wrapped up in her coat she was still something special to look at, especially in a downmarket bar like Filbin’s. She ignored the avaricious stares and walked to the end of the bar closest to the door, her hand still on the clasp of her bag. The elf-like barman walked over to her, still polishing his glass. “What can I get you, my dear?” he asked.

  She leaned forward. “Are you Shorty?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

  The barman laughed. “What do you think?” he replied, and put the clean glass on a shelf. He grinned at two young men who were huddled over pints of Guinness. “She wants to know if I’m Shorty!” The three men laughed together and Kelly felt her cheeks redden.

  Kelly waited for the laughter to die down, then leaned her elbows on the bar. She motioned with her finger and Shorty moved closer. “My name’s Kelly Armstrong,” she whispered. “Fergus O’Malley said I should speak to you.”

  Shorty’s mouth dropped. “You’re O’Malley’s niece?” he said. “Jesus, I wouldn’t believe an ugly old sod like him could be related to a looker like you.”

  “Why, thank you, I think,” smiled Kelly.

  Shorty frowned. “But Armstrong is a Prod name? What’s a good Catholic girl doing with a name like Armstrong?”

  “I married an American,” she explained. “And he’s neither Catholic nor Protestant.” Shorty nodded thoughtfully. “So, can you help me or not?” Kelly asked.

  Shorty looked around the bar, saw that there were no customers waiting to be served, and motioned to a table in the corner. “Sit over there,” he said. “What can I get you?”

  Kelly said she’d have a Coke and went over to the table to wait for the barman. Shorty joined her, gave her a glass of Coke and sipped a malt whisky from a balloon glass. He smacked his lips appreciatively, all the time his eyes never leaving Kelly’s face. He shook his head in wonder. “Fergus O’Malley’s niece,” he mused. “Who’d have thought it?”

  Kelly was beginning to tire of the man’s attitude. “My uncle told you I’d be coming?”

  “Aye, that he did.”

  “And what I wanted?”

  “Aye.” He took another sip of whisky, the creases deepening in his brow. “You wouldn’t be offended if I asked you for identification, would you?” he said.

  Kelly wondered how Shorty would react if she produced her FBI credentials, but instead she showed him her driving licence. Shorty studied it and then handed it back to her. “Well?” she said.

  Shorty placed his glass on the table and folded his arms. “The person you’re looking for doesn’t want to be found,” he said quietly. Kelly said nothing. “By anyone,” he added. Kelly raised an eyebrow. “Your uncle said it was important, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was about.”

  “He doesn’t know,” Kelly said. They were both speaking in low voices, their heads bent forward.

  “Would you like to tell me?” asked Shorty.

  “I can’t do that,” she said. “Do you know what she’s involved in?”

  “No,” admitted Shorty.

  “But you know how to reach her?”

  Shorty didn’t reply. A customer stood up at a nearby table, put on his coat and left.

  “You trust my uncle, don’t you?” Kelly pressed. Shorty nodded. “And he told you to help me, didn’t he?” Shorty nodded again. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He tapped it on the table, then opened it and took out a card. He looked at the handwritten telephone number on the card and handed it to her. “I can reach her at this number?” asked Kelly.

  Shorty shook his head. “No, but it’s the number of a man who might be able to help you – if you can persuade him that you’re to be trusted.” He drained his glass, stood up and went back to the bar. Kelly slipped the card into the pocket of her coat and left. The two young men drinking Guinness watched her go. So did FBI agent Don Clutesi, his eye pressed to the camcorder on its tripod at the window overlooking Filbin’s. Clutesi didn’t recognise the woman, but she was clearly a cut above the normal type of customer who frequented the bar. Clutesi wondered if she was a hooker on the make. Young, blonde and pretty, what other reason could she have had for visiting a bar alone? She’d spoken to Shorty but Clutesi hadn’t picked up anything from the listening devices. Either they’d been out of range or they’d been whispering. Clutesi made a note in his incident book and stretched his arms above his h
ead. He was tired, but there was another two hours to go before he was due to be relieved. Then he had to go back to Federal Plaza to meet the agent from Phoenix.

  An FBI driver was waiting outside JFK holding a sign with Cole Howard’s name on it, and he carried Howard’s bag to the car. They made polite conversation on the drive into Manhattan, about the Mets, the weather, and the murder of three DEA agents in the Bronx that afternoon.

  The driver took Howard into Federal Plaza and helped him obtain a visitor’s pass which Howard clipped to the breast pocket of his suit. The receptionist rang the Counter-Terrorism Division to tell them that Howard was on the way up, then she told him which floor to go to. The driver nodded goodbye and Howard headed to the elevator.

  When the doors hissed open a small, shrewish woman with grey hair and a reluctance to look him in the eye took him along to Mulholland’s office. Ed Mulholland was in his fifties, with a craggy, lined face and a grey, military crewcut. He had a bone-crushing handshake and looked as if he worked out a lot.

  “Cole, good to see you. Jake Sheldon speaks very highly of you. You want coffee? Tea?”

  Howard shook his head. “No, I’m fine.”

  Mulholland looked over Howard’s shoulder. “Katie, can you get Hank along for this, please? And ask Frank Sullivan and Don Clutesi to sit in, too. Thanks.”