Reprisal Page 5

  “And if he is?”

  “To stop him by any means necessary.”

  This amused Dartley. He was not naive enough to believe that he was being asked to do something which French intelligence operatives could not achieve themselves. If Hasan was making a bomb, French intelligence already knew of it. And if they wanted to stop Hasan, they could do so more easily than a lone American in a hostile country could.

  Dartley had no doubt that Jacques Laforque was a member of one of the branches of French intelligence. His background was perfect, along with the fact that gendarmes were not ordinary cops in the American sense of the word. The Gendarmerie Nationale was a highly militarized force, run along army lines and with military spirit and discipline. They were enough to make FBI agents seem like hippies.

  Dartley also wondered if Laforque had seen through his guise of claiming to be Paul Savage. Or did Laforque not really care whether he had Dartley or Savage, so long as he had an American agent doing France’s dirty work in Egypt? Why? Dartley knew it would be a waste of time for him to ask questions. Laforque would already have answers prepared for them—answers which would only let him know what Laforque wanted him to know. In all likelihood, Laforque had been told very little himself. In every country’s intelligence services, information was rationed carefully, on a “need to know” basis.

  “Go in,” Dartley mused. “Find out if he’s making a bomb. If he is, stop him. By any means necessary. Keep France’s name out of it. Any complications?”

  “Israel.”

  “I see. So neither France nor Israel can find out if Egypt is making a bomb. Yet you believe that I can. Amazing.”

  “French intelligence has reached its own conclusions,” Laforque said loftily. “We will use your findings as confirmation of ours. As for the Israelis, France has no wish to collaborate with them against our Arab friends.”

  Dartley grinned. “In case those Arab friends of yours find out? That’s right, I mustn’t forget: You need oil. Sure, I’ll go. You know my fee? A million. In U.S. dollars.”

  Laforque did not bat an eye. “Where can we deposit it?”

  Dartley wrote for him an account number and the name of a bank in Panama.

  Charles Stuart Woodgate was Richard Dartley’s uncle and lived on a fifty-acre farm near Frederick, north of Washington, D.C. Charley had taken a bad leg wound at Monte Cassino in the slow climb up the Italian peninsula against the Germans. Since then his career had been a mystery to some and a marvel to others. A few knew he was a gunsmith and had a large collection of rare and unusual weapons. Very few were aware that he made special guns to order, with no questions asked, for those who knew exactly what they wanted and could afford the heavy expense involved. Certain of his guns could be taken apart and fitted into aluminum crutches or specially designed bicycles. Silencers were another of his specialties. Ammunition, too. With new advances in surgical techniques, increasing numbers of people were surviving assassination attempts. Bullets that exploded on impact or those with poisoned tips were beyond the reach of the most advanced physicians. Charley supplied them all.

  Charley had more or less taken his nephew in after the youth’s father had been murdered. Now Dartley still didn’t have a place of his own. As a base, he used a studio apartment over what had once been a horse barn on his uncle’s farm. It was when he stayed there between missions that he put in long hours of target shooting and practicing combat with various weapons. Charley very often had something new to show him, and Dartley was more than happy to break in new weapons by firing the thousands of rounds from them necessary before they could be judged fully accurate and trustworthy.

  This was how Richard Dartley was these days—cold, efficient, merciless, one of the very top hitmen in the world. But Richard Dartley hadn’t been born that way. In fact, he hadn’t even been born Richard Dartley.

  Charley Woodgate often looked at him now and wondered. He wondered if it mightn’t have been better if he had never helped the youth. But he knew for sure that the damage had already been done by the time he arrived on the scene. Without Charley’s help, there would not have been a Richard Dartley. There would just have been someone else with another name, but equally deadly, equally driven. So Charley told himself.

  Dartley was born Richard John Woodgate, son of Richard Woodgate and Martha Dartley Woodgate, in 1945 in Washington, D.C. Even that was not true. His mother told him when he was twelve that he had been adopted. Just that, nothing more. If he had known earlier, he could have grown up with the knowledge. Since she had waited that long to tell him, Richard only wished she had held off even longer.

  It wasn’t until much later—when he was twenty-two—that he found out who he really was. If that was who he really was anymore. Through illegal access to court records on adoption, he discovered that he was the son of teenage parents, both the offspring of prominent Washington attorneys. His birth name had been Paul Savage.

  He was raised by his adoptive parents in a big old house with a veranda in Chevy Chase, Maryland, went to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, went to Episcopal church and didn’t particularly excel at anything. Richard knew that his adoptive father worked for the government—“something in the State Department,” he wasn’t sure what. When an ex-CIA agent, disillusioned with America, named names, the family was astonished to find the head of the household high on the list.

  Woodgate was in Buenos Aires at the time and may never have known he had been exposed. As he got into a car on September 11, 1976, outside the American embassy, he was hit in the forehead by a Kalashnikov AK-47 bullet. The family had thought he was in Florida. The New York Times referred to him as “an American security advisor,” and the vice president of the United States, in an oration at his funeral, called him a “courageous warrior.”

  The man who was to become Richard Dartley realized, in a sudden rush, that he knew nothing about anything—he had not known his adoptive father as a real person, he decided.

  When all this took place, his head was already messed up by what he had done in Vietnam; and what it had done to him. He did his share of butchering there, but also lost some good buddies to the Cong. The thing that really broke him was falling for an almond-eyed beauty, really going for her in a big way. It was only when she tried to kill him that he realized she was Cong. He had asked her to marry him! He killed her by crushing her skull with the heel of his boot.

  His father’s murder was the thing that made him get his act together. In the months after his father’s death, he moved to one room above a store on K Street in Georgetown, ran for hours every day along the C&O Canal, quit smoking and drinking, went on a special diet… He became fit again, sinew and muscle, tough in mind as well as body. And he was ready then to face a couple of facts—he was thirty years old and he didn’t have a job.

  Charley Woodgate gave him advice. Go in his father’s footsteps. Join the CIA. But the CIA didn’t want anyone with his confidential Army record, which besides the death of the Viet girl, included a fragging and other stuff he tried never to think about anymore. The CIA wanted to train nice kids to be killers; they had no program to train crazies to be nice CIA men. So that was out.

  It turned out that so too were other government jobs. He was only an ant on an ant heap, but word traveled. He leveled with his Uncle Charley. By this time he knew that Charley was cast in the same mold as his adoptive father, who was, of course, Charley’s brother. The man who was to become Richard Dartley did not share their genes, but he felt he sure shared their way of looking at things.

  Charley scratched his head when Richard asked him to find a job as an assassin. Charley said, “You better change your name. Make a fresh start. Born again, you might say.”

  Richard John Woodgate became Richard Dartley, after his mother’s maiden name. It wasn’t untraceable, it wasn’t clever—but it was as far as he had been willing to go at that time. His sense of identity was shaky enough already. Totally dumping everything and assuming a one hundred percent, stran
ge new identity made him panic deep down inside. He needed something to cling to.

  His next trouble was that a paid assassin is not born overnight. No one wants to hire someone unless they hear he has done a clean job for someone else they know. It was a word-of-mouth business. A man might want someone dead and be willing to pay well for it, but his greatest fear had to be that the assassin he hired would turn out to be an amateur or a psycho, and in either case bungle the job and perhaps reveal the money man’s identity. This was the kind of position where they took “experienced only.”

  Dartley would have gotten nowhere had it not been through Charley Woodgate. A man who made weapons to order occasionally was asked if he knew a skilled, professional shooter. Even so, it took a year before Dartley drew a pro job.

  By 1980 Richard Dartley was known to the select few as one of the two or three best hitmen in the world. Once he had accepted an assignment, he had always gotten his man. Besides this, he had managed to keep his identity unknown. In 1981 he first asked for a fee of a million dollars. Now he rarely worked for less.

  He had been careful all the way—and moral too, in his own peculiar way. He had never assassinated anyone who hadn’t deserved it. That was his most important rule. Dartley could honestly say that, to the present time, he had never deliberately harmed an innocent person in his life.

  For Dartley to take him out, the target had to be real scum. Dishonest was not enough. The man had to be certified garbage in the worst way before Dartley would agree to touch him.

  Although Dartley admitted he had become hardened and maybe cold-bloodedly vicious and calculating because of the work he did, he never lost sight of that one thing—each of the cockroaches he took out had to have lost the right to go on living.

  Dartley sat at a table in the farmhouse with Charley Woodgate and Herbert Malleson. Malleson was doing the talking. He had neat columns of lists before him and was adding to them. Occasionally he pulled a photocopy from a large manila envelope and tossed it to the others to illustrate or back up what he said. His arch mannerisms and Oxford accent had earned him in America the nickname “the Viscount.”

  “Interior Minister Ahmed Rushdi, Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid and Speaker of the Parliament Rafaat el-Mahgoub and their families are in the American Embassy in Cairo with ex-President Hosni Mubarak and his family. There’s almost a hundred more lesser lights of the previous administration taking shelter there also. All have been condemned to death by the Light of Islam mullahs for their so-called pro-Western, pro-degeneracy stance. I’ve had it on the highest authority that President Reagan has warned President Hasan in person, over the phone, that if the American Embassy in Cairo is stormed, the USAF will saturation-bomb every military installation in Egypt, land, sea, and air. Since then Hasan has been cooling it so far as Washington is concerned, and in return the State Department presently seems to be going to all sorts of diplomatic extremes to avoid confrontation with him.”

  Charley Woodgate shook his head in disagreement. “That’s not how certain acquaintances of mine feel about things, and I assure you they have a lot of say in this administration.”

  Malleson smiled. “Charley, you talk with the wrong sort of people—always a fault of yours. These dreadful Pentagon types and spooks from Langley. I wish you’d go to some fashionable cocktail parties on the embassy circuit instead of talking to such troglodytes.”

  Charley shot back, “The trouble with people at the embassy cocktail parties and State Department receptions is that they can’t imagine people who are not like themselves. People like Ahmed Hasan, for instance. I bet Hasan has never been to a cocktail party in his life. I suppose that’s why he’s such a mystery to them.”

  Dartley could see that the two older men were getting into one of their interminable arguments again. Charley and the Viscount could pass three hours pleasantly disagreeing with one another on just about any subject. The only rule of the game seemed to be that neither must give an inch in concession, no matter how good a point his opponent made.

  The Viscount was a graduate of Oxford and Harvard Law School. He served as Dartley’s data bank. Malleson’s computers had information on every country and its most important citizens. It was the unique quality of this information which made it useful to a hitman. It could be used to blackmail as well as for other purposes.

  “Herbert,” Dartley said to him, politely cutting short the two men’s argument, “how do I get into Egypt?”

  “I can give you a choice,” the Viscount replied. “As an archeologist or an expert on short-stemmed, disease-resistant wheat.”

  “I’ll take the wheat.”

  “Good choice,” Malleson confirmed. “Those pharaohs’ names are the deuce to memorize in correct order. I hear that’s why the CIA rarely uses archeology as a cover these days. They find it easier to finance the dig and have real archeologists do stuff part time for them. Right. You fly to Athens, change planes there, then to Cairo. You’re one of these Green Revolution types they love to see. Every time they welcome your sort, they see big World Bank loans just over the horizon. Those papers explain everything for you. You work for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center—you call it CIMMYT after its title in Spanish. That’s based in Mexico, but you’re coming from the Botany Division of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and you’re arranging to ship in several thousand tons of some of the wheat varieties which have done so well in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. They’re all based on semi-dwarf varieties developed in Mexico. You’ll have no trouble getting in, even as an American. Just remember to say you’ve never worked at any time for the U.S. Agency for International Development.”

  Dartley couldn’t tell wheat from barley or barley from oats, but he wasn’t worried. He knew that Malleson would have explained clearly and concisely what he needed to know in the batch of papers. The Viscount was meticulous about details and could generate thousands of words on anything in a very short time. From previous experience, Dartley knew that everything Malleson gave him was worth studying closely. It could even be interesting, since the Viscount was an award-winning historian who had written several bestsellers on such unrelated subjects as the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the Gloria Vanderbilt custody case, Josef Stalin, Huey Long and Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s British aristocracy.

  Why was such a talented, wealthy man working for a paid assassin? For the same reason that Richard Dartley was a paid assassin. To escape from boredom. Except that in Herbert Malleson’s case, being an armchair assassin was sufficient. The intellectual excitement was enough to satisfy him. Dartley enjoyed this, but he had to have the physical thrills too.

  After Dartley had gone through his other requirements with Malleson and his uncle, he left them to continue their arguments, fueled by a quart of Jack Daniels. Dartley knew that Charley had a weapon delivery to make later on that evening, and he offered to do it so that Charley could enjoy some drinks with his old friend. Charley could not risk being pulled over by the D.C. cops for impaired driving and having them find a sophisticated weapon in the car. No one could claim they needed the kind of gun that Charley Woodgate put together so they could shoot possum.

  “I got a date with Sylvia tonight,” Dartley said. “Why don’t I deliver your package and you go attack that bottle of sour mash with the Viscount?”

  Charley beamed at the prospect.

  The weapon to be delivered was a bolt action sniping rifle. The Remington 700 action chambered for .308 was fitted with a fiberglass stock. Its Schmidt and Bender eight-power scope had a 56 mm objective. Under conditions of good moonlight, this scope could detect a man at five hundred yards. Charley had test-fired and adjusted the piece until it was as accurate as could be expected under night conditions. This yardage was important to a sniper, because he used the moments of confusion after the shot to escape and thus every added yard between him and his target increased his chances of leaving the scene undetected.

  Charley had picked a bolt
rifle over a semi or full automatic because the average bolt rifle can consistently shoot ten rounds in an eight- or nine-inch group as compared with a semiautomatic’s fourteen- or fifteen-inch group. A gunsmith can get an ordinary bolt rifle consistently shooting 1.5 inches at three hundred yards and well under a minute of angle all the way out to one thousand yards. In addition, the bolt action has fewer things to go wrong.

  He had chosen a .308 cartridge over a .223 because of its better bullet weight velocity combination, which made it very stable at long ranges, with good wind backing ability and lots of power on contact.

  The stock was made of temperature-stable fiberglass with glass bedding between the receiver and the stock. These materials did not alter with changes in temperature and pressure, thus providing that little extra in accuracy which can make all the difference to a sniper, who may be limited to a single shot.

  Dartley had first started to deliver his uncle’s handcrafted or altered weapons not as a convenience, but out of necessity. Not all of Charley’s customers were reliable people to do business with. Especially when it came to their having to pay in cash. Once it had been a case of the customer wanting secrecy so badly he decided to silence Charley too when he made the delivery. He never saw Dartley behind him and died before he knew what hit him.

  Tonight Dartley had no such concern. The customer was a military attaché with the Australian Embassy. The Aussies came to Charley for special guns when they didn’t want the Brits and Canadians to know what they were doing—an inebriated first secretary had once told Charley that at a Christmas party.

  The Australian attaché knew Dartley by sight, though not by name, from previous deals. The only thing Dartley disliked was the place set for the meet by his uncle—outside the White House gates. That was Charley’s idea of a joke.

  It was already dark when the attaché caught Dartley in his headlights for a moment and pulled into the curb.