Solo (Aka the Cretan Lover) (v5)

by Jack Higgins

  He turned quickly, but he had not been mistaken. The Porsche was still there and then he saw the Colonel crouched beside his own car.

  As Stewart hurried towards him, Morgan stood up and Stewart saw that his offside front tyre was flat.

  'Here, what the hell do you think you're doing?' he demanded angrily.

  Morgan kicked the wheel. 'Looks like you're in trouble, Inspector. I'd get hold of a policeman, if I were you.'

  He walked to the Porsche, climbed in and drove rapidly away.

  Mikali rose late that morning and it was eleven o'clock before he went for his usual run in Hyde Park in spite of the heavy rain. Not that it bothered him. He liked the rain. It gave him a safe, enclosed feeling, rather like being in a little world of your own.

  He finally got back to the flat in Upper Grosvenor Street and opened the door to the aroma of freshly ground coffee. At first he assumed the girl from the previous night hadn't gone home and then Jean Paul Deville appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  'Ah, there you are. Let myself in with the contingency key. I hope you don't mind.'

  Mikali got a towel from the bathroom and mopped the sweat from his face. 'When did you get in?'

  'The breakfast plane. I thought we should chat.'

  He returned to his coffee-making. Mikali said, 'It didn't go too smoothly.'

  'You shot him in the head at point-blank range. Who could ask for more? And we've achieved what we set out to do. A major assassination attempt in the heart of London. Headlines in every newspaper in the world and wonderful publicity for the Palestinian cause. Black September are delighted. Their man in Paris came to see me last night. It got a little rough this one, I understand. Were you worried?'

  'When I was in Algiers, the Arabs had a saying. It comes as God wills. However carefully you plan, one of these days, someone turns up where they shouldn't be. The gun that's never been known to jam, does. That's what will kill me in the end and you, when you least expect it'

  'Very possibly,' Deville said. 'Like the girl on the bicycle in the tunnel?'

  'That was regrettable. I tried to avoid her, but there was nothing to be done. There was the briefest of mentions in both London evening papers, but what I can't understand is why they've made no connection with the Cohen affair.'

  'Yes, I wondered about that. I had my people in London investigate. It seems the girl's parents were divorced some time ago. The father is a paratroop colonel named Morgan - Asa Morgan. Serving in Ireland at the moment. The KGB at our London Embassy most obligingly ran him through the computer for me and he has quite a record. Expert in subversion, urban guerrilla techniques, advanced interrogation methods. Was even a Chinese prisoner in Korea. It makes sense that the Army would prefer to keep a very low profile on a man like that, which would explain the official handling of the matter.'

  'They're also keeping a very low profile on the Cretan.' Mikali spooned tea into the pot.

  'What's that supposed to mean? That you're afraid someone else will get the credit?'

  Mikali laughed. 'Go to hell.'

  'Soon enough, my friend.' Deville took his coffee and sat by the window. 'To revolutionaries the world over from the Red Brigade to the IRA, the Cretan Lover is a living legend. But make no mistake. The files of every Western intelligence agency record in minute detail each of your operations. By disclosing as little as possible to the public, the better they hope to make their chances of catching you. Besides, everybody loves a winner. You might even become popular and that would never do.'

  'It's a thought.'

  Deville took a folded sheet of notepaper from his pocket and pushed it across. 'I've changed your emergency postbox number again, not only in London but also in Manchester and Edinburgh. Learn and burn.'

  'Okay,' Mikali poured a cup of tea.

  'Your performance the other night - were you satisfied?'

  'Tolerably. I'm never happy with the Albert Hall acoustics, but the ambience is great.'

  'And now a holiday. What do you intend to do? Go to Hydra?'

  'A few days in Cambridge first.'

  'Dr Katherine Riley?' Deville said. 'That's fast becoming a habit. Are you serious?'

  'She's company,' Mikali said. 'No more than that, but then good company's damned hard to find in this lousy world, don't you agree?'

  He unzipped the right-hand pocket of his track suit and took out a small, rather ugly automatic, perhaps six inches long with a curious-looking barrel, which he placed on the table.

  Deville picked it up. 'What is it?'

  'A Czech Ceska. This particular model was manufactured by the Germans when they took over the factory during the war. It incorporates a very effective silencer.'

  'Any good?'

  'SS Intelligence used them.'

  Deville put it down carefully. 'You always go armed, even when running in the park?'

  Mikali poured himself a cup of tea, added sugar and milk, English-style. 'Tell me,' he said. 'Do you still carry a cyanide capsule?'

  'Of course.'

  'GRU regulations, am I right?'

  'Yes.'

  'Why have you never offered me one?'

  Deville shrugged. 'Because I could never conceive of a situation in which you would use it.'

  'Exactly.' Mikali smiled and picked up the Ceska. 'When that totally unexpected moment arrives, when they come to take me, I'll have this in my hand. Even in the Green Room at the Albert Hall.'

  'I see,' Deville said. 'You go down firing. The soldier's end, face towards the enemy.' He sighed and there was genuine affection in his voice now. 'My dear John, you really are the most romantic fool at heart. Is that how you see yourself? The last Samurai?'

  Mikali opened the window and stepped on to the balcony. The sun was shining as he looked out across the park. It was going to be a warm day.

  He turned. 'Oscar Wilde once said that life is a bad quarter of an hour made up of exquisite moments.'

  'Which brings us back to Cambridge and Dr Riley,' Deville said.

  Mikali smiled. 'Exactly. Very definitely one of the more exquisite moments he was referring to.'

  4

  By evening Morgan had reached Leeds. He left the city by the A65 making for the Yorkshire Dales through Otley, Ilkley and Skipton, moving up into a high dark landscape of desolate moors surmounted by an occasional low mountain peak.

  The village of Malham is set in the midst of the most rugged limestone scenery in Yorkshire. He reached it as darkness was falling, drove on for another mile before finally turning through a five-barred gate to a small, greystone cottage set amongst trees in half an acre of garden.

  Strictly speaking, it was now Helen's part of the settlement, but when he checked, the key was under the stone where it had always been kept. He opened the door, then went and got his things from the car.

  There was that faintly damp smell that came from lack of use, but there was a fire laid ready on the hearth. He put a match to it and went exploring upstairs where there were two bedrooms and a bath.

  He found what he wanted in one of the wardrobes. His old climbing gear. Boots, corduroy pants and heavy woollen sweaters. He took them downstairs along with a sleeping bag and spread them round the fire. Then he got a bottle of Scotch from his holdall, climbed into the sleeping bag and lay in front of the fire.

  He piled on the logs and drank whisky - a great deal of whisky - because he didn't want to think of her. Not then. That would come later. After a while, he slept.

  A couple of miles beyond Malham, a footpath leads to the cliffs of Gordale Scar. Asa Morgan had last visited this place with his daughter on her twelfth birthday. Walking steadily across the boggy ground that morning through heavy rain, he could hear again her excited voice as they rounded the rocky corner and the Scar came into view, the waterfall pouring down the centre, heavier than usual because of the rain.

  The only way forward had been by a rock climb up the steep buttress on the left and he had pushed her on ahead, staying close behind, just in case.
Afterwards, there was the long struggle up the scree past the upper waterfall and then the path following the edge of the ravine.

  He ploughed on through thick mist and rain for mile after mile, totally trapped in the past. It was as if she was still there, hurrying on ahead into the mist, then suddenly reappearing, with a rush, to tell him of some discovery.

  And for a while he was a fourteen-year-old boy again, in that first week out of school. Up at five and off over the mountain with a packet of his Mam's cheese sandwiches and a flask of cold tea. Six miles' hard walking every morning to reach the pit that had killed his father.

  He never forgot that first day. The sickening jolt as the cage dropped, two thousand feet down, into a nightmare world of darkness and despair and back-breaking labour.

  And the six-mile tramp back at the end of his first shift, so tired that he'd thought he would never make it. Later, sitting in the old zinc tub in front of the fire while she scrubbed the coat of dust from his body, he knew only one thing with certainty. There had to be something better for there was something in him, he felt it, aching to break out.

  And there was, for as some were born to act, others gifted to be great surgeons or musicians. Asa Morgan was a soldier by nature. A born leader. For him, the military life was as much a calling as the ministry was for others. So, greatest irony of all, it was the war that saved him; that took him out of the Rhondda for good and into the Army.

  The walk circled back towards Malham and it was on the inward leg of the journey as he descended what was known as Dry Valley, that it happened. He came to an overhang, a large boulder beside it, where they had sheltered from the rain to eat their sandwiches.

  The pent-up agony erupted inside him. 'No!' he cried. 'No!' and turned, as if running from the Devil himself, slipping and sliding on the treacherous surface as he stumbled down the valley.

  Suddenly, he found himself on the limestone pavement that he knew led to the brink of the great two-hundred-and-forty-foot cliff of Malham Cove. The wind snatched the mist away and the whole of the Dale stretched below him.

  It rose up inside him like white-hot lava now, a rage such as he had never known.

  'I'm coming, you bastard!' he screamed. 'I'm coming!'

  He ran across the limestone slabs and started down the path as fast as he could go.

  By noon of the following day he was knocking at the door of the flat in Cavendish Square. It was opened by the Gurkha, Kim, in his neat white jacket, brass buttons polished. Morgan moved straight past him without a word and found Ferguson seated at his desk in the living-room, half-moon spectacles on the end of his nose, working his way through a pile of papers.

  He glanced up and removed them. 'You have been a naughty boy. Poor old Stewart wasn't exactly received with open arms on his return. You've probably set the poor devil's promotion back a couple of years.'

  'I want him, Charles,' Morgan said. 'I'll do anything you say. Play it any way you like, but you must give me my chance.'

  Ferguson got up and moved to the window. 'Revenge, Bacon said, is a kind of wild justice and that won't do. Won't do at all. Too emotional. Bound to impair your judgement. And you're not exactly twenty-five any more, now are you?' He shook his head firmly. 'No, you finish your leave, then it's back to Belfast.'

  'Then I'll resign my commission.'

  'You can't, not in your case. It's your security classification, you see, Asa. Makes you rather special. You're with us for the duration. Just like the good old war days.'

  'All right.' Morgan put up his hands defensively. 'A month, that's what you said I had and a month it is then.'

  He turned and walked out before Ferguson could make any reply.

  He was calmer now, of course, completely in control again. That primordial outburst at Malham, the mad drive south, had drained the excess emotion out of him. He was once more a professional, cold, calculating and capable of total objectivity.

  But where to start, that was the problem? He was sitting in the living-room of the Gresham Place flat just after four, working his way through several different newspapers with accounts of the shooting, when the doorbell rang. When he opened it, Harry Baker was standing there, holding a leather briefcase.

  He walked straight in. 'Bit rough on young Stewart, weren't you? I mean, the lad's got to learn.'

  Morgan followed him into the living-room and stood waiting, hands in pockets. 'All right, Harry, what do you want?'

  'Ferguson phoned me. Said you'd been on his back again.'

  'Did he also tell you he'd warned me off?'

  'Yes.'

  'So?'

  Baker took out his pipe and started to fill it. 'You saved my life in Nicosia, Asa. If it hadn't been for you, I'd have taken a bullet in the head from that EOKA gunman. You shoved me down and took it in the back instead.'

  'We all make mistakes.'

  'If Ferguson finds out about this I'm finished, but to hell with it.' Baker opened the briefcase, produced a Manila folder and tossed it on the table. 'There you are, Asa. Everything there is to know, and that isn't a great deal, on the man who shot Maxwell Cohen and killed Megan. The man we call the Cretan Lover.'

  5

  Baker stood in front of the fire, warming himself as Morgan started to work his way through the file.

  'As you can see, the first time he appeared on the scene was in nineteen sixty-nine. The Vassilikos killing. That's when the newspapers first referred to him as the Cretan.'

  'Because the chauffeur was so sure he'd spoken with a Cretan accent?'

  'Which according to the file, was confirmed by the maid at the Hilton in West Berlin a month later when he got General Stephanakis.'

  Morgan read on. 'This business with the girl in the wardrobe while they were waiting for Stephanakis to appear. It's genuine?'

  'Oh, yes.'

  'Which explains the Cretan Lover tag?'

  'That and a similar case you'll find mentioned in there. And that Boudakis girl - it wasn't rape. A psychiatrist had a session with her. His impression was that she'd fallen for the man.'

  'From the details listed in here, I'd say a great many Greeks might be cheering for him,' Morgan said. 'Both Vassilikos and General Stephanakis seem to have been a couple of butchers.'

  'All right,' Baker said. 'So our friend is just a simple Cretan peasant, a hero of the Resistance who doesn't like the present regime in Greece, a regime he sees as fascist. He decides to do something about it. Fine - except for one rather important point. Since then, he's been responsible for one assassination after another the world over. Oh, the credit's usually been claimed by some appropriate terrorist group, but we know, as do most of the world's leading intelligence organizations, when the Cretan has been responsible. His touch is distinctive and unmistakable. Read on. You'll see what I mean.'

  He sat by the fire and relit his pipe and Morgan started to work his way through the file.

  In June 1970, he had killed, in his hotel room, Colonel Rafael Gallegos, Chief of Police for the Basque country which straddles the Pyrenees between Spain and France. The killing was a carbon copy of the murder of General Stephanakis in West Berlin. Responsibility had been claimed by the Basque Nationalist movement, the ETA, which had been fighting for years for separation from Spain.

  In September of the same year, General Severo Falcao, head of the Brazilian secret police, had been assassinated in Rio de Janeiro by a traffic policeman who had stopped his car on a quiet country road leading out of the city to the General's home. As in the Vasslikos killing, only the General and his bodyguards died. The chauffeur had been allowed to go.

  In November 1970, he had murdered George Henry Daly, an insurance executive in Boston. What the newspapers had not been told was that Daly was actually Major Sergei Kulakov, who had defected to the Americans five years before from the Red Army's Berlin Intelligence station. The CIA had squeezed him dry and then provided him with what they had fondly imagined to be a brand-new identity. His wife had described the Cretan perfectly. He cou
ld have killed her and didn't.

  In 1971, in Toronto, there was Henry Jackson, an economist, another case of a defecting Russian agent under an assumed name.

  Later that year, the Israeli Consul-General in Istanbul. The Turkish People's Liberation Army had claimed credit for that.

  Then came one of the most spectacular affairs of all. His killing of the Italian film director Mario Forlani, at the Cannes Film Festival. The Black Brigade in Rome, the Fascist answer to the Red Brigade, claimed credit. They'd threatened Forlani on a number of occasions because of a film he had made ridiculing Mussolini.

  'So he isn't some Marxist fanatic,' Morgan commented.

  'You mean the Cannes business? That was a hell of an affair. The French had the hotel Forlani was staying at guarded like Fort Knox. Garde mobile all over the place. Plainclothes security men inside. Everybody was staying there. Half the uncrowned heads of Europe, most of what counts for stars these days in Hollywood. John Mikali, the pianist, Sophia Loren, David Niven, Paul Newman and God knows who else.'

  'And he pulled it off in the middle of that lot?'

  'What happened was simple. Forlani appeared from his apartment on the fifteenth floor with three girl friends to go down to dinner. There were two policemen on his door, another on the lift.'

  'And?'

  'The Cretan simply materialized at the end of the corridor, shot him twice in the heart with a handgun, at that range, mind you. Was away through the fire door like a flash.'

  'And no trace?'

  'Vanished off the face of the earth. The French police turned the place inside out, but they didn't get a thing. Most of the celebrities left that night. Couldn't get away fast enough. It caused one hell of a stink.'

  'Then?'

  'It's in the file. Killed Helmut Klein, the East German Minister of Finance who was visiting Frankfurt University last November. The campus was under heavy security. He holed up with a girl called Lieselott Hoffmann who, it later transpired, was a Baader-Meinhof sympathizer. She took in a rifle under orders of the Red Army Faction. Was told to hold it for pick-up.'