“This is New York, killer,” she said. “It’s a hundred dollars a pop.”
Paco threw her clothes at her. He got a handful of hundreds out of his shoulder bag and waved them at her, to show she wasn’t worth it to him. “Out,” he said, “before I flush your nose down the toilet.”
When Flaherty came into the room a half-hour later, he stopped dead in his tracks and stared long and hard at Paco.
“It can’t be you,” said Flaherty. “No, it’s a prank the lads are playing on me.”
“It’s the plastic surgery,” said Paco.
“You mean to say you let the Arabs go at you with a scalpel and this handsome matinee idol is the result?”
Paco lifted his chin, turned his head.
“Even your voice is different,” said Flaherty. “Less of a whinny, more of a baritone.”
“They fixed my vocal chords too.”
“Did they now? And what else? Can you fuck the way you used to?” The KGB had castrated more than one great agent, the better to control him. The odd thing was, it made men more loyal to their mutilators, even grateful.
These were friendly insults. Paco and Flaherty, who was one of the truly great bombers of the Provisional IRA, the Provos, went back a long way. They had met in the KGB school for terrorists at Karlovy Vary, in Czechoslovakia, and had ever since done each other favors. Paco had bought some dynamite in Zurich for Flaherty, who had used it to blow up a British politician in a London street. Flaherty had drilled a hole in the kneecap of a Swede Paco had suspected of being an informer; he’d used an electric drill, Provo style. Paco hadn’t been quite suspicious enough to kill the man, who was a world-class sniper and might, if he proved to be innocent, turn out useful.
“So what is it this time?” asked Flaherty.
Paco told him. The shah was in a New York hospital, the Cornell Medical Center.
“If it’s the shah you’re after, it’s no more trouble to blow up the hospital where he’s recuperating from his dreadful surgical ordeal,” said Flaherty. “There must be a good reliable lad who drives an ambulance or something, or a lonely nurse, or one of the oppressed who needs a few quid to put the kiddies through college. We’d wheel in, say 20 kilos of plastic, nicely molded to the underside of one of them rolling stretchers they use. It would go off in the room below the shah’s bed and blow his majesty and most of the bloody hospital into the East River. Or is that too gruesome for a squeamish lad like you?”
“Can you use a time fuse?”
“Sure. I can do much fancier stuff than that book in Mexico.”
“Call me here and give me the exact time it’s set to go. I need at least an hour’s notice,” said Paco.
“What’re you going to do, warn ’em?” asked Flaherty, and they both laughed and had more of the Old Bushmill out of Paco’s bottle.
When Paco called, from a pay phone outside the men’s room on the hotel mezzanine, to warn the shah’s security about Flaherty’s bomb, a voice said, “We have already taken care of that. Who’s calling, please?”
Later, Flaherty came by for some more whiskey. “How could they have known?” asked Paco.
“My lad inside says the Israelis called up. They’re still very thick with the shah; it was them that trained the Savak, you know, not the silly bloody CIA like everyone says.”
“The Israelis?” Paco said. He didn’t like their being after him, so close, so early in the game.
* * *
—
Captain Shariar Mustapha Chafik of the Royal Iranian Navy was walking down the Rue Villa Dupont, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris on the afternoon of December 7, 1979. He was on his way to a nearby apartment owned by his mother, Princess Ashraf, twin sister to the shah.
A young man in a plastic motorcyclist’s helmet walked up behind Captain Chafik and, placing the muzzle of a Makarov pistol within an inch of his skull, fired two shots. The killer escaped.
Next day, in the windowless room in Jerusalem, Eleazar and his control discussed this event.
“Carlos wanted to kill Chafik himself,” said the control. “Kaddafi’s East Germans told him he had to let the Iranians do something. It’s obvious from the close-in technique, pure KGB-Palestinian, who trained the assassin.”
“But why? Why Chafik? Why Paris? It’s a sideshow.”
“It’s all a sideshow. The Germans in Mexico, the bomb in New York. Carlos, if he is Carlos, could have killed the shah in either place.”
“Then what is he waiting for?”
“To kill him in a particular place, for a particular reason.”
A silence fell. It was stifling in the room despite the air conditioning, and notwithstanding thick sealed walls the peculiar noise of the Near East, a surf of voices breaking on the bleak shore of the jumbled city, came to their ears.
“Your team is ready?” asked the control, knowing that it was. Each member could speak Arabic and at least one other language, each could kill—kill with an Uzi machine pistol, kill with a knife, kill in ingenious ways. (“Is this really you?” one member had asked over a telephone. “Yes,” replied his target, a Palestinian terrorist who happened to be in bed with a woman at the other end. The phone exploded in the terrorist’s hand. They found the girl, quite mad, with her lover’s severed head in her lap.)
“I’d like you to take your team to Cairo,” said Eleazar’s control. He handed him six British passports, six driver’s licenses, six sets of credit cards, a few letters, stamped, postmarked, and opened, addressed to the fictitious names on the forged documents.
Their weapons would be waiting in Egypt.
* * *
—
In Havana, Paco woke up to find Layal’s black eyes fixed on his face. They were strange eyes, all one glassy dark color, lacking pupils, absent light. It was disconcerting to wake up every day to find this flat, utterly expressionless, but beautiful face staring into his own.
“Why don’t you learn to sleep?” Paco asked.
“I already know how to sleep,” Layal said. “I need to learn how to stay awake.”
“We have pills for that.”
Something happened behind Layal’s unrippled face that might have been a smile. She had no physical shame; clothed or unclothed, her behavior was the same. Her body, smooth as a court kimono, was as lithe and hard as the body of a gymnast. She had amazing muscular control.
Just before dark, the telephone rang—the first time since they had arrived in Cuba. Paco spoke a code phrase and listened to another. Then he got out his leather bag, unlocked it, and removed one of his Makarovs. He took five extra clips.
“Stay with the bag. Don’t let anyone touch it,” he said to Layal. “Not even your Cuban friends, not even Kotchergine if he stops by.”
Colonel Vadim Kotchergine of the KGB had established the camps in Cuba that had trained the first pioneering terrorists from the Americas and Europe. Not many people knew that. Paco liked to show his women that the revolution kept no secrets from him.
Night fell. Paco departed. “I know you want to come with me,” he said to Layal, “but this is not the operation for you, I’m saving you for the real work.”
* * *
—
It was always a relief to Paco to speak Spanish. But Spanish is not a good language to speak in a boat, because voices carry over the water, and Latin Americans only speak softly when they are in a brothel or in a church. Paco made his joke not to calm the men he was sending to attack Contadora Island off the coast of Panama, the shah’s last refuge, but because he was, in some ways, weak. He wanted men he was sending to their deaths to think he was a good fellow.
There were two men from the desert band, a pair of Basques who had been sent to Libya by ETA to learn how to kill Spanish policemen. One of them was very good with explosives; it was the ETA that had tunneled under a Madrid street and planted a hun
dred kilos of dynamite in the hole and blown a Dodge Dart carrying Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the premier of Spain, over a five-story building. Paco had given them the dynamite.
The two Basques laughed at Paco’s joke. The third man did not. He was a Montonero, which is like saying that he was a tyrannosaur—terrifying, but thought to be extinct. The Montoneros, originally the secret bullies of the Peronist movement in Argentina, had turned sharply left and been crushed, 9,000 of them killed by the police and the army in a single year. Some had escaped and taken refuge with cells of the Red Brigades in Italy. They were rich fugitives: in just one operation, the Montoneros had extorted $60 million in kidnap ransom from one of Argentina’s richest families.
Like all Montoneros, this one, Raul by gamename, thought that he was an aristocrat. Paco had wanted to use M-19 people for this operation—a nifty outfit of doctors, lawyers, architects from Colombia—but they had just had a disaster when they released, rather than killed, the 14 foreign ambassadors they had seized as hostages in the Dominican Embassy at Bogota. The media could only cover one embassy full of hostages at a time, and they had a big investment in the Americans in Iran. Now M-19, to redeem itself, was planning to liquidate Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the former dictator of Nicaragua. Their best men were in Paraguay, stalking Somoza.
Raul stepped into the boat. It was the best money could buy, but old—one of the many inflatable Zodiacs with powerful engines that the Cubans had captured from CIA teams 20 years before during the Kennedys’ secret war against Castro.
“Come back,” said Paco. Raul got out of the boat, wetting his shoes and trousers in the surf. “Remember, follow the plan of the mission,” Paco said. “You’re not shooting to kill. We just want two rounds from the bazooka to land near the house, not hit it.” Raul looked with contempt at the RPG-7 rocket launcher lying in the bottom of the boat. It had a range of 500 meters and its projectile could, in theory, pierce 12 inches of armor. “If we hit the fucking island of Contadora from a moving boat, we’ll be lucky,” he said. “And why two rounds? So they’ll see the flame from the backblast and have time to blow us out of the water?” Paco smiled. “After you fire, dive. The Basques will show you how,” he said. All three men wore wet suits. Tanks and respirators lay beside the Russian bazookas in the bottom of the Zodiac.
This operation meant nothing. It was just a little something extra to let the shah and the Americans know it was time to move again, that there was danger that the sick monarch might yet be killed before he died of cancer. The Americans around President Carter were terrified that this might happen. Then they would lose their hostages, lose the election. Somebody from the White House was talking at this very moment to Ghotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister, about ways to betray the shah. The man from the White House was wearing a false beard.
Paco didn’t bother to wait on the beach for Raul and the Basques to come back from Contadora. He just left an observer with a good pair of binoculars looking out over the Pacific. The observer saw, reflected from the low cloud over the choppy sea, two small red flashes, as from the backblast of a bazooka. Moments later he saw a helicopter hovering with tracer rounds falling lazily into the sea from its guns, and then the much larger flash, as from a boat loaded with gasoline going up.
He sent Paco the prearranged message: “The sheep is running.”
* * *
—
At last the shah was on his way to Egypt. Outside Cairo, in a house directly under the glide path to the airport, Eleazar watched through the big glasses as the two men came out on the roof in Heliopolis. An American M-1 rifle, fitted with a telescope and certain other refinements, lay on the rug in which he had carried it through the streets. The men were wearing caftans, long roughspun gowns that reached to their ankles. Jets, approaching Cairo Airport, screamed overhead. The airport was almost two miles away. The men on the rooftop, though their faces were young in the bright circle of the powerful optic, moved stiffly, as if they had some crippling disease of the spine. Such things were not unusual in Egyptians, but the faces Eleazar saw were not Egyptians, but European. Italian? Yes, Italian.
The Italians lay down on the rooftop. From beneath their caftans one man drew a long tube, the other a missile with fins. The chartered jet carrying the shah was due in half an hour. The Italians were fitting the missile, a Strela SAM 7 infra-red projectile that could nose into the hot orifice of a jet engine at an altitude of 2,000 meters. There was no time to call the Egyptians; 30 minutes was not enough for them. Eleazar sighed. He picked up the rifle and gazed through the scope. He shot the first Italian in the spine and the second through the head. Then he put two rounds through the launcher, in case there was a backup team, abandoned his equipment, and went out into the teeming street.
“What was that noise?” asked an old fruit peddler.
“The world is nothing but noise,” Eleazar said in his flawless Arabic. “What great price are you asking a thirsty man for one of those oranges?”
* * *
—
Paco closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the straight razor on his cheek. What a sensuous thing it was to be shaved by a woman. No female had taken such care of him before Layal. She massaged his body with oils, she gave him baths, scrubbing him down with a rough sponge, she even cleaned the wax from his ears. Without opening his eyes, Paco put his hand between Layal’s thighs. He knew how much she enjoyed that, but she gave no sign: the razor kept moving in small, precise strokes over his face and throat. It was the sharpest instrument Paco had ever seen; Layal stropped it every day. She carried it always, in a little chamois sheath at the small of her back.
“Now we know for sure that the Israelis are after us,” said Paco. “It’s probably one of their Wrath of God teams. The Mossad wouldn’t risk blowing their own people.”
“But you lost two men. They were found with a Strela missile and launcher beside them. They were identified as Italians.”
The speaker was an emissary from George Habash’s PFLP Headquarters in Aden. Because Habash’s people had trained a lot of European terrorists, they thought they were in charge of every operation. But they were just Palestinians. Everything they had, someone had given them: money from Kaddafi, arms from the GRU and the KGB, terrorists from the romantic upper middle class of the Free World. Even Paco himself was a gift. He controlled this operation.
“I have four Italians left,” said Paco. “That should be enough.”
“You have also the two Iranians,” said the emissary. “They must be used.”
“They’re so good.”
“Your employer insists. A Shi’a must offer the shah water before he is killed.”
“I know more about the requirements than you do,” Paco said. Layal took the hot towel off his face and rubbed his skin with an astringent. Paco opened his eyes for the first time and stared at the emissary. A television set flickered behind him, the sound turned up loud to muffle their conversation.
“We all wonder what private understanding you might have with the holy man,” said the emissary.
There it was again: the suggestion that he, Paco, was stealing from the revolution, that he was risking everything for pay, that he was a mercenary and worse than a mercenary.
“Get out!” Paco shouted. “I don’t like your manners!”
The emissary gave a sardonic smile. Layal whipped the barber’s sheet off Paco, snapping it in the air. The emissary saw the Makarov, fitted with a long silencer, lying on Paco’s lap, and stopped smiling.
“We would like to have the details of your plan,” the emissary said.
“I’m sure you would,” said Paco. “Now get out.”
* * *
—
Layal was incredibly useful. Among the band in the desert, she had been the best shot with every kind of weapon. She spoke perfect Arabic in several regional variations. She even wrote Arabic: her only pastime was
practicing Arabic script and Japanese calligraphy. She was strong: in the desert, in a training exercise at night, she had taken a loaded Skorpion—a loaded hair-trigger Skorpion!—away from one of the Germans who had come up behind her, and broken the man’s arm. She was adept at Akihido, a kind of martial art Paco had not encountered before. She had the calm fearlessness of the true professional killer.
Also, she had type B-negative blood. This was going to get her into Maadi Military Hospital, where a team of American surgeons was preparing to remove the shah’s cancerous spleen. The shah had B-negative blood, a rare type. So rare that donors would be let into the hospital through the crowd of Elite Guards and police who had kept out even the wailing relatives of other patients.
“Get dressed and go,” Paco said.
Layal did as she was told. She did not nod, she did not say yes, nothing happened in her eyes. Unless Paco had her on the bed, she was a stone.
In the garage in Helwan, a village south of Cairo, Paco inspected the van while the Italians from the Red Brigades and the Iranians from the Islamic Revolutionary Youth, or whatever they called themselves, watched nervously. The team leader, gamename Bruno, showed Paco how it would work. It was one of those camper vans, the roof could be cranked open, to give headroom and air. Open, it looked like a lean-to, with mosquito netting over the opening. They had sanded the paint off the van, which was new and in perfect mechanical condition, in order to make it look old; the Italians were proud of the dents they had put in the van, using an old truck, not hammers.
“Very realistic,” said Paco.
Inside the roof the Italians had fitted a device called “Stalin’s organ.” It was a rack holding 12 RPG-7 rocket launchers. Bruno cranked up the roof. The muzzles of the launchers were hidden by the mosquito netting.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 117