Checkpoint Charlie (5 page)

“Me and how many weightlifters?” He glanced at the clock above the official photograph of the President. “You've got eight hours. The briefings won't take that long. Anyhow you can sleep on the plane.”

“Maybe. I never have,” I said, “but then I've never been this exhausted. Have you got anything to eat around here?”

“No. This should perk you up, though — it's Gregorius.”

“Is it now.”

“I knew you'd wag your tail.”

“All right, you have my attention.” Then I had to fight the urge to look straight up over my head in alarm: Myerson's smile always provokes the premonition that a Mosler safe is falling toward one's head.

“You've gained it back. Gone off the diet?” Now that he had me hooked in his claws he was happy to postpone the final pounce: like a cat with a chipmunk. I really hate him.

I said, “Crawfish.”

“What?”

“It's what you eat in Finland. You take them fresh out of a lake, just scoop them up off the bottom in a wooden box with a chickenwire bottom. You throw them straight into the pot and watch them turn color. I can eat a hundred at a sitting. Now what's this about Caracas and Gregorius?”

“You're getting disgustingly fat, Charlie.”

“I've always been fat. As for disgusting, I could diet it off, given the inclination. You, on the other hand, would need to undergo brain surgery. I'd prescribe a prefrontal lobotomy.”

“Then you'd have no one left to spice your life.”

“Spice? I thought it was hemlock.”

“In this case more likely a few ounces of plastique. That seems to be Gregorius' preference. And you do make a splendid target, Charlie. I can picture two hundred and umpty pounds of blubber in flabby pieces along the ceiling. Gregorius would be most gratified.”

He'd mentioned Gregorius now; it meant he was ready to get down to it and I slumped, relieved; I no longer enjoy volleying insults with him — they cut too close and it's been a long while since either of us believed they were jokes. Our mutual hatred is not frivolous. But we need each other. I'm the only one he can trust to do these jobs without a screw-up and he's the only one who'll give me the jobs. The slick militaristic kids who run the organization don't offer their plums to fat old men. In any section but Myerson's I'd have been fired years ago — overage, overweight, overeager to stay in the game by the old rules rather than the new. I'm the last of the generation that puts ingenuity ahead of computer print-outs.

They meet once a month on the fifth floor to discuss key personnel reassignments and it's a rare month that goes by without an attempt being made by one of the computer kids to tie a can to my tail; I know for a fact Myerson has saved me by threatening to resign: “If he goes, I go.” The ultimatim has worked up to now but as we both get older and I get fatter the kids become more strident and I'm dubious how long Myerson can continue the holding action. It's not loyalty to me, God knows; it's purely his own self-interest — he knows if he loses me he'll get the sack himself: he hasn't got anybody else in the section who knows how to produce. Nobody worthwhile will work for him. I wouldn't either but I've got no choice. I'm old, fat, stubborn, arrogant and conceited. I'm also the best.

He said, “Venezuela is an OPEC country, of course,” and waited to see if I would attend his wisdom — as if the fact were some sort of esoterica. I waited, yawned, looked at my watch. Myerson can drive you to idiocy belaboring the obvious. Finally he went on:

“The oil-country finance ministers are meeting in Caracas this time. Starting Thursday.”

“I haven't been on Mars, you know. They have newspapers even in Helsinki.”

“Redundancies are preferable to ignorance, Charlie.” It is his litany. I doubt he passes an hour, even in his sleep, when that sentence doesn't run through his mind: he's got it on tape up there.

“Will you come to the point?”

“They'll be discussing the next round of oil-price hikes,” he said. “There's some disagreement among them. The Saudis and the Venezuelans want to keep the increase down below five percent. Some of the others want a big boost — perhaps twenty-five or thirty percent.”

“I plead. Tell me about Gregorius.”

“This is getting us there. Trust me.”

“Let's see if I can't speed it up,” I said. “Of course it's the Mahdis —”

“Of course.”

“They want Israel for themselves, they don't want a Palestinian peace agreement, they want to warn the Arab countries that they won't be ignored. What is it, then? They've arranged to have Gregorius explode a room full of Arab leaders in Caracas? Sure. After that the Arab countries won't be so quick to negotiate a Middle East settlement without Mahdi participation. Am I warm?”

“Scalding. Now I know you're awake.”

“Barely.”

The Mahdi gang began as an extremist splinter arm of the Black Septemberists. The gang is small but serious. It operates out of floating headquarters in the Libyan desert. There's a long and tedious record of hijackings, terror bombings, assassinations. Nothing unique about that. What makes the gang unusual is its habit of using mercenaries. The Mahdis — they named themselves after the mystic who wiped out Gordon at Khartoum — are Palestinians but they're Bedouins, not Arabs; they're few in number and they're advanced in age compared with the teen-age terrorists of the PLO. The Mahdi staff cadre consists of men who were adults at the time of the 1947 expulsion from Palestine. Some of the sheikhs are in their seventies by now.

Rather than recruit impassioned young fools the gang prefers to hire seasoned professional mercenaries; they get better results that way and they don't need to be concerned about generation-gap factionalism. They are financed by cold-blooded groups of various persuasions and motivations, most of them in Iraq and Germany.

They had used Gregorius at least twice in the past, to my knowledge: the Hamburg Bahnhof murders and the assassination of an Israeli agent in Cairo. The Hamburg bomb had demolished not only a crowd of Israeli trade officials but also the main staircase of the railroad station. The Cairo setup had been simpler, just one victim, blown up when he stepped onto the third stair of his entrance porch.

Gregorius was a killer for hire and he was well paid; apparently his fees were second only to those of Carlos the Jackal, who had coordinated the Munich athlete murders and the Entebbe hijack; but Gregorius always chose his employment on ideological grounds — he had worked for the PLO, the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Rhodesian rebels, the Cuban secret service, but he'd never taken a job for the West. Evidently he enjoyed fighting his own private war of liberation. Of course he was a psychotic but there was no point dwelling on his lunacy because it might encourage one to underestimate him; he was brilliant.

Myerson said, “We've got it on authority — fairly good authority — that the Mahdis have hired Gregorius for two targets in Caracas. Ministers. The Saudi and the Venezuelan. And of course whatever bonus prizes he may collect — bombs usually aren't too selective.”

“How good is ‘fairly good'?”

“Good enough to justify my pulling you off the Helsinki station and posting you to Venezuela.”

“All right.” If he didn't want to reveal the source he didn't have to; it wasn't really my affair. Need-to-know and all that.

Myerson got down to nuts and bolts and that pleased me because he always hurries right through them; they bore him. He has a grand image of himself as the sort of master strategist who leaves tactical detail to junior staff. Unhappily our section's budget doesn't permit any chain of command and Myerson has to do his own staff work and that's why I usually have to go into the field with a dearth of hard information; that's one reason why nobody else will work for him —Myerson never does much homework.

“It could happen anywhere,” he concluded. “The airport, a hotel lobby, a state banquet, any of the official ministerial meetings, a limousine. Anywhere.”

“Have you alerted Venezuelan security?”

“I didn't have to. But I've established your liaison out of courtesy.”

In other words the tip had come from Venezuelan security. And they didn't feel confident of their own ability to contain Gregorius. Very astute of them; most small-nation security chiefs lack the humility to admit it when a job is too big for them.

Myerson continued, in the manner of an afterthought, “Since we don't know where he plans to make the strike we've taken it upon ourselves to —”

“Is that a royal ‘we'?”

“No. The fifth floor. As I was saying, it's been decided that our best chance at him is to lure him into the open before the ministers begin the conference. Of course he doesn't tempt easily.”

Then he smiled My flesh crawled.

“You're the bait, Charlie. He'll come out for you.”

“In other words it's an open secret that I'll be in Caracas and you've spread the word where you know he'll hear it.” I brooded at him, hating him afresh. “Maybe you've neglected something.”

“Oh?”

“Gregorius is like me in one respect. He's —”

“Young, fast, up-to-date and sexy. Yes indeed, Charlie, you could be twins.”

I cut across his chuckle. “He's a professional and so am I. Business comes first. He'd love to nail me. All right. But first he'll do the job he's being paid for.”

“Not this time. We've leaked the news that you're being sent down there to terminate him regardless of cost. He thinks you're being set up to nail him
after
he exposes himself by blowing up a few oil ministers. He can't risk that — you got closer to nailing him than anybody else ever has. He knows if you're set on him again you won't turn loose until you've done the job. And he knows if he sets off a bomb while you're in earshot of it you'll reach him. He needs more lead time than that if he means to get away.”

And he smiled again: “He's got to put you out of the way before he goes after the ministers. Once the bombs go off he can't hang around afterwards to take you on. He's got to do it first.”

I said, “I've heard stronger reasoning. He's confident of his skills. Suppose he just ignores me and goes ahead with the job as if I weren't there?”

“He hates you too much. He couldn't walk away, could he? Not after Beirut. Why, I believe he hates you even more than I do.”

*   *   *

T
WO YEARS EARLIER
we'd known Gregorius was in Beirut to blast the Lebanese coalition prime minister. I'd devised one of the cleverer stunts of my long career. In those days Gregorius worked in tandem with his brother, who was six years older and nearly as bright as Gregorius. Our plan was good and Gregorius walked into it but I'd had to make use of Syrian back-up personnel on the alternate entrances to that verminous maze of alleys and one of the Syrians had been too nervous or too eager for glory. He'd started the shooting too early by about seven-tenths of a second and that was all the time Gregorius needed to get away.

Gregorius left his brother behind in ribbons in the alley; still alive today but a vegetable. Naturally Gregorius made efforts afterward to find out who was responsible for the ambush. Within a few weeks he knew my name. And of course Gregorius — that's his code name, not the one he was born with — was Corsican by birth and personal revenge is a religion with those people. I knew one day he'd have to come for me; I'd lost very little sleep over it — people have been trying to kill me for thirty-five years.

Just before Myerson sent me to the airport he said, “We want him alive, Charlie.”

“You're joking.”

“Absolutely not. It's imperative. The information in his head can keep the software boys busy for eight months. Alive — it's an order from the fifth floor.”

“You've already blindfolded me and sent me into the cage with him and now you want to handcuff me too?”

“Why, Charlie, that's the way you like it best, you old masochist.”

He knows me too well.

*   *   *

I
'D WATCHED THEM
check in at the hotel desk and I'd narrowed the possibilities to three; I'd seen which pigeonholes the room clerk had taken the keys from so I knew which rooms they were in. I didn't need to look at the register because it wouldn't help me to know what names or passports they were using.

It was like the Mexican Shell Game: three shells, one pea. Under which shell is the pea?

He had to strike at me today because Myerson's computer said so. And it probably had to be the Tamanaco Hotel because I had studied everything in the Gregorius dossier and I knew he had a preference — so strong it was almost a compulsion — for the biggest and best old hotel in a city. Big because it was easy to be anonymous there; best because Gregorius had been born dirt-poor in Corsica and was rich now; old because he had good taste but also because old walls tend to be soundproof. The Tamanaco, in Caracas, was it.

I was making it easy for him, sitting in plain sight in the lobby.

Earlier in the day I'd toured the city with Cartlidge. He looks like his name: all gaunt sinews and knobby joints. We'd traced the route in from the airport through the long mountain tunnel and we'd had a look at the hotel where the Saudi minister was booked in; on my advice the Venezuelans made a last-minute switch and when the Saudi arrived tomorrow morning he'd be informed of the move to another hotel. We had a look at the palace where the conference would take place and I inquired about the choice of halls: to forestall Gregorius the Venezuelans had not announced any selection — there were four suitable conference rooms in the building — and indeed the final choice wouldn't actually be made until about fifteen minutes before the session began. They were doing a good job. I made a few minor suggestions and left them to it.