Reprisal (7 page)

“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.

“Those Secret Service guys are giving us a good looking over, mate,” the attaché remarked cheerfully. “Where’s your car parked?”

Dartley directed him. He did not open the thick
envelope the Australian handed him. The money would be there to the last dollar.

Dartley had left his car on a ghetto street a few blocks from the White House. As they approached, Dartley spotted three figures
in a doorway near the car.

“Drive on slowly,” he said to the attaché, who had also seen them.

Dartley got a close look as they passed by. The three black youths in the doorway were about twenty years old. They were making
no effort to conceal themselves, and obviously had not, as Dartley first thought, put his car under surveillance.

“They’re okay,” Dartley said. “Probably local guys. Park here and walk back with me. I’ll cover you on your way back to the
car.”

The pickup went off without incident. The three men in the doorway watched curiously as the two white men opened the trunk
of the car. One threw a thick envelope in and pulled out a long cardboard box, which he gave to the other and slammed the
trunk down. Then the dude with the box walked back to his car, while the other one watched his back. The one with the box
drove away.

“Hey, you,” one of the three shouted to Dartley, “why don’t you mess with that shit on your own streets, ‘stead of bringing
it down here?”

“We don’t need your fucking garbage, man.”

“You dumping enough shit on us as it is.”

They were moving from the doorway toward him, fanning out, looking for action.

“It’s not what you think,” Dartley said in a calm voice, making no effort to dash inside the car.

“Hah, man, you come down here to deal your dope and piss on us ‘cause you think nothing matters down here.”

“You’re right, bro.”

“This muffa think he something.”

Dartley wasn’t armed, if it could be said that a man with Dartley’s skills in the martial arts was unarmed, simply because
he was not carrying conventional hardware.

The first of them came at Dartley, assumed an exaggerated stance, and kicked sideways at his head. The guy was all show and
had about as much speed as a slow-motion demonstration film. Dartley stepped barely out of range of the kick, clamped his
right hand on the upper side of the man’s shoe and pressed his left hand powerfully upward on the inside of his heel. The
anklebones shattered and the foot hung, loose and floppy.

The guy whimpered as he fell, and scratched the sidewalk with his fingernails to ease the pain.

Dartley moved from his first to his second assailant in a blur of continuous motion. He dodged the long narrow screwdriver
the man tried to sink into his stomach, grabbed the steel shaft of the screwdriver and bent it back into the V formed by the
man’s thumb and index finger, thus twisting the tool out of his grasp.

At that moment Dartley took a heavy body punch or kick—he couldn’t tell which—from the third man, and then a sharp rap across
the forehead from his fist. Dartley felt the stone in the man’s ring tear his skin, and warm blood leaked into his left eye.

He had seen this blow to his forehead as it was
coming and rode with the punch. He couldn’t have avoided it and also have sidestepped the far more deadly rabbit punch being
delivered by the man he had just disarmed of the screwdriver.

Dartley stood apart from the two men for an instant, brandished the screwdriver and then drove its long steel stem into the
ribcage of the man he had taken it from. He thrust the screwdriver upward at a forty-five degree angle, to fit between the
slats of the ribs. He left it buried to the handle in the man’s left side.

The third man stood and stared, transfixed with shock. Dartley let him be. He knew the fight had gone out of this one and
he bore him no personal grudge. As the body of the stabbed man crumpled to the sidewalk, his uninjured companion felt an instinctual
urge of self-preservation and took off down the street.

Dartley made sure the fleeing man did not turn to look at the number on his car’s registration plate. Then, using the victim’s
own shirt, he wiped his prints off the handle of the screwdriver still buried in the dying man’s side.

The one with the broken ankle still lay groaning, too immersed in his own problems to have noticed what went on around him.

Dartley looked up and down the empty street. He got in his car, started the engine, and drove away, waiting a couple of blocks
before he flicked the lights on.

He had arranged to meet Sylvia Marton at National. She was taking the shuttle in from New York and so couldn’t be sure exactly
which plane she would be
on. She had been there since early morning, making a TV commercial for a pantyhose company. This was a bit of a step down
for a movie star—but then she had been a star only in Yugoslav films, never on this side of the Atlantic.

“Every twenty-nine-year-old woman needs an ego boost regularly,” she had told Dartley a few days previously. “If the ad agency
for the pantyhose company thinks my legs are more shapely than those of all the young bimbos they’ve got in New York City,
who am I to argue with them? Of course I couldn’t refuse them!”

While he waited, Dartley mopped the blood from his forehead with Kleenexes and covered the red furrow gouged by the ring’s
stone with a Band-Aid. He knew Sylvia wouldn’t ask questions. She would merely raise her eyebrows to let him know she had
noticed.

She was not averse to excitement herself. To his amazement, Dartley discovered she was a crack shot, and on several occasions
she had been his getaway driver. She knew nothing, asked no questions, wanted no money—she just went along for kicks. Which
made her Dartley’s kind of woman.

“Darling, I’m exhausted,” she cried when she saw him at the airport. “Those brutes made me pose nearly nude all day in all
sorts of lurid positions. My little tush is numb from the effort.”