At first, there seemed to be no problem. Rowse had been sitting in economy class and was one of the last out of the airliner. He followed the other passengers down the steps into the blazing sun of a Libyan morning.
From the observation terrace of the modern white airport building, a pair of impassive eyes picked him out, and binoculars trained briefly on him as he crossed the tarmac toward the Arrivals door. After several seconds the binoculars were laid aside, and a few calm words were muttered in Arabic.
Rowse entered the air-conditioned cool of the terminal and took his place at the end of the queue waiting for passport clearance. The sloe-eyed immigration officers took their time, scanning every page of each passport, gazing at each passenger’s face, comparing it lengthily with the passport photo, and consulting a manual that was kept out of sight beneath their desks. Libyan passport holders were in a separate queue.
Two American oil engineers who had been in the smoking section and were behind Rowse made up the rear of the queue. It took twenty minutes for Rowse to reach the passport desk.
The green-uniformed officer took his passport, opened it, and glanced down at a note beneath the grill. Without expression, he raised his gaze and nodded to someone behind Rowse. There was a tug at Rowse’s elbow. He turned. Another green uniform—younger, courteous but firm. Two armed soldiers stood farther back.
“Would you please come with me?” the young officer said in passable English.
“Is there something wrong?” asked Rowse. The two Americans had gone silent. In a dictatorship the removal of a passenger from the passport queue is a great conversation-stopper.
The young officer at his elbow reached under the grill and retrieved Rowse’s passport.
“This way, if you please,” he said. The two soldiers closed up from behind, one at each elbow. The officer walked, Rowse followed, the soldiers came behind. They turned out of the main concourse and down a long white passage. At the far end, on the left, the officer opened a door and gestured to Rowse to enter. The soldiers took up position at either side of the door.
The officer followed Rowse inside and closed the door. It was a bare white room with barred windows. A table and two facing chairs stood in the center, nothing else. A portrait of Muammar Qaddafi hung on one wall. Rowse took one of the chairs; the officer sat down facing him and began to study the passport.
“I don’t understand what is wrong,” said Rowse. “My visa was issued yesterday by your People’s Bureau in Valletta. Surely it is in order?”
The officer simply made a gesture with one languid hand to suggest that Rowse should be quiet. He was. A fly buzzed. Five minutes elapsed.
From behind him, Rowse heard the door open. The young officer glanced up, shot to his feet, and saluted. Then without a word, he left the room.
“So, Mr. Rowse, here you are at last.”
The voice was deep and modulated, the English of a kind that can only be learned in one of Britain’s better public schools. Rowse turned. He allowed no trace of recognition to cross his face, but he had studied pictures of this man for hours in McCready’s briefing sessions.
“He’s slick and highly educated—by us,” McCready had said. “He’s also utterly ruthless and quite deadly. Be careful of Hakim al-Mansour.”
The Libyan head of external intelligence was more youthful than his pictures had suggested, barely older than Rowse himself. Thirty-three, the dossier had said.
In 1969, Hakim al-Mansour had been a fifteen-year-old schoolboy attending Harrow public school outside London, the son and heir of an extremely wealthy courtier and close confidant of Libyan King Idris.
It was in that year that a group of radical young officers headed by an unknown colonel of Bedouin origin called Qaddafi had carried out a coup d’état while the King was abroad, and had toppled him. They immediately announced the formation of the People’s Jamahariyah, the socialist republic. The King and his court took refuge with their considerable wealth in Geneva and appealed to the West for help in their own restoration. None came.
Unknown to his father, the young Hakim was entranced by the turn of events in his own country. He had already repudiated his father and all his politics, for only a year earlier his young imagination had been fired by the riots and near-revolution of the radical students and workers in Paris. It is not unknown for the impassioned young to turn to radical politics, and the Harrow schoolboy had converted in body and soul. Rashly, he bombarded the Libyan Embassy in London with requests to be allowed to leave Harrow and return to his homeland to join the socialist revolution.
His letters were noted and rejected. But one diplomat, a supporter of the old regime, tipped off al-Mansour Senior in Geneva. There was a blazing row between father and son. The boy refused to recant. At seventeen, his funds cut off, Hakim al-Mansour left Harrow prematurely. For a year he moved around Europe, trying to persuade Tripoli of his loyalty and always rejected. In 1972 he pretended to reform his views, made peace with his father, and joined the court-in-exile in Geneva.
While he was there, he learned details of a plot by a number of former British Special Forces officers, funded by King Idris’s financial chancellor, to create a countercoup against Qaddafi. They intended to mount a commando raid against the Libyan coastline in a ship called the Leonardo da Vinci, out of Genoa. The aim was to break open Tripoli’s main jail, the so-called Tripoli Hilton, and release all the desert clan chiefs who supported King Idris and detested Muammar Qaddafi. They would then scatter, raise the tribes, and topple the usurper. Hakim al-Mansour immediately revealed the entire plan to the Libyan Embassy in Paris.
In fact, the plan had already been “blown away” by the CIA, who later regretted it, and it was dismantled by the Italian security forces at America’s request. But al-Mansour’s gesture earned him a long interview at the Paris embassy.
He had already memorized most of Qaddafi’s rambling speeches and zany ideas, and his enthusiasm impressed the interviewing officer enough to earn the young firebrand a journey home. Two years after he was seconded to the Intelligence Corps, the Mukhabarat.
Qaddafi himself met and took to the younger man, promoting him beyond his years. Between 1974 and 1984, al-Mansour carried out a series of “wet affairs” for Qaddafi abroad, passing effortlessly through Britain, America, and France, where his fluency and urbanity were much appreciated, and through the terrorist nests of the Middle East, where he could become totally Arab. He carried out three personal assassinations of Qaddafi’s political opponents abroad, and he liaised extensively with the PLO, becoming a close friend and admirer of the Black September planner and mastermind Abu Hassan Salameh, whom he much resembled.
Only a head cold had prevented him from joining Salameh for his dawn game of squash that day in 1979, when the Israeli Mossad finally closed on the man who had planned the butchery of their athletes at the Munich Olympics and blown him to bits. Tel Aviv’s kidon team never knew how close they had come to taking two similar birds with one bomb.
In 1984, Qaddafi had promoted him to direct all foreign terror operations. Two years later, Qaddafi was reduced to a nervous wreck by American bombs and rockets. He wanted revenge, and it was al-Mansour’s job to deliver it—quickly. The British angle was not a problem—the men of the IRA, whom al-Mansour privately regarded as animals, would leave a trail of blood and death across Britain if they were given the wherewithal. The problem was finding a group that would do the same thing inside America. And here was this young Britisher, who might or might not be a renegade. ...
“My visa, I repeat, is in perfect order,” Rowse said indignantly. “So may I ask what is going on?”
“Certainly, Mr. Rowse. The answer is simple. You are being denied entry into Libya.”
Al-Mansour strolled across the room to stare out of the windows at the airline-maintenance hangars beyond.
“But why?” asked Rowse. “My visa was issued in Valletta yesterday. It is in order. All I want to do is try to research some passages for my next novel.”
“Please, Mr. Rowse, spare me the bewildered innocence. You are a former soldier of the British Special Forces, apparently turned novelist. Now you turn up here saying you want to describe our country in your next book. Frankly, I doubt that your description of my country would be particularly flattering, and the Libyan people, alas, do not share your British taste for self-mockery. No, Mr. Rowse, you cannot stay. Come, I will escort you back to the plane to Malta.”
He called an order in Arabic, and the door opened. The two soldiers entered. One took Rowse’s grip. Al-Mansour picked up the passport from the table. The other soldier stood aside to let the two civilians pass.
Al-Mansour led Rowse down a different passage and out into the sunlight. The Libyan airliner stood ready for takeoff.
“My suitcase,” said Rowse.
“Already back onboard, Mr. Rowse.”
“May I know who I have been speaking to?” asked Rowse.
“Not for the moment, my dear fellow. Just call me ... Mr. Aziz. Now, where will you go from here for your research?”
“I don’t know,” said Rowse. “I seem to have reached the end of the line.”
“Then take a break,” said al-Mansour. “Have a brief holiday. Why not fly on to Cyprus? A lovely island. Personally, I always favor the cool air of the Troodos Mountains at this time of year. Just outside Pedhoulas in the Marathassa Valley is a charming old hostelry called the Apollonia. I recommend it. Such interesting people tend to stay there. Safe journey, Mr. Rowse.”
* * *
It was a lucky coincidence that one of the SAS sergeants spotted Rowse coming through the Valletta airport. They had not expected him back so soon. Both men were sharing a room at the airport hotel, spelling each other in the Arrivals hall on a four-hours-on, four-hours-off basis. The duty man was reading a sports magazine when he spotted Rowse emerging from customs, his suitcase in one hand and his grip in the other. Without raising his head, he let Rowse pass and watched him approach the desk beneath the logo for Cyprus Airways. Then he used a wall phone to rouse his colleague in the hotel. The colleague raised McCready in central Valletta.
“Damn,” swore McCready. “What the hell’s he doing back so fast?”
“Dunno, boss,” said the sergeant, “but according to Danny, he’s inquiring at the Cyprus Airways desk.”
McCready thought furiously. He had hoped Rowse would stay in Tripoli for several days and that his cover story of seeking sophisticated weaponry for a bunch of fictional American terrorists would eventually lead to his arrest and interrogation by al-Mansour himself. Now it looked as if he had been thrown out. But why Cyprus? Had Rowse gone out of control?
McCready needed to get to him and find out what had happened in Tripoli. But Rowse was not checking into a hotel, where he could be covertly approached for a situation report. He was moving on. Perhaps he thought he was now under surveillance by the bad guys.
“Bill,” he said down the line, “tell Danny to stay with him. When the coast is clear, get to the Cyprus Airways desk and try to find where they went. Then book us two on the same flight, and two more on the next flight, in case I can’t get there on time. I’ll be out there as soon as I can.”
The traffic in downtown Valletta is fierce at sundown, and by the time McCready reached the airport, the evening flight for Nicosia had gone—with Rowse and Danny onboard. The next flight was not till the following day.
McCready checked into the airport hotel. At midnight, a call came in from Danny.
“Hallo, Uncle. I’m at the Nicosia airport hotel. Auntie’s gone to bed.”
“She must be tired,” said McCready. “Is it a nice hotel?”
“Yes, it’s lovely. We’ve got a super room. Six ten.”
“I’m so glad. I’ll probably stay there myself when I arrive. How’s the holiday so far?”
“Great. Auntie’s rented a car for tomorrow. I think we’re going up into the mountains.”
“That’ll be lovely,” McCready said jovially to his “nephew” across the eastern Mediterranean. “Why don’t you reserve that room for me? I’ll join you and Auntie as soon as I can. Good night, dear boy.”
He put the phone down. “Bugger’s going up into the mountains tomorrow,” he said gloomily. “What the hell did he learn in that stopover in Tripoli?”
“We’ll know tomorrow, boss,” said Bill. “Danny’ll leave a message in the usual place.”
Never seeing the point of wasting good sleeping time, Bill rolled over, and in thirty seconds he was fast asleep. In his profession, one never knew when one would sleep next.
McCready’s plane from Valletta touched down at the airport of the Cypriot capital just after eleven, having lost an hour because of the change of time zone. He was well separated from Bill, although they emerged from the same plane and took the same courtesy shuttle to the airport hotel. McCready settled into the lobby bar while Bill went up to room 610.
There was a maid cleaning it. Bill nodded and smiled, explained he had forgotten his razor, and went into the bathroom. Danny had left his situation report taped to the underside of the lavatory cistern lid. He emerged from the bathroom, nodded again to the maid, held up the razor he had produced from his pocket, was rewarded with an answering smile, and went back downstairs.
They made the exchange in the men’s toilet off the lobby. McCready retired to a cubicle and read the sitrep.
It was just as well that Rowse had not tried to make contact. According to Danny, shortly after Rowse had appeared from the customs hall at Valletta, his tail had followed, a sallow young man in a fawn suit. The Libyan agent had shadowed Rowse until the Cyprus Airways plane took off for Nicosia, but he had not joined the flight. Another tail, presumably called up from the Libyan People’s Bureau in Nicosia, had been waiting at the Nicosia airport and had shadowed Rowse to the hotel, where he had spent the night in the lobby. Rowse might have spotted either man, but he had given no sign. Danny had spotted both and stayed well back.
Rowse had asked the reception desk to order him a hired car for seven the following morning. Much later, Danny had done the same. Rowse had also asked for a map of the island and had consulted the reception manager on the best route to the Troodos Mountains.
In the last passage of the sitrep, Danny had said he would leave the hotel at five, park at a place where he could see the only route out of the car park, and wait for Rowse to emerge. He could not know whether the resident Libyan would follow Rowse all the way into the mountains or just see him off. He, Danny, would stay as close as he could and would call the hotel lobby when he had run Rowse to earth and could find a public phone. He would ask for Mr. Meldrum.
McCready returned to the lobby and made a brief call from one of the public phones to the British Embassy. Minutes later, he was speaking to the SIS Head of Station, an important post, bearing in mind Britain’s bases on Cyprus and its proximity to Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the Palestinian strongholds across the sea. McCready knew his colleague from their days in London, and he soon got what he wanted— an unmarked car with a driver who spoke fluent Greek. It would arrive within the hour.
The call for Mr. Meldrum came at ten past two. McCready took the phone from the hand of the reception manager. Once again it was the uncle-and-nephew routine.
“Hallo, dear boy. How are you? How nice to hear from you.”
“Hallo, Uncle. Auntie and I have stopped for lunch at a lovely hotel high in the mountains outside the village of Pedhoulas. It’s called the Apollonia. I think she may stay here, it’s so lovely. The car gave a bit of problem at the end, so I’ve brought it to a garage in Pedhoulas run by a Mr. Demetriou.”
“Never mind. How are the olives?”
“There are no olives up here, Uncle. Just apple and cherry orchards. Olives only grow down in the plain.”
McCready put the phone down and headed for the men’s room. Bill followed him. They waited till the only other occupant had left, checked the cubicles, and talked.
“Is Danny all right, boss?”
“Sure. He tailed Rowse to a hotel high in the Troodos Mountains. Seems Rowse has checked in. Danny’s in the village at a garage called Demetriou’s. He’ll wait for us there. The Libyan tail, the olive-skinned one, remained down here, apparently satisfied that Rowse would go where he was supposed to go.
“The car will be here shortly. I want you to take your grip and leave. Wait for us half a mile down the road.”
Thirty minutes later, Mr. Meldrum’s car indeed appeared—a Ford Orion with several dents, the only true sign of an “unmarked” car in Cyprus. The driver was an alert young staffer from the Nicosia Station. His name was Bertie Marks, and he spoke fluent Greek. They picked up Bill from under the shade of a tree by the wayside and headed for the mountains to the southwest. It was a long drive. It was dusk before they entered the picturesque village of Pedhoulas, heart of the Troodos Mountains cherry industry.
Danny was waiting for them in a café opposite the garage. Poor Mr. Demetriou had still not mended the rented car—Danny had ensured when he sabotaged it that it would take at least half the day to fix.
He pointed out the Hotel Apollonia, and he and Bill surveyed the surrounding countryside in the darkening light with professional eyes. They fixed on the mountain slope across the valley from the hotel’s splendid dining terrace, hefted their grips, and disappeared silently into the cherry orchards. One of them carried the hand-held communicator that Marks had brought from Nicosia. The other communicator stayed with McCready. The two SIS men found a smaller and less pretentious taverna in the village and checked in.
Rowse had arrived during the lunch hour, after a pleasant and leisurely drive from the airport hotel. He assumed he was being tailed by his SAS minders—and he certainly hoped he was.
The previous evening at Malta, he had deliberately dawdled through the passport and customs formalities. All the other passengers but one had cleared the formalities before him. Only the sallow young man from the Libyan Mukhabarat had hung back. That was when he knew “Mr. Aziz”—Hakim al-Mansour—had given him a tail. He did not look around for the SAS sergeants in the Malta concourse, hoping they would not try to approach him.
The Tripoli tail had not joined the flight to Nicosia, so he assumed another would be waiting for him there. And he was. Rowse had behaved perfectly naturally and had slept well. He had seen the Libyan leave him on the road out of the Nicosia airport complex, and he hoped there was an SAS man somewhere behind him. He took his time, but he never looked around or tried to make contact. There might be another Libyan posted in the hills.
There was a room available at the Apollonia, so he took it. Perhaps al-Mansour had arranged for it to be available—perhaps not. It was a pleasant room with stunning views over the valley to a hillside covered with cherry trees, which were now just beyond their bloom.
He lunched lightly but well off a local lamb casserole, washed down by a light Omhodos red wine, followed by fresh fruit. The hotel was an old taverna, well refurbished and modernized with added features such as a dining terrace built on piles out over the valley; the tables were set well apart under striped awnings. Whoever else was staying there, few had turned up for lunch. There was an elderly man with jet-black hair at a corner table on his own, who addressed the waiter in mumbled English, and several couples who were clearly Cypriots and might have simply come for lunch. When he entered the terrace, a very pretty younger woman had been leaving. Rowse had turned to look at her; she was quite a head-turner, and with her mane of corn-gold hair, she was almost certainly not Cypriot. All three admiring waiters had bowed her out of the restaurant before one of them showed him to his table.
After lunch he went to his room and took a nap. If al-Mansour’s laborious hint meant that he was now “in play,” there was nothing further he could do but watch and wait. He had done what he had been advised to do. The next move, if any, was in the Libyan’s court. He only hoped, if the going got rough, that he still had some backup out there somewhere.
The backup was indeed in place, by the time Rowse awoke from his nap. The two sergeants had found a small stone hut among the cherry trees on the mountainside opposite the hotel terrace. They had carefully removed one of the stones of the wall facing across the valley, which gave them a nice aperture from which to observe the hotel at a range of seven hundred yards. Their high-powered field glasses brought the dining terrace to a range that appeared to be twenty feet.
Dusk was deepening when they called up McCready and gave him directions to approach their hideout from the other side of the mountain. Bertie Marks drove according to the instructions, out of Pedhoulas and down two tracks, until they saw Danny standing in their way.
Abandoning the car, McCready followed Danny around the curve of the mountain. They disappeared into the cherry orchard and made the hut without being perceived from across the valley. There, Bill handed McCready his image-intensifying night glasses.
On the dining terrace the lights were coming on, a ring of colored bulbs strung around the perimeter of the dining area, with candles in sconces on each table.
“We’ll need Cypriot peasant clothes tomorrow, boss,” murmured Danny. “Can’t move around this hillside dressed as we are for long.”
McCready made a mental note to have Marks go to a village some miles away in the morning and buy the sort of canvas smocks and trousers they had seen farm workers by the wayside wearing. With luck, the hut would remain undisturbed; in May it was too late for the spraying of the blossom and too early for the harvest. The hut was clearly abandoned, its roof half-collapsed. Dust was everywhere; a few broken-hafted hoes and mattocks stood against one wall. For the SAS sergeants, who had lain for weeks among soaking scrapes on the hillsides of Ulster, it was like a four-star hotel.
“Hallo,” muttered Bill, who had taken back the night glasses. “Tasty.” He passed the glasses to McCready.
A young woman had entered the terrace from the recesses of the hotel. A beaming waiter was showing her to a table. She wore a simple but elegant white dress over a golden suntan. Blonde hair hung about her shoulders. She sat down and apparently ordered a drink.
“Keep your minds on your work,” grumbled McCready. “Where’s Rowse?”
The sergeants grinned. “Oh yeah, him. One line of windows above the terrace. Third window to the right.”
McCready swiveled his glasses. None of the windows had their curtains drawn. Several had lights on. McCready saw a figure, naked but for a towel around his waist, emerge from the shower room and cross the floor of the bedroom. It was Rowse. So far, so good.
But none of the bad guys had shown up. Two other guests took their places on the terrace: a plump Levantine businessman with flashing rings on both hands, and an elderly man who sat alone at one corner of the terrace and studied the menu. He sighed. His life had involved a hell of a lot of waiting, and he still hated it. He handed back the glasses and checked his watch. Seven-fifteen. He would give it two hours before he took Marks back to the village for supper. The sergeants would keep the vigil through the night. It was what they were best at—apart from violent physical action.
Rowse dressed and checked his watch: seven-twenty. He locked his room and went down to the terrace for a drink before dinner. Beyond the terrace the sun had dropped below the mountains, bathing the far side of the valley in thick gloom while the silhouette of the hills was brilliantly back-lit. On the western coast, Paphos would still be enjoying a warm late-spring evening with another hour of sunshine to go.
There were three people on the dining terrace: a fat man of Mediterranean look, an old fellow with unlikely black hair, and the woman. She had her back to him, staring at the view across the valley. A waiter approached. Rowse nodded to the table next to the woman’s, up against the terrace balustrade. The waiter grinned and hastened to show him to it. Rowse ordered ouzo and a carafe of local spring water.
As he took his seat, she glanced sideways. He nodded and murmured, “Evening.” She nodded back and continued to gaze at the view of the darkening valley. His ouzo arrived. He too looked at the valley.
After a while he said, “May I propose a toast?”
She was startled. “A toast?”
He gestured with his glass to the shadow-shrouded sentinels of the mountains all around them and the wash of blazing orange sunset behind them.
“To tranquility. And spectacular beauty.”
She gave a half-smile. “To tranquility,” she said, and drank a sip of her dry white wine. The waiter brought two menus. At separate tables they studied their cards. She ordered mountain trout.
“I can’t better that. The same for me, please,” Rowse told the waiter, who left.
“Are you dining alone?” asked Rowse quietly.
“Yes, I am,” she said carefully.
“So am I,” he said. “And it worries me, for I’m a God-fearing man.”
She frowned in puzzlement. “What’s God got to do with it?”
He realized her accent was not British. There was a husky twang; American? He gestured beyond the terrace. “The view, the peace, the hills, the dying sun, the evening. He created all of this, but surely not for dining alone.”
She laughed, a flash of clear white teeth in a sun-golden face. Try to make them laugh, his dad had told him. They like to be made to laugh.
“May I join you? Just for dinner?”
“Why not? Just for dinner.”
He took his glass and crossed to sit opposite her. “Tom Rowse,” he said.
“Monica Browne,” she replied.
They talked, the usual small talk. He explained that he was the writer of a moderately successful novel and had been doing some research in the area for his next book, which would involve Levantine and Middle East politics. He had decided to end his tour of the eastern Mediterranean with a brief break at this hotel, recommended by a friend for its good food and restfulness.
“And you?” he asked.
“Nothing so exciting. I breed horses. I’ve been in the area buying three thoroughbred stallions. It takes time for the shipment papers to come through. So”—she shrugged— “time to kill. I thought it would be nicer here than stewing on the dock side.”
“Stallions? In Cyprus?” he asked.
“No, Syria. The yearling sales at Hama. Pure Arabs, the finest. Did you know that every race horse in Britain is ultimately descended from three Arabian horses?”
“Just three? No, I didn’t.”
She was enthused by her horses. He learned that she was married to the much older Major Eric Browne and that together they owned and ran a breeding stud at Ashford. Originally she was from Kentucky, which was where she had gained her knowledge of bloodstock and horse-racing. He knew Ashford vaguely—it was a small town in Kent, on the road from London to Dover.
The trout arrived, deliciously grilled over a charcoal brazier. It was served with a local dry white wine from up the Marathassa Valley.
Inside the hotel, beyond the patio doors open to the terrace, a group of three men had moved into the bar.
“How long will you have to wait?” asked Rowse. “For the stallions?”
“Any day now, I hope. I worry about them. Maybe I should have stayed with them in Syria. They’re terribly mettlesome. Get nervous in transit. But my shipping agent here is very good. He’ll call me when they arrive, and I’ll ship them out personally.”
The men in the bar finished their whiskey and were shown out onto the terrace to a table. Rowse caught a hint of their accents. He raised a steady hand to his mouth with a forkful of trout.
“Ask yer man to bring another round of the same,” said one of the men.
Across the valley, Danny said quietly, “Boss.”
McCready jackknifed to his feet and came to the small aperture in the stone wall. Danny handed him the glasses and stood back. McCready adjusted focus and let out a long sigh.
“Bingo,” he said. He handed the glasses back. “Keep it up. I’m going back with Marks to watch the front of the hotel. Bill, come with me.”
By then, it was so dark on the mountainside that they could walk around to where the car was still waiting without fear of being seen from across the valley.
On the terrace, Rowse kept his attention fixed entirely on Monica Browne. One glance had told him all he needed to know. Two of the Irishmen he had never seen before. The third—clearly leader of the group—was Kevin Mahoney.
Rowse and Monica Browne declined desserts and took coffee. Small sticky sweetmeats came with it. Monica shook her head.
“No good for the figure—no good at all,” she said.
“And yours should in no way be harmed, for it is quite stunning,” said Rowse. She laughed away the compliment, but not with displeasure. She leaned forward. By the candlelight Rowse caught a brief but dizzying glance of the channel between her full breasts.
“Do you know those men?” she asked earnestly.
“No, never seen ’em before,” said Rowse.
“One of them seems to be staring at you a lot.”
Rowse did not want to turn and look at them, but after that remark it would have been suspicious not to. The dark handsome features of Kevin Mahoney were fixed on him. As he turned, Mahoney did not bother to glance away. Their eyes met. Rowse knew the glance: puzzlement. Unease. As of someone who thinks he has seen a person somewhere before but cannot place him.
Rowse turned back. “Nope. Total strangers.”
“Then they are very rude strangers.”
“Can you recognize their accent?” asked Rowse.
“Irish,” she said. “Northern Irish.”
“Where did you learn to detect Irish accents?” he asked.
“Horse racing, of course. The sport is full of them. And now, it’s been lovely, Tom, but if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to turn in.”
She rose. Rowse followed, his fleeting suspicion allayed.
“I agree,” he said. “It was a wonderful dinner. I hope we can eat together again.”
He looked for a hint that she might want him to accompany her, but there was none. She was in her early thirties, her own woman, and not stupid. If she wanted that, she would indicate it in some small way. If not, it would be foolish to spoil things. She gave him a radiant smile and swept off the terrace. Rowse took another coffee and turned away from the Irish trio to look out across the dark mountains. Soon he heard them retire back to the bar and their whiskey.
“I told you it was a charming place,” said a deep, cultured voice behind him.
Hakim al-Mansour, as beautifully tailored as ever, slipped into the vacant chair and gestured for coffee.
Across the valley, Danny laid down his glasses and muttered urgently into his communicator. In the Ford Orion, parked up the road from the Apollonia’s main entrance, McCready listened. He had not seen the Libyan enter the hotel, but he might have been there for hours.
“Keep me posted,” he told Danny.
“You did indeed, Mr. Aziz,” said Rowse calmly. “And it is. But if you wanted to talk to me, why did you expel me from Libya?”
“Oh, please—not expel,” drawled al-Mansour. “Just decline to admit. And well, the reason was that I wished to talk to you in complete privacy. Even in my homeland there are formalities, records to be kept, the curiosity of superiors to satisfy. Here—nothing but peace and quiet.”
“And the facility,” thought Rowse, “to carry out a quiet liquidation and leave the Cypriot authorities with a British body to explain.”
“So,” he said aloud, “I must thank you for your courtesy in agreeing to help me with my research.”
Hakim al-Mansour laughed softly. “I think the time for that particular foolishness is over, Mr. Rowse. You see, before certain—animals—put him out of his misery, your late friend Herr Kleist was quite communicative.”
Rowse spun around on him, bitterly angry. “The papers said he was killed by the drug people, in revenge for what he did to them.”
“Alas, no. The people who did to him what was done do indeed deal in drugs. But their principal enthusiasm is for planting bombs in public places, principally in Britain.”
“But why? Why should those bloody Paddies have been interested in Ulrich?”
“They weren’t, my dear Rowse. They were interested in finding out what you were really up to in Hamburg, and they thought your friend might know. Or suspect. And he did. He seemed to believe your tarradiddle about “fictional” American terrorists masked a quite different purpose. That information, coupled with further messages received from Vienna, brought me to the view that you might be an interesting man to talk to. I hope you are, Mr. Rowse; for your sake, I sincerely hope you are. And the time has come to talk. But not here.”
Two men had appeared behind Rowse. They were big and olive-skinned.
“I think we should go for a little ride,” said al-Mansour.
“Is this the sort of ride from which one returns?” asked Rowse.
Hakim al-Mansour rose. “That depends very much on whether you are able to answer a few simple questions to my satisfaction,” he said.
McCready was waiting for the car when it emerged from the portico of the Apollonia onto the road, having been tipped off by Danny across the valley. He saw the Libyans’ car—with Rowse in the back seat between the two heavies—turn away from the hotel.
“Do we follow, boss?” asked Bill from the rear seat of the Orion.
“No,” said McCready. To try and follow without lights would have been suicide on those hairpin curves. To put on headlights would give the game away. Al-Mansour had chosen his terrain well. “If he comes back, he’ll tell us what went on. If not ... well, at least he’s in play at last. The bait is being examined. We’ll know by morning whether it has been taken or rejected. By the way, Bill, can you enter that hotel unseen?”
Bill looked as if he had been grievously insulted.
“Slip that under Rowse’s door,” said McCready, and he passed the sergeant a tourist brochure.
The drive took an hour. Rowse forced himself not to look around. But twice, after the Libyan driver had negotiated hairpin bends, Rowse could look back the way they had come. There was no moving wash of another car’s headlights behind them. Twice the driver pulled to the side of the road, doused his lights, and waited for five minutes. No one came past them. Just before midnight, they arrived at a substantial villa and drove through wrought-iron gates. Rowse was decanted and pushed through the door, which was opened by another heavyweight Libyan. With al-Mansour himself, that made five. Too heavy odds.
And there was another man waiting for them in the large drawing room into which he was pushed, a heavy-set, jowly, big-bellied man in his late forties with a brutal, coarsened face and big red hands. He was clearly not a Libyan. In fact, Rowse easily recognized him though he gave no sign. The face had been in McCready’s rogue’s gallery, shown to him as a face he might one day see if he agreed to plunge into the world of terrorism and the Middle East.
Frank Terpil was a CIA renegade, fired by the Agency in 1971. Soon after, he had gravitated to his true and very lucrative vocation in life—supplying torture equipment, terrorist tricks, and expertise to Uganda’s Idi Amin. Before the Ugandan monster was toppled and his hideous State Research Bureau broken up, he had introduced the American to Muammar Qaddafi. Since then Terpil, sometimes in association with another renegade, Edwin Wilson, had specialized in providing a vast range of terrorist equipment and technology to the most extreme groups around the Middle East, always remaining the servitor of the Libyan dictator.
Even by then, Terpil had been well out of the Western intelligence community for fifteen years, but he was still regarded in Libya as the “American” expert. It suited him well to hide the fact that by the late 1980s, he was completely out of touch.
Rowse was told to take a chair in the middle of the room. The furniture was almost entirely shrouded in dust sheets. Clearly, the villa was a holiday home for a wealthy family who had shut it up for the winter. The Libyans had simply taken it over for the night, which was why Rowse had not been blindfolded.
Al-Mansour removed a dust sheet and fastidiously seated himself in a brocade high-back chair. A single bulb hung over Rowse. Terpil took a nod from al-Mansour and lumbered over.
“Okay, boy, let’s talk. You’ve been going around Europe looking for arms. Very special weapons. What the hell are you really up to?”
“Researching a new novel. I’ve tried to explain that a dozen times. It’s a novel. That’s my job, that’s what I do. I write thriller novels. About soldiers, spies, terrorists—fictional terrorists.”
Terpil hit him once on the side of the face—not hard, but enough to indicate there was more where that came from and plenty of it.
“Cut the shit,” he said without animosity. “I’m going to get the truth anyway, one way or the other. Might as well keep it painless—all the same to me. Who are you really working for?”
Rowse let the story come out slowly, as he had been briefed, sometimes recalling things exactly, sometimes having to search his memory.
“Which magazine?”
“Soldier of Fortune.”
“Which edition?”
“April ... May, last year. No, May, not April.”
“What did the ad say?”
“ ‘Weapons expert needed, European area, for interesting assignment’ ... something like that. A box number.”
“Bullshit. I take that magazine every month. There was no such ad.”
“There was. You can check.”
“Oh, we will,” murmured al-Mansour from the corner of the room. He was making notes with a slim gold pen on a Gucci pad.
Rowse knew Terpil was bluffing. There had been such an ad in the columns of Soldier of Fortune. McCready had found it, and a few calls to his friends in the CIA and the FBI had ensured—or so Rowse fervently hoped—that the placer of the ad would not be available to deny he had ever received a reply from Mr. Thomas Rowse of England.
“So you wrote back.”
“Yep. Plain paper. Accommodation address. Giving my background, areas of expertise. Instructions for a reply, if any.”
“Which were?”
“Small ad in the London Daily Telegraph.” He recited the wording. He had memorized it.
“The ad appeared? They made contact?”
“Yep.”
“What date?”
Rowse gave it. Previous October. McCready had found that ad as well. It had been chosen at random, a perfectly genuine small advertisement from an innocent British citizen, but with wording that would suit. The Telegraph staff had agreed to alter the records to show it had been placed by someone in America and paid for in cash.
The interrogation went on. The phone call he had taken from America after placing a further ad in The New York Times. (That too had been found after hours of searching—a real ad listing a British phone number. Rowse’s own unlisted number had been changed to tally with it.)
“Why the roundabout way of getting in touch?”
“I figured I needed discretion in case the placer of the original ad was crazy. Also that my secretiveness might impress whoever it was.”
“And did it?”
“Apparently. The speaker said he liked it. Set up a meet.”
When? Last November. Where? The Georges Cinq in Paris. What was he like?
“Youngish, well dressed, well spoken. Not registered at the hotel. I checked. Called himself Galvin Pollard. Certainly phony. A yuppie type.”
“A what?”
“Young, upwardly mobile professional,” drawled al-Mansour. “You’re out of touch.”
Terpil went red. Of course. He had seen the term but forgotten it.
What did he say? He said he represented a group of ultra-radical people, Rowse replied, who were sick and tired of the Reagan Administration, of its hostility to the Soviet and Third Worlds, and particularly of the use of American planes and taxpayer money to bomb women and children in Tripoli the previous April.
“And he produced a list of what he wanted?”
“Yes.”
“This list?”
Rowse glanced at it. It was a copy of the list he had shown Kariagin in Vienna. The Russian must have a superb memory.
“Yes.”
“Claymore mines, for God’s sake. Semtex-H. Booby-trapped briefcases. This is high-tech stuff. What the hell did they want all that for?”
“He said his people wanted to strike a blow. A real blow. He mentioned the White House, and the Senate. He seemed particularly keen on the Senate.”
He allowed the money side of it to be dragged out of him. The account at the Kreditanstalt in Aachen with half a million dollars in it. (Thanks to McCready, there really was such an account, backdated to the appropriate period. And bank secrecy is not really all that good. The Libyans could confirm it if they wanted to.)
“So what did you get involved for?”
“There was a twenty percent commission. A hundred thousand dollars.”
“Peanuts.”
“Not to me.”
“You write thriller novels, remember.”
“Which don’t sell all that well. Despite the publisher’s blurb. I wanted to make a few bob.”
“Bob?”
“Shillings,” murmured al-Mansour. “British equivalent for “greenbacks” or “dough.”
At four in the morning, Terpil and al-Mansour went into a huddle. They talked quietly in an adjacent room.
“Could there really be a radical group in the States prepared to carry out a major outrage at the White House and the Senate?” asked al-Mansour.
“Sure,” said the burly American who hated his homeland. “In a country that size, you get all kinds of weirdos. Jesus, one Claymore mine in a briefcase on the lawn of the White House. Can you imagine it?”
Al-Mansour could. The Claymore is one of the most devastating antipersonnel weapons ever invented. Shaped like a disk, it leaps into the air when detonated, then sends thousands of ball-bearings outward from the perimeter of the disk at waist-height. A moving sheet of these missiles will slice through hundreds of human beings. Loosed in an average railway concourse, a Claymore will leave few of the thousands of commuters in the area alive. For this reason, the sale of the Claymore is fiercely vetted by America. But there are always replicas. ...
At half-past four, the two men returned to the sitting room. Although Rowse did not know it, the gods were smiling on him that night. Al-Mansour needed to bring something to his Leader without further delay to satisfy the insistent pressure for revenge against America; Terpil needed to prove to his hosts that he was still the man they needed to advise them about America and the West. Finally, both men believed Rowse for the reason that most men believe: because they wanted to.
“You may go, Mr. Rowse,” said al-Mansour mildly. “We will check, of course, and I will be in touch. Stay at the Apollonia until I or someone sent by me gets in touch.”
The two heavies who had brought him drove him back and dropped him at the hotel doorway before driving off. When he entered his room, he switched on the light, for the dawn was not yet bright enough to fill his west-facing room. Across the valley, Bill, who was on the shift, activated his communicator and awoke McCready in his hotel room in Pedhoulas.
Rowse stooped to pick something from the carpet inside his room. It was a brochure inviting visitors to visit the historic Kykko Monastery and admire the Golden Icon of the Virgin. A single script in pencil beside the paragraph said “Ten A.M.”
Rowse set his alarm for three hours’ sleep. “Screw McCready,” he said as he drifted off.