Rebound (5 page)

He decided he would join the CIA and pick up where his assassinated father had left off. His Uncle Charley supported him and
arranged the interview. But once they saw his Army file, the CIA wanted no part of him. When he wouldn’t be put off easily,
they told him straight. The CIA trains nice guys to be killers, not crazies to be nice guys. Go away.

None of the other government intelligence agencies would touch him, either. He had been working on and off for Charley, and
they got on well. Dartley had by now figured out Charley’s game, and he asked him to find work for him as a professional hit
man. Dartley had some offers to go as a mercenary to Central America and Africa, but he reckoned he had done enough blind
following of other people’s orders. This
time, since it was his life on the line, he wanted to be in control.

Charley hemmed and hawed for a while, clearly hoping that his nephew would change his mind. When he did not, Charley started
to give him some advice. He would have to change his name. This was when he became Richard Dartley. It so happened that Charley
Woodgate was asked every now and then, when delivering a weapon, if he knew of a good hit man. He had made recommendations
in the past. Now he offered to do the same for his nephew. Charley was fully aware that many people would not regard this
as a valid way to help out a relative, but those people did not have relatives like Richard Dartley. His nephew was already
a cold-blooded killer and would earn his living as one, no matter what Charley had to say. Charley had the contacts. The most
he could do was to try to guide Richard.

It was agreed between the two men from the very beginning that Richard would only go after evil men with sufficient power
to escape conventional means of justice. He would take no assignments that involved liquidating relatively innocent individuals
as a result of business or private quarrels. For someone to become a potential victim of Richard Dartley, he had to be an
unscrupulous asshole who had done some major bad things and hurt a lot of people. Dartley wouldn’t go after a thief or a con
man. He was after bigger game.

For a starting-out hit man with no rep to seek only the biggest targets was not the quickest way to get jobs. Powerful people
are nearly
always taken out by other powerful people, and they want the man they hire to do the job to be an experienced pro, not a gifted
amateur or, worse still, some kind of psycho. Dartley did not find work for a full year. Then he got a job only because another
hit man let down the client at the last minute. Dartley took the assignment at a few hours notice and did a clean job. This
was enough to give him professional status overnight. Word of mouth brought him other jobs, and his successes over the next
few years built his reputation as one of the top assassins in the world.

Dartley was aware that he had grown increasingly cold-blooded, wealthy, and calculating. His only defense was that he had
never yet deliberately sought to kill a man who had a right to go on living.

“Mr. Dartley never meets with his clients,” the gray-haired man with the bushy gray mustache and pale puffy cheeks told the
men sitting around the table. “My name is Paul Savage, and I handle all Mr. Dartley’s arrangements. He has empowered me to
accept or turn down assignments in his absence, so you can be assured, gentlemen, that my word will be final.”

The four men in business suits looked curiously at the gray-haired man, whose hair and mustache were clearly false under the
fluorescent lighting of the room. He seemed to have theatrical makeup on his face as well. No doubt this disguise would fool
people outdoors who would not glance twice at an elderly citizen,
but not here, where he was the focus of all attention.

The man who called himself Paul Savage sat next to Charley Woodgate. Three of the businessmen were Filipino, the fourth an
American. They continued to stare at the man with the false mustache who had just told them his decision would be final.

One Filipino remarked humorously, “I hope Mr. Dartley’s skills at his end of the business are better than yours as a disguise
artist, Mr. Savage.”

“This makeup is not meant to fool you into thinking I’m an old man. Its sole function is to prevent you from recognizing me
again or describing me to someone else. I think you’ll find it fulfills this function very well.”

These words came in a cold, detached voice that put an end to humorous remarks.

“I’m sure we can rely on Mr. Woodgate’s recommendation,” the Filipino said by way of restoring peace. “I’ll get right to the
point. We know you refuse to become involved in politics or big business, which are one and the same thing in the Philippines.
Our involvement is from that angle, but yours need not be. All that need concern you is that a whole series of U.S. servicemen
in the Philippines are being killed. We know who the killer is. And we want you to get him.”

Dartley nodded his gray head. “There are some obvious questions that come to mind.”

“Let me try to intercept them,” the Filipino offered. “I assume you’ve read about the killings in the newspaper. The eighteenth
man
was murdered yesterday, by a frogman with a spear gun. His wife shot the assassin when he tried to attack the couple’s small
children. The killer’s corpse was identified this morning. We learned by telephone that he probably worked for the man we
know to be behind all this—Ruperto Velez, known as Happy Man. We Filipinos often have Malay–Chinese faces, Spanish names,
and American nicknames. Happy Man is head of a powerful landowning family with much political power. Like some other powerful
men, he has his own private army. Happy Man wants very badly to become president so he and his friends can plunder the country.
If he doesn’t get office by electoral means, he will try to create a situation in which he can seize power. We want to stop
him.”

“If he does take over,” the American businessman added, “he’ll be no friend to Washington.”

“What’s your interest in this?” Dartley asked him.

“Mine?” He seemed a little taken aback. “Agribusiness. My company has extensive pineapple plantations in the Philippines.”

“You based over there?”

“No,” the businessman said. “I’ve been a few times, but my office is on Wall Street.”

Dartley nodded. He had the picture now. He couldn’t give a flying fuck for the international investments of some Wall Street
firm or for the political ambitions of these three Filipinos. He’d have thrown them out if that was all they had brought with
them, and Charley would never have set up the meeting in the first place.
But they knew that, and they also knew they had something that would bring him in. Happy Man Velez was killing Americans.
No matter what Velez’s final intention was, he was going about it the wrong way, so far as Dartley was concerned. Dartley
was all for discouraging people from messing with Americans abroad. If someone wanted to go after Germans or Russians or Norwegians,
to publicize how bad things were in his own country, that was none of Dartley’s business. But he felt very strongly that the
U.S. government had been sending wimp messages to people who harmed U.S. citizens and that this apparent weakness was an invitation
to further attacks. He knew what the answer would be to his next question before he asked it.

“Why doesn’t the CIA or military intelligence take out Happy Man?”

The American answered, “The diplomats in the Philippines advise against it, and that makes the State Department nervous. They
don’t want to be seen as interfering in the internal affairs of the country, especially during these times when there’s a
lot of opposition to our military bases there.”

“Couldn’t the Philippine government do it?”

A Filipino said, “There is no evidence to link him to these crimes, so he cannot be arrested. Since he is an important political
contender, the government feels that ordering his killing would prove that they also ordered Benjamino Aquino’s —you remember
they said soldiers killed him as
he got off his plane. The government won’t take any chances on it.”

“How do I know you’re not setting up Velez?”

The Filipino businessman pointed to a thick manila envelope. “There’s the evidence. Most of it is hearsay. Part of it is what
we know from our own experience. None of it would stand up in court. We would also expect Mr. Dartley to make his own inquiries
before taking any action.”

“It’ll cost you a million dollars.”

“Mr. Woodgate has already told us that. The money is in Switzerland.”

Dartley was impressed. These fellas had no hesitation about cash and showed no desire to bargain. He said, “If the mission
falls through because it turns out to be not what you say it is, it will be canceled, and nine hundred thousand will be returned.
If it’s canceled through no fault of yours, you’ll get everything back.” He wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to the
businessman. “Deposit the cash, in American dollars, in that number in the Zurich branch.”

Within seconds of deposit the money would be automatically redeposited in another numbered account at the Geneva branch.

Herbert Malleson sat at the kitchen table with Dartley and Woodgate in the latter’s Maryland farmhouse. The Englishman’s courtly
manner and Oxford accent had earned him the honorary title of Viscount with Dartley and Woodgate, particularly when they were
annoyed with him for his superior ways. Malleson had spent the past few days putting together a picture
of the Philippines for Dartley. Although Dartley had been to the Orient many times, including Vietnam, he had never been to
the Philippines.

“There are 7,107 islands,” the Viscount announced, “but that’s counting rocks and sandbars. They are really a series of volcanic
peaks on the ocean floor, and the mountaintops stick out of the water as islands. Twelve of the volcanoes are presently active.
The islands were settled by those people who invented the outrigger canoe and who navigated all over the South Pacific and
north to Hawaii. Even today we have not determined how they did this. Before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century,
the islands were thinly populated by people of basically Malaysian racial origin. Most lived in villages at the river mouths
in stilt houses made of bamboo and palm thatch. They grew rice and caught fish. A few groups lived in the mountains, and they
were gatherers and hunters who did some slash-and-burn planting. Chinese, Arab, Indian, and Indonesian traders visited the
islands, and they bartered weapons, tools, and pottery for pearls, coral, and gold. In the early fourteenth century the southernmost
islands became Moslem, which they are to this day.

“Ferdinand Magellan arrived in 1521. He was looking for a route to India across the Pacific from Spanish-controlled Mexico.
The Portuguese controlled the Cape of Good Hope and would not allow Spanish ships around the southern tip of Africa. Magellan
was killed in a clash with a local Filipino chieftain. His expedition
went on and eventually returned to Spain three years later. Only one ship of the original five survived, and only eighteen
of the original two hundred and fifty-two Spaniards. But more Spanish forces arrived. After a while the conquistadores owned
great estates on which the Filipinos worked as peons, and friars rounded up their souls for salvation.

“The Spanish began trading with the Chinese in Manila. They bought silk, porcelain, spices, and so forth, and paid for them
in Mexican silver. Each year the famous Manila galleon set sail for Acapulco, loaded down with treasures from the exotic East.
On the return journey the ship carried payment in silver, which every British privateer and pirate tried to capture. My fellow
countrymen, from British India, did capture Manila in 1762, but all they did was promise not to burn the city to the ground
if a ransom was paid. It was, and they left after a couple of years. The English governor, Dawson Drake, packed every treasure
he could lay hands on into wooden crates and shipped them back to England, marked
RICE FOR DRAKE.

“The Filipinos revolted in 1896. Then America went to war with Spain over Cuba. Commodore George Dewey sailed into Manila
Bay in 1898. His seven American ships beat twelve Spanish ones. Filipino guerrillas helped the American forces fight the Spanish.
At the end of the Spanish-American War, Spain ceded the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States. The Filipinos
had thought they would be independent now, but instead found they had new masters. They staged another
rebellion, but the Americans put this down. The islands were promised independence for 1945, but World War II upset that.

“The Japanese invaded on December 10, 1941. The Filipinos and Americans fought together against them but were overrun. Before
he retreated, General MacArthur said, I shall return,’ and he waded ashore again on December 20, 1944, at the head of a huge
invasion force. Fierce fighting against the Japanese occupation forces caused huge losses in American and Filipino lives.
The islands were finally granted independence in 1946.

“Since then there have been three more rebellions against the Manila government: the unsuccessful communist Huk rebellion
of the fifties; the unsuccessful Moro rebellion of the early seventies, in which the Moslem southern islands attempted to
secede; and the present-day communist New People’s Army rebellion. It’s generally believed that the NPA is responsible for
the American servicemen’s deaths, which sounds reasonable to me.”

The Englishman’s speech was finished, and he looked at Dartley and Woodgate for comments.

“What about Happy Man Velez?” Dartley asked.

“I see nothing to tie him to the crimes,” Malleson responded. “The supposed proof given to you could be faked against anyone
in the public eye who has enemies.”

“I’ve been asking around Washington,” Charley Woodgate put in. “From what I’ve been able to learn, which hasn’t been much,
Velez is
your man. The Air Force and Navy certainly think so.”

Malleson shrugged. “That could be. I don’t have your intelligence connections, Charley. But from the data available to me
there is nothing definite to indicate that Velez is involved.”