Dirty Harry 10 - The Blood of Strangers (11 page)

Harry began to race in the direction of the departure gate, prepared for the scream that he was sure must come as soon as the woman discovered the condition of the ladies’ room and the condition of the man who was still in it. The scream came all right, but it was much louder and higher pitched than he’d have thought humanly possible. It was a scream to wake the dead though not necessarily a man with a slug from a .44 magnum inside him.

But by the time the airport security and police arrived at the scene, Harry was already on board his plane. He was the last person on. The cabin door was closed moments after he entered.

Casually, he advanced along the aisle toward first class which was divided from the economy section by a beige curtain.

Ellie was seated on an aisle seat. She saw him coming but gave no sign of recognition. As Harry approached her, he whispered, “I owe you one.”

“I owed you one,” she replied in an equally low voice, “I was just returning the favor.”

“See you in Beirut,” he said, smiling, and continued on his way.

Achmed and Kayyim were just where he’d left them. They didn’t turn around until he took the seat behind them. They probably hadn’t been expecting to see him back. Achmed’s face darkened at the sight of Harry and he muttered something in Arabic that Harry was certain had to do with his mother. There is an art to cursing in Arabic. With an astonishing variety of abuse possible, an insult might lead to a blood feud persisting for generations. Harry had the sense Achmed was running through the entire spectrum of curses under his breath. Kayyim, on the other hand, being a more reserved sort, responded only with a mild look of reproach, as if it were bad form for Harry to still be alive.

Then, in a very pleasant way, he asked if Harry had enjoyed the stopover.

“Let’s say I got plenty of exercise,” Harry replied, and Kayyim nodded as if he knew exactly what Harry was talking about.

The Small Man hated Muzak. He would willingly have blown out the speakers or blown up L.A.’s airport just as he had San Francisco’s, but neither option was available to him at the moment. For his sole responsibility now was to follow Ellie Winston and keep the Alpha Group aware of her movements. Obviously, he had done a wretchedly bad job because here he was in San Francisco while she was in Paris or wherever she had decided to go to after Paris.

Now he was in a telephone booth attempting once again to contact the unit commander who’d assigned him to track Winston in the first place.

At least this time he had managed to reach the commander who listened impatiently to his account of how he had lost her.

“How was I to know she was going to jump aboard a jetliner to Europe?” he asked plaintively. “San Diego, Vegas, Tijuana, all right, but Europe? I tried getting hold of you, but you were nowhere to be found.”

The unit commander was not interested in his excuses. “You have your credentials in order?”

“Naturally.” He had several different collections of credentials in order, in fact, depending on which alias he chose to use.

“Do you think you can possibly catch up with her?”

The Small Man hesitated, but as he glanced out of the phone booth he caught sight of the man Winston had met in a nearby restaurant just before she embarked on her flight. He now had a small suitcase in his hand which he had not had before. The suitcase not only looked new but there was even a tag dangling from it that the man had neglected to remove after purchasing it. The Small Man had a sense of what this man was up to.

“Well, answer my question.” The unit commander had an imperious nature and infrequently abided undisciplined behavior.

“Yes,” the Small Man said, “I think I can catch up with her. There’s someone here who can lead me right to her.”

“Good then. Check in with me when you have her in contact again.”

The Small Man rung off and stepped out into the lounge. He was no longer so acutely conscious of the dreadful Muzak. He had David Whittier to concentrate on.

C H A P T E R
E i g h t

A
t the first available opportunity, Harry slipped into the first-class lavatory and inspected the wallet and passport that he’d purloined from the man at Orly.

The wallet contained an interesting sum of money, in several currencies: U.S., French, Lebanese, British, Jordanian, and Libyan. The man traveled a lot, Harry thought, and his conclusion was borne out by the passport which was blurred with indecipherable stamps from a dozen or more countries in the Middle East and Europe. His name was Muhammed Ajai though Harry doubted very much whether it was the name his parents had given him at birth. The passport indicated also that his nationality was Palestinian.

Kayyim must have been responsible for the attack on him; how he had managed to get word to Ajai without physically leaving the plane was the thing Harry couldn’t figure out. Most likely there was a confederate aboard—another passenger or even one of the members of the flight crew—who not only passed on Kayyim’s command, but also pointed out the victim.

Kayyim would have realized by now that the attempt had failed and Harry suffered from no illusions that he wouldn’t try again. In Beirut he would have an easier time of it; there in a city already torn by warfare who would notice one more dead body?

Whatever happened, he prayed that Ellie could be kept out of it. Bad enough he was marked for murder; if she was linked with him in any way she would surely be marked as well.

From the air, Beirut looked peaceful enough. The endless blue skies and the bright summer sun combined to create a deceptive atmosphere of tranquility. One of the flight attendants was heard to remark that the airport had opened only the previous day after a week’s shutdown due to incessant shelling. For some people the very act of landing in a plane is bad enough; to know that somebody might be waiting to blow you to kingdom come once you actually got down, was even more disheartening.

But it was quiet on the airfield. It was quiet even for a normal airfield. That there was very little traffic was understandable; a country doesn’t get a lot of tourists and businessmen coming and going in the middle of a war—unless those businessmen happened to be selling weapons of death.

Here is where the shit hits the fan, Harry thought. Kayyim had been told that Harry was supposed to turn right around which would mean that there was no need to leave the airport. Nor did Harry really care to, in spite of the simple curiosity of seeing where Kayyim was going in Beirut.

But it seemed that Kayyim had other ideas. “Mr. Turner,” he said, “would you do me the honor of accepting my hospitality for tonight? After all, you have come all this way and risked your life for me, it is the least I can do. To get on another plane and endure the ordeal of another air flight to the States is foolish. You would feel so much better if you rested tonight and went back in the morning.”

Harry knew he should decline, but something caused him to accept the invitation. Maybe his curiosity was even greater than he thought. In any case, he only hoped that Kayyim adhered to the famous Islamic and Bedouin customs governing the welfare of a guest. A man might be your deadly enemy, but if he came into your house you were obligated to serve him in every way you could; then in the morning, as soon as he was on his way again, you were free to kill him.

Of course, in a city where militiamen break into a hospital and start spraying the patients with machine gun fire you couldn’t count on anything, least of all old Islamic traditions.

Kayyim expressed his delight when Harry agreed though Achmed looked none too pleased which was, for Harry, not a bad sign.

“Good. Then you come with me. We will have no trouble with customs. I am well known in Beirut.”

Before they could disembark, one of the flight attendants approached Harry and surreptitiously deposited a folded piece of paper in the pouch facing his seat, squashing it between the in-flight magazine and the air sickness bag.

When he was certain that neither Kayyim nor his bodyguard were observing him, he retrieved the paper and unfolded it:

I’m staying at the Commodore. I’ll also have access to the U.S. Embassy and to the station in S.F. and the network in N.Y. So if you need anything or need to contact anyone let me know. I’m holding the fort for you. E.

Harry quietly tore up the note and scattered the shreds in a way such that the note could never be reassembled. For the second time today, he had to admit that having Ellie around was not the worst thing that could have happened to him. She’d saved his life in Paris, who knows but he might have to call on her to do the same in Beirut.

As Kayyim promised, customs posed no difficulty. The three of them were passed right through without any official glancing at either their papers or their baggage. There were certain advantages to being a sponsor of terrorism with millions of dollars to spend. For one thing, one probably got invited to lots of parties.

A limousine, armor-plated with bullet-resistant glass and equipped with a machine gun mounted on the trunk that could be operated by the passengers within, was waiting to receive the minister and his party of two. In any other country, a fortified car like this would have made Harry feel quite secure. But not here in Beirut.

A shrill whine woke him that seemed to electrify the air. What made sure that he was awake was the enormous explosion that followed the whine. Within seconds, the walls began to shudder and the glass in the windows cracked further.

Unaccustomed to waking up in the middle of the war, Harry was not immediately able to orient himself. For one thing, his whole system was out of whack, from the exhausting journey that had taken him thousands of miles from California, and all the food and drink he’d consumed along the way. He had no idea how long he’d slept; his watch was missing. The only thing he could say for certain was that it was daylight, from the angle of the sun, midafternoon. Another rocket came down somewhere in the vicinity, and another, and another. It was unnerving, listening to them, and downright discouraging when one began to realize one of them might come careening down right on top of you. How did people get used to this sort of thing? Harry wondered.

He had a plan, he remembered that quite distinctly. It had seemed to him a reasonably good plan too. He had intended to go with Kayyim only so far, discover where he was staying in the city, then slip away. He had even worked out a way to do this; aside from Achmed and the chauffeur, Kayyim had no other protection that Harry could see. No one had relieved Harry of his weapon.

But he should have known that on his own territory, Kayyim would play by other rules, rules that Harry was unacquainted with. It could be that he hadn’t been thinking straight, that the torturously long plane trip combined with the incident at Orly had knocked more than the wind out of him.

Otherwise, why would he be here in a large white room somewhere in the middle of Beirut? Possibly he’d been drugged, more likely he’d collapsed because his body had given out. He tried the door; it didn’t budge. He stepped over to the windows; they were arched and once had probably yielded a panoramic view. But now they were so cracked from the noise of explosives that you could barely see out of them. They, too, were locked. Breaking them wouldn’t be difficult but it would hardly make sense. It seemed that Harry was very high up and there was nothing out there but a sheer drop that would leave a man looking like a pool of jelly when he came to the end of it.

His watch wasn’t all that was missing; gone too were his gun—that was to be expected—his wallet, his passport, as well as Muhammed Ajai’s wallet and passport. Harry had the feeling that the only reason he’d been spared thus far was because Kayyim was anxious to find out how much the U.S. authorities knew about his operations.

There was a pitcher of water gone lukewarm some time during the night. That was all the refreshment available. A bedpan had also been provided. These two items evidently constituted Kayyim’s notion of hospitality.

Harry thought he had nothing to lose by pounding on the door to see what kind of response he would get.

None was the answer.

He sat back on the bed. Nothing to do but wait and listen to rockets turn what little that was left intact in Beirut into rubble.

Without any way of measuring time more accurate than the relative position of the sun in the sky, Harry couldn’t say whether twenty minutes or two hours had gone by when he heard the key turn in the lock. The wait had been endless. But he did not necessarily welcome an end to it.

With Kayyim was the inevitable Achmed. But two other men had come along, perhaps thinking the show would be well worth the price of admission. They all had the air of men who liked pumping a great many volts of electricity into people.

“You slept comfortably?” Kayyim inquired. He was no less cordial than he’d been on the plane, but he was no more sincere.

“You have any cold water?” Harry asked, gesturing to the pitcher. “This has gone stale.”

“That can be arranged . . . later.”

Later, thought Harry dismally. How much later?

Kayyim circled Harry, hands clasped behind his back. His friends stood by, evidently restless for him to get on with it.

“You killed Muhammed Ajai,” Kayyim said flatly.

“He was ready to do the same to me.”

“Muhammed Ajai was a good man,” Kayyim muttered. “You are an agent of the U.S. imperialist clique.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Harry replied.

“But you don’t deny that you are an agent?”

“It wouldn’t do any good to ask you to let me contact the U.S. Embassy?” Harry was feeling a little giddy. Even though his life was in peril he somehow could not quite take this whole affair seriously. Imperialist clique indeed.

“No, I am afraid it wouldn’t. You are with the CIA.”

He was not making it a question.

“No, I am with the San Francisco Police Department. It’s just that I took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.”

Kayyim exchanged a few words with the man standing next to Achmed. Suddenly, they were all laughing. Kayyim returned his attention to Harry. “If you do not tell us the truth we will be forced to take measures.”