Retribution Read online

  DOUBLE JEOPARDY!

  THE TERRORIST’S HAND drifted toward his gun pocket. Dartley surprised him with how quickly he closed the space between them. He pushed the terrorist’s pistol in his pants top and forced him along the hotel corridor at knife point.

  The Arab knocked at his room door, and said something in Arabic too fast for Dartley to understand. The door began to open slowly inward. Dartley seized the terrorist by the hair, drew the blade across his throat, and booted him against the door. Blood spraying from his severed arteries and veins, the terrorist fell forward on his comrade opening the door.

  This youth screamed in horror, splashed with his friend’s blood. He backed into the room, while Dartley checked that his Colt Commander .45 automatic was ready to fire.

  Also by Ian Barclay

  The Crime Minister

  The Crime Minister: Reprisal

  The Crime Minister: Rebound

  The Crime Minister: Reckoning

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1987 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56757-2

  Contents

  DOUBLE JEOPARDY!

  Also by Ian Barclay

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER

  1

  “It’s just like a picture postcard,” Cheryl said, looking out the car window at the tulips and windmills.

  Her husband, Barry, who was driving, nodded and the car wavered on the roadway as he gazed out over the rectangles of color made by different tulip varieties in the fields.

  “Flowers make me throw up,” said one of their twin twelve-year-old daughters in the backseat.

  “Let’s go to Amsterdam right now,” her sister said. “I want to see the punks.”

  “Grody tulips.”

  They had left Philadelphia four days previously, landed in Brussels and spent two days there before hiring a car. They hit Ghent, Brughes, Antwerp— cathedrals, moats with swans, diamond centers—before heading north into Holland. The twins had quit on the food, surviving now on French fries and chocolate.

  “Only ten more days to go,” one had said to the other.

  “Can we stop at the next town?” the second asked. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  Barry decided on a belt of Scotch from his bottle, next time they stopped. He had already killed one of the two duty-free bottles they brought in. If things kept going like they were, he’d soon have to turn to local stuff because Scotch cost an arm and a leg here. Cheryl’s voice droned on in a long account from a guidebook about how and why the Dutch built dikes and dammed inland seas. One of the girls said she really needed to go to the bathroom.

  “Hey, look at that big windmill over there, with its sails turning,” Barry said.

  “Windmills suck,” one of his daughters said.

  Barry wasn’t listening. He had a new Minolta Professional Maxxum 9000, which he had already used on various color bands of flowers. The contrast between this weathered, battered windmill and the scarlet tulips in the fields at its base would really show what this camera could do. He pulled the car off ,the road onto a dirt track leading to the mill. His daughters groaned.

  “I need you for scale,” he said, making his wife and the twins stand with their backs to the windmill. No one was around to disturb him, so he had a chance to make fine adjustments for different shots to see how they would turn out.

  “Daddy, someone is coming,” one of his daughters said after a while.

  She was right. A black Mercedes was moving slowly over the dirt road toward them. The local farmer wouldn’t own such a car, Barry decided. These were probably tourists like themselves. You only had to stop at a beautiful spot for someone else to decide it was worth their while to pull in also. He went on taking pictures and heard the car stop behind him.

  “Barry, it’s the three men who were watching us in Antwerp,” his wife said urgently.

  He saw fear in her eyes and turned around to face the newcomers. All three had gotten out of the car, two from the front, one from the back, leaving three doors hanging open. The engine was still running. The men were in their mid-twenties, well-dressed and groomed, Mediterranean in appearance. He couldn’t say for sure these were the same three who had frightened his wife and daughters at the hotel in Antwerp. He hadn’t caught a close look at them then and hadn’t wanted to add to the hysteria by appearing alarmed. His wife had claimed they were being watched by them and that they were Arabs. This was possible, he conceded to her, but as Americans they had no need to fear them. The diamond centers in Antwerp were crowded with Orthodox Jews in beards, black hats, and black coats. Even if these men were Arabs and even if they meant trouble, they were not going to pass over targets like that to bother with Yanks named Halloran. Yet his wife and the twins claimed they were followed.

  “It’s them, Barry. I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m scared, Daddy.”

  Without being obvious about it, Barry snapped a shot of the three men and advanced the film. He photographed them again. “Nice day,” he said.

  One of the men nodded.

  “Let’s go, kids,” Barry said and turned toward his car.

  The man who had nodded to Barry nodded again, this time to the one who had been in the backseat of the Mercedes. This man reached inside the car and brought out a Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun. He cocked the weapon and waved it at Barry to make him join his wife and children against the wall of the windmill.

  As Barry went he talked in a calm, reasonable voice, slowly enough for people with a poor grasp of English to understand. “Let my family go. Keep me hostage or shoot me, but let them go. Killing women and children won’t help your cause. No one agrees with killing women and children.”

  “We picked you because of your woman and girl children,” said the man who had been doing the nodding. He spoke in accented but clearly understandable English. “If we let anyone go, it will be you.”

  “Are you crazy?” Barry shouted at him. “You think shooting that seventy-year-old man in a wheelchair on the Achille Lauro got you converts to the Arab cause?”

  “I understand your point,” the man said. He could not have been more than twenty-five and spoke politely, even kindly. “We do not enjoy killing a mother and her children. We must harden our hearts to do it.” He beckoned to the man with the gun. “Ali, this talk achieves nothing.”

  Ali caught the two adults at chest level in a single burst of fire. He had to lower the submachine gun barrel to cut the twins across the middle in a second burst.

  The man who had done the talking now said in Arabic, “Go over them once more, Ali.” While he watched Ali empty his thirty-round magazine of 9mm bullets into the bodies, he shouted over the gunshots to the third man, “He photographed us, Hasan. Open that camera and expose the film.”

  Blue-gray gunsmoke drifted in the clear Dutch air toward the tulip fields. Traffic moved on the road. There was no indication anyone had heard or seen anything. Naim Shabaan was pleased with the way neither Ali nor Hasan had hesitated to obey his orders. They were going to work well together as
a team. He snapped the thick stalk of a weed and used it to trace an Islamic star and crescent—symbols of peace and life— on the windmill wall, dipping the end of the stalk into blood oozing from the wounds in Barry Halloran’s back.

  Charley Woodgate sat at the long kitchen table of his farmhouse near Frederick, Maryland, and worked on the trigger mechanism of a rifle. For many years Charley had made a good living as a gunsmith. Also sitting at the table was his old friend Herbert Malleson, whom he often referred to as the Viscount for his rather grand British manner. Like Charley the Englishman was a free lance of sorts, earning his way in Washington by providing intelligence to those willing to pay for it. Sometimes they had the same customers, Charley providing them with customized weapons. Both men were in their sixties, healthy and fit, though Woodgate walked with a bad limp from a leg wound received at Monte Cassino, as the Allies drove the Germans northward through Italy.

  As Woodgate worked on the trigger mechanism, Malleson leafed through that day’s issues of the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times, as always looking for the real story behind the news.

  “‘In The Hague today, a spokesman for the Dutch government denounced the murder of the Halloran family as a brutal and senseless crime,’” Malleson read from one of the papers. “They don’t mention a word about Holland agreeing to sign the Ostend Concordance.”

  “The what?” Charley asked.

  “The Halloran murders were brutal but not senseless. The Dutch government doesn’t want the real story to get out. They were warned not to announce their intention of signing the Concordance.”

  “What Concordance?”

  “The Ostend Concordance is the American-sponsored international treaty committing its participants to close cooperation in fighting terrorists. The U.S., Canada, Israel, and Japan have already signed, but the agreement is meaningless without the inclusion of the European Common Market countries. If even one influential Common Market country refuses to sign, the Ostend Concordance is dead.”

  “I suppose I’m being a bit dense today,” Charley Woodgate said, looking up from his work, “but surely the killing of this American family in Holland would only strengthen the Dutch government’s determination to sign, instead of weakening it?”

  “The terrorists who don’t want this treaty put into effect know they’ve already lost Holland. It’s the first Common Market country to agree—but only the first. If they can make the Dutch suffer for it, other countries will think twice before announcing their intention to sign.”

  “Hit the tourist trade?” Charley suggested.

  “That’s what I think,” Malleson agreed, “and that’s why the Dutch government is not linking these killings to its announcenent to sign, saying that the murders are senseless and the work of a madman. They go to the trouble of stating that they can find no political motivation, which is bullshit. They don’t want Americans to cancel their trips. It was bad enough last year, when so many American tourists stayed away. If the vacationers’ dollars don’t come in again this summer, the Dutch treasury will feel the pinch.”

  “That would explain why they went after Americans instead of Dutch people,” Charley said. “Do you think it’s the Belgian Communist Fighting Cells or the German Red Army Faction or some Dutch group of terrorists who did it?”

  “The newspapers don’t report it, but the story is that the killers left a star and crescent scrawled in blood. That could make them Iranians or Arabs or anyone in sympathy with them.”

  “Or someone who wants the authorities to think he is.”

  “Maybe,” Malleson allowed. “Anyway I’m going to look into it. This looks like just the start of things. There may be something for Richard in this. Is he still up in Maine?”

  “Yes. I suppose I should nose around too.” Charley Woodgate was Richard Dartley’s uncle and he acted as contact for the professional assassin. Herbert Malleson often served as Dartley’s paid intelligence and logistics expert. They had no doubt that Dartley’s survival so far in his chosen career was a result of their joint efforts on his behalf—Woodgate’s careful screening of his assignments and Malleson’s support systems. Dartley himself never allowed them to think otherwise.

  They went on with their tasks in silence in the farmhouse kitchen, each buried in his own thoughts. When Malleson gathered up his newspapers and announced he was going home, Woodgate asked him, “You think they’ll strike in Holland again?”

  “Definitely, if only to show everyone that the Hallorans’ deaths were not an isolated, senseless act. They will want their message to come across loud and clear.”

  Charley grimaced. Malleson had an eerie talent for predicting future events.

  English was the only common language shared by the Dutch military intelligence agent and the Israeli colonel who met his flight at Tel Aviv. They both spoke it well. Gerrit van Gilder did not reveal his rank, which made Colonel Yitzhak Bikel wonder if the Dutchman ranked lower than him or very much outranked him. He suspected the latter. Van Gilder also would not want to make it look like Dutch intelligence had to send a very senior man on what was only a routine job for the Israelis, something that could safely be entrusted to a colonel.

  Driving in from the airport, Bikel briefed van Gilder. “The June 4–New Arab Social Front, which made the threats against your government, is a breakaway group from the PLO. They’re anti-Arafat and pro-Syrian. They probably skim money from most of the Arab oil-producing countries in a sort of protection racket and then buy arms on the free market.”

  Van Gilder said impatiently, “They didn’t send me down here on a background study, Colonel. We want action. I’d like to be back in Amsterdam tonight with something to show for my trip.”

  Bikel smiled. The Dutchman did not realize what a compliment he was paying the Israelis by having these expectations. Or maybe he did, and this was what was making him a little irritable. Holland had to come to Israel for help.

  The colonel said, “The Front’s operational headquarters are in a building at the southern edge of Ain Khilwe, a Palestinian district of Sidon.”

  Van Gilder knew that the port of Sidon was less than two hundred kilometers away, north along the coast of Lebanon. “I want to go.”

  That’s not possible. We could not risk a non-Jewish Dutch national falling into our enemies’ hands from a downed Israeli aircraft. Your queen would have to apologize to them. We would look bad.”

  “But I must see that the building is destroyed,” van Gilder insisted.

  “We will provide you with full-color aerial reconnaissance shots. Before and after.”

  “How will I know it was the Front’s headquarters?”

  “You will hear the complaints tomorrow at the United Nations in New York,” Colonel Bikel said patiently. “Of course they will claim the building was a hospital or an orphanage.”

  Three olive drab Huey Cobra helicopter gunships swept in from the sea in loose formation. They flew close to the tops of buildings at more than 150 miles per hour, and were gone before anyone could fire on them. The gunships traveled over the outskirts of Sidon, zeroing in on the Palestinian district of Ain Khilwe.

  While one chopper raked the streets with the three-barrel 30mm gun in its turret, the other choppers attacked a two-story building with rockets. The Cobra’s pair of stub wings carried four XM-159 pods, each containing nineteen 2.75-inch rockets. The gunships swooped down on the building, over and over again, from all angles, the rockets biting chunks out of the walls, filling the interior with orange flames and sending up a column of black smoke.

  At one corner of the building the second floor collapsed down into the first. Men ran from inside out onto the street, their clothes blazing on their backs, only to be cut down by the turret gun of the third Cobra.

  Then, suddenly as they had come, the three gunships disappeared. They moved rapidly across the city outskirts once again, this time by a different route, and flew far out to sea before turning south for Israel.

  At
Ain Khilwe, ambulances manned by armed militiamen raced to the scene of the disaster. Youths, many in their early teens, their assault rifles on their backs, searched in the rubble, in the smoke and dust, for fathers, brothers, and friends. Some shed tears of sorrow or rage. Most had fixed expressions on their faces.

  Few noticed a high-flying jet, well out of range of their weapons. In its belly the lens of an automatic camera continually clicked.

  The senior civil servant looked up irritably from the papers on his desk as a subordinate came into his office. The man was respectful and hesitant to disturb what he must have assumed were the complex and serious thoughts of his superior—which were actually occupied with what a gray rainy day it was in The Hague, just the kind of day to complete with a visit from his wife’s idiot sister and her penniless husband.

  “What do you want, van Heerden?” he snapped.

  “The airlines are giving us trouble, sir. They want some kind of security cordon set up around Schiphol airport.”

  “Schiphol is secure. There’s no better guarded airport in the world!”

  “We know that, sir. So do the airlines. But the tourists don’t. The airport security is mostly plainclothes. The suggestion is for some kind of visible cordon, in order to reassure everyone. Then the hotels out there jumped in too—they want to be inside the cordon. The Hilton Schiphol, Ibis, and Sheraton.”

  “What the hell do they want?” the senior man asked. “Tanks and uniformed troops?”

  “That’s a good idea, sir.”

  “No, it’s not. At all costs this must be played down. There is no threat and nothing to worry about. An isolated incident occurred and the police have strong leads on the perpetrators. Nothing more.”

  “We’ve already said that, sir, and no one believes us,” van Heerden said. “Our department spokesman told me that reporters jeered him at this morning’s press conference. He wants me to ask you for some hard facts to release and some comment on Arab terrorist threats made to the government.”