The Lion's Game (32 page)

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Authors: Nelson DeMille

BOOK: The Lion's Game
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At this last word, General Waycliff suddenly began to understand who this intruder might be.
Khalil continued, “Are you familiar with the Koran? No? But you read the Hebrew testament. So, why don’t Christians read the word of God, which was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad? Praise be unto him.”
“Look ... I don’t know who you are—”
“Of course you do.”
“All right ... I know who you are—”
“Yes, I am your worst nightmare. And you were once my worst nightmare.”
“What are you talking about—?”
“You are General Terrance Waycliff, and I believe you work at the Pentagon. Correct?”
“That’s none of your business. I’m telling you to leave. Now.”
Khalil didn’t reply. He just looked at the General standing before him in his blue uniform. Finally, Khalil said, “I see that you are highly decorated, General.”
General Waycliff said to his wife, “Gail, call the police.”
The woman stood frozen a moment, then moved toward the kitchen table where a phone hung on the wall.
Khalil said, “Don’t touch the telephone.”
She looked back at her husband, who said, “Call the police.” General Waycliff took a step toward the intruder.
Khalil drew the automatic pistol from his jacket.
Gail Waycliff gasped.
General Waycliff let out a sound of surprise and stopped in his tracks.
Khalil said, “This is actually your gun, General.” He held it up as though examining it and said, “It’s very beautiful. It has, I believe, a nickel or silver plating, ivory handles, and your name inscribed on it.”
General Waycliff did not reply.
Khalil looked back at the General and said, “It is my understanding that there were no medals issued for the Libyan raid. Is that true?” He looked at Waycliff, and for the first time saw fear in the man’s eyes.
Khalil continued, “I’m speaking of the April fifteen, nineteen eighty-six, raid. Or was it nineteen eighty-seven?”
The General glanced at his wife, who was staring at him. They both knew where this was headed now. Gail Waycliff moved across the kitchen and stood beside her husband.
Khalil appreciated her bravery in the face of death.
No one spoke for a full minute. Khalil relished the moment and took pleasure at the sight of the Americans waiting for their death.
But Asad Khalil wasn’t quite finished. He said to the General, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you were Remit Twenty-two. Yes?”
The General didn’t reply.
Khalil said, “Your flight of four F-111s attacked Al Azziziyah. Correct?”
Again, the General said nothing.
“And you’re wondering how I discovered this secret.”
General Waycliff cleared his throat and said, “Yes. I am.”
Khalil smiled and said, “If I tell you, then I have to kill you.” He laughed.
The General managed to say, “That’s what you’re going to do anyway.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
Gail Waycliff asked Khalil, “Where is Rosa?”
“What a good mistress you are to worry about your servant.”
Mrs. Waycliff snapped, “Where is she?”
“She is where you know she is.”
“You bastard.”
Asad Khalil was not used to being spoken to that way by anyone, least of all a woman. He would have shot her right then, but he controlled himself and said, “In fact, I am not a bastard. I had a mother and father who were married to each other. My father was murdered by your allies, the Israelis. My mother was killed in your bombing raid on Al Azziziyah. And so were my two brothers and my two sisters.” He looked at Gail Waycliff and said, “And it’s quite possible that it was one of your husband’s bombs, Mrs. Waycliff, that killed them. So, what have you to say to that?”
Gail Waycliff took a deep breath and replied, “Then all I can say is that I’m sorry. We’re both sorry for you.”
“Yes? Well, thank you for your sympathy.”
General Waycliff looked directly at Khalil and said in an angry tone, “I’m not at all sorry. Your leader, Gadhafi, is an international terrorist. He’s murdered dozens of innocent men, women, and children. The base at Al Azziziyah was a command center for international terrorism, and it was Gadhafi who put the civilians in harm’s way by housing them in a military target. And if you know so much, you also know that only military targets were bombed all over Libya, and the few civilian casualties were accidental. You know that, so don’t pretend that murdering anyone in cold blood is justified.”
Khalil stared at General Waycliff and actually seemed to be considering his words. Finally, he said, “And the bomb that was dropped on Colonel Gadhafi’s house in Al Azziziyah? You know, General—the one that killed his daughter and wounded his wife and injured his two sons. Was that an accident? Did your smart bombs go astray? Answer me.”
“I have nothing more to say to you.”
Khalil shook his head and said, “No, you do not.” He raised his pistol and pointed it at General Waycliff. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this moment.”
The General stepped in front of his wife and said, “Let her go.”
“Ridiculous. My only regret is that your children are not home.”
“
Bastard!”
The General sprang forward and lunged at Khalil.
Khalil fired a single shot into the General’s service ribbons on his left breast.
The force of the low-velocity blunt-nosed .45 bullet stopped the General’s forward motion and lifted him off his feet. He fell backwards onto the tile floor with a thud.
Gail Waycliff screamed and ran toward her husband.
Khalil held his fire and let her kneel beside her dying husband. She was stroking his forehead and sobbing. Blood foamed out of the bullet hole, and Khalil saw that he had missed the man’s heart and hit the lung, which was good. The General would drown slowly in his own blood.
Gail Waycliff pushed the palm of her hand over the wound, and Khalil had the impression she was trained to recognize and treat a sucking chest wound. But perhaps, he thought, it was just instinct.
He watched for a half minute, interested, but disinterested.
The General was very much alive and was trying to speak, though he was choking on his blood.
Khalil stepped closer and looked at the General’s face. Their eyes met.
Khalil said, “I could have killed you with an ax, the way I killed Colonel Hambrecht. But you were very brave and I respect that. So, you will not suffer much longer. I can’t promise the same for your other squadron mates.”
General Waycliff tried to speak, but pink, foamy blood erupted from his mouth. Finally, he managed to say to his weeping wife, “Gail ...”
Khalil put the muzzle of the automatic to the side of Gail Waycliff’s head, above her ear, and fired a shot through the skull and brain.
She toppled over beside her husband.
General Waycliff’s hand reached out to touch his wife, then he picked his head up to look at her.
Khalil watched for a few seconds, then said to General Waycliff, “She died in far less pain than my mother.”
General Waycliff turned his head and looked at Asad Khalil. Terrance Waycliff’s eyes were wide open and blood frothed at his lips. He said, “Enough ...” He coughed. “... enough killing ... go back ...”
“I’m not finished here. I’ll go home when your friends are all dead.”
The General lay on the floor, but said nothing further. His hand found his wife’s hand, and he squeezed it.
Khalil waited, but the man was taking his time dying. Finally, Khalil crouched beside the couple and removed the General’s watch and his Air Force Academy ring, then found the General’s wallet in his hip pocket. He also took Mrs. Waycliff’s watch and rings, then ripped her pearl necklace off.
He remained crouched beside them, then put his fingers over the General’s chest wound where the blood covered his service ribbons. Khalil took his hand away and put his fingers to his lips, licking the blood off, savoring the blood and the moment.
General Waycliff’s eyes moved, and he watched in horror as the man licked the blood from his fingers. He tried to speak, but began coughing again, spitting up more blood.
Khalil kept his eyes fixed on the General’s eyes, and they stared at each other. Finally, the General began breathing in short, wheezing spasms. Then, the breathing stopped. Khalil felt the man’s heart, then his wrist, then the artery in his neck. Satisfied that General Terrance Waycliff was finally dead, Khalil stood and looked down at both bodies. He said, “May you burn in hell.”
By noon, even Kate, Ted, and Jack looked thoroughly debriefed. In fact, if we’d been any more debriefed, all we’d have left in our heads were empty sinus cavities. I mean, jeez, these people knew how to get the last piece of information out of you without resorting to electric shock.
Anyway, it was now lunchtime in Hooverland, and they left us alone for lunch, thank God, but advised us to dine in the company cafeteria. They didn’t give us lunch vouchers, so we actually had to pay for the privilege, though as I recall the chow was government-subsidized.
The cafeteria-style lunchroom was pleasant enough, but there was a reduced Sunday menu. What was offered tended toward healthy and wholesome—a salad bar, yogurt, vegetables, fruit juices, and herbal teas. I had a tuna salad and a cup of coffee that tasted like embalming fluid.
The people around us appeared to be the cast of a J. Edgar Hoover training film called
Good Grooming Leads to More Arrests
.
There were only a few black guys in the lunchroom, looking like chocolate chips in a bowl of oatmeal. Washington may be the capital of cultural diversity, but change comes slowly in some organizations. I wondered what the bosses here actually thought of the ATTF in New York, in particular the NYPD guys, who when assembled look like the alien bar scene in
Star Wars
.
Anyway, maybe I was being uncharitable toward my hosts. The FBI was actually a pretty good law enforcement agency whose main problem was image. The politically correct crowd didn’t like them, the media could swing either way, but the public for the most part still adored them. Other law enforcement agencies were impressed by their work, envious of their power and money, and pissed off at their arrogance. It’s not easy being great.
Jack Koenig, eating a salad, said, “I can’t tell if the ATTF is going to stay on the case, or if the Counterterrorism section here is going to take it away from us.”
Kate commented, “This is precisely the kind of case we were created for.”
I guess it was. But parent organizations don’t always like their weird offspring. The Army, for instance, never liked its own Special Forces with its fruity green berets. The NYPD never liked its anti-crime unit made up of guys who looked and dressed like derelicts and muggers. The spit-and-polish establishment neither trusts nor understands its own down-and-dirty special units, and they don’t give a rat’s ass how effective the irregular troops are. Weird people,
especially
when they’re effective, are a threat to the status quo.
Kate added, “We have a good track record in New York.”
Koenig thought a moment, then replied, “I suppose it depends on where Khalil is, or where they think he is. Probably they’ll let us work the New York metro area without interference. Overseas will go to the CIA, and the rest of the country and Canada will go to Washington.”
Ted Nash said nothing, and neither did I. Nash was holding so many cards so close to his chest that he didn’t need a bib for his yogurt. I was holding no cards, and I was totally clueless about how these people carved up the turf. But I did know that ATTF people, based in the New York metro area, often were sent to different parts of the country or even the world when a case began in New York. In fact, one of the things that Dom Fanelli told me when he was pushing this job on me was that ATTF people went to Paris a lot to wine, dine, and seduce French women and recruit them to spy on suspicious Arabs. I didn’t actually believe this, but I knew there was a possibility of hitting the Federal expense account hard for a trip to Europe. But enough about patriotism. The question was, If it happens on your turf, do you follow it to the ends of the earth? Or do you stop at the border?
The most frustrating homicide case I could remember was three years ago, when a rapist-murderer was loose on the East Side, and we couldn’t get a fix on the guy. Then he goes down to Georgia for a week to see a friend, and some local yokel cop stops him for DWI, and the local yokels have a brand-new computer bought with Federal bucks and for no reason other than boredom, they run the guy’s prints through to the FBI, and lo and behold, they match the prints we found at a crime scene. So we get an extradition order, and yours truly has to go down to Hominy Grits, Georgia, to extradite the perp, and I have to put up with twenty-four hours of Police Chief Corn Pone ribbing me about all kinds of crap, mostly about New York City, plus I got lessons in criminal investigation and how to spot a killer and if I ever needed any help again, just give him a call. That sucked big-time.
But back to the lunchroom at FBI Headquarters. I could tell by Koenig’s musings that he wasn’t sure the ATTF was in a strong position to pursue or resolve this case. He said, “If Khalil is caught in Europe, two or three countries will want a crack at him before we get him, unless the U.S. government can persuade a friendly country that he should be extradited here for what amounts to a crime of mass murder.”
Though some of this legal stuff seemed to be for my benefit, I already knew most of this. I was a cop for almost twenty years, I taught at John Jay for five years, and I lived with a lawyer for almost two years. In fact, that was the only time in my life that I got to fuck a lawyer, rather than vice versa.
Anyway, Koenig’s major concern was that we had dropped the ball at the goal line, and we were about to be sent to the showers. Actually, this was my concern, too.
To make matters worse, one of our team, Ted Nash by name, was about to get traded back to the team he started with. And this team had a better shot at winning this kind of game. An image of Police Chief Corn Pone flashed through my mind, but now he had Ted Nash’s face, and he was pointing to Asad Khalil behind bars and saying to me, “See, Corey, I got him. Let me tell you how I did it. I was in this café on Rue St. Germaine—that’s Paris, Corey—and I was talking to an asset.” And then I pulled my gun and capped him.
In fact, Ted was babbling, and I tuned in. Ted was saying, “I’m going to Paris tomorrow to talk to our embassy people. It’s a good idea to begin where it began, then work backwards from there.” He went on.
I wondered if I could sever his windpipe with my salad fork.
Kate and Jack chatted a bit about jurisdiction, extradition, Federal and state indictments, and so forth. Lawyer crap. Kate said to me, “I’m sure it’s the same with the police. The officers who start the case work it through to the end, which keeps the chain of evidence unbroken and makes the testimony of the case officers less open to attack by the defense.”
And so on. I mean, jeez, we haven’t even caught this scumbag yet and they’re perfecting a case. This is what happens when lawyers become cops. This is the crap I had to put up with when I dealt with ADAs and District Attorney investigators. This country is sinking in legalities, which I guess is okay when you’re dealing with your average all-American criminal. I mean, you need to keep an eye on the Constitution and make sure no one gets railroaded. But somebody should invent a different kind of court with different rules for somebody like Asad Khalil. The guy doesn’t even pay taxes, except maybe sales tax.
Anyway, as the lunch hour ended, Mr. Koenig said to us, “You all did a fine job this morning. I know this is not pleasant, but we’re here to help and to be useful. I’m very proud of the three of you.”
I felt the tuna turn in my tummy. But Kate seemed pleased. Ted didn’t give a rat’s ass, which meant we finally had something in common.

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