The Lion's Game (59 page)

Asad Khalil said, “So, gentlemen, you are having happy memories of your bombing mission?”

McCoy did not reply.

Satherwaite said, “This is a fucking gas. Hey, Mr. Fanini, crawl onto the nose and get a shot of us from the front.”

Khalil did not move.

Jim McCoy said, “Okay, let’s get out of here. Come on, Bill.”

Khalil said, “Stay where you are.”

McCoy stared at Asad Khalil, and his mouth suddenly went dry. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind, he knew this day would come. Now, it was here.

Satherwaite said to Khalil, “Roll the stairs around and take some shots from the other side. Get a few standing on the ground, too, then—”

“Shut up.”

“Huh?”

“Shut your mouth.”

“Hey, who the fuck—” Satherwaite found himself staring into the muzzle of a pistol, held close to his customer’s body.

McCoy said softly, “Oh, God ... oh, no—”

Khalil smiled and said, “So, Mr. McCoy, you have already guessed that I am not a maker of canvas. Perhaps I am a maker of shrouds.”

“Oh, mother of God ...”

Bill Satherwaite seemed confused. He looked at McCoy, then at Khalil, trying to figure out what they knew that he didn’t know. “What’s going on?”

“Bill, shut up.” McCoy said to Khalil, “This place is full of armed guards and security cameras. I suggest you leave now, and I won’t—”

“Quiet! I will do the talking, and I promise I will be brief. I have another appointment, and this will not take long.”

McCoy did not reply.

For once, Bill Satherwaite did not say anything, but a glimmer of understanding began to penetrate his mind.

Asad Khalil said, “On April fifteen, nineteen eighty-six, I was a young boy living with my family in the place called Al Azziziyah, a place that both of you know.”

Satherwaite said, “You lived there? In Libya?”

“Silence!” Khalil continued, “Both of you flew into my country, dropped bombs on my people, killed my family—my two brothers and two sisters and my mother—then went back to England, where I presume you celebrated your murders. Now, you are both going to pay for your crimes.”

Satherwaite finally realized that he was going to die. He looked at Jim McCoy sitting beside him and said, “Sorry, buddy—”

“Shut up.” Khalil continued, “First of all, thank you for inviting me to this little reunion. Also, I want you to know that I have already killed Colonel Hambrecht, General Waycliff and his wife—”

McCoy said softly, “You bastard.”

“—Paul Grey, and now both of you. Next ... well, I must decide if I should waste a bullet on Colonel Callum and end his suffering. Next is Mr. Wiggins and then—”

Bill Satherwaite extended his middle finger toward Khalil and shouted, “Fuck you, raghead! Fuck you, fuck that camel-fucking boss of yours, fuck—”

Khalil put the neck of the plastic bottle over the muzzle of the Glock and fired a single shot at close range into Bill Satherwaite’s forehead. The muffled shot echoed in the cavernous hangar as Satherwaite’s head snapped back in a splash of blood and bone, then fell forward on his chest.

Jim McCoy sat frozen in his seat, then his lips started to move in prayer. He bowed his head, praying, then made the sign of the cross, and continued to pray through trembling lips.

“Look at me.”

McCoy continued to pray, and Khalil heard the words, “... the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil—”

“My favorite Hebrew psalm. For thou art with me—”

They finished the psalm together, “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

When they were finished, Asad Khalil said, “Amen,” and fired a round through Jim McCoy’s heart. He watched him die, and their eyes met, before Jim McCoy’s eyes stopped seeing anything.

Khalil pocketed the pistol, put the plastic bottle back in his bag, and reached inside the cockpit, finding Satherwaite’s wallet in the hip pocket of his jeans, and McCoy’s wallet, covered with blood, in the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He put both wallets in his bag and wiped his fingers on Satherwaite’s T-shirt. He felt around Satherwaite’s body, but found no weapon and concluded that the man lied too much.

Khalil reached up and pulled down the Plexiglas canopy. “Good night, gentlemen. May you already be in hell, with your friends.”

He came down from the staircase and gathered his two shell casings, then rolled the staircase away, near another aircraft.

Asad Khalil held his Glock in his jacket pocket, and walked quickly out of the hangar and back into the atrium. He didn’t see the guard in the huge expanse, and did not see him outside through the glass doors.

He walked into the office area and heard a sound coming from behind a closed door. He opened the door and saw the guard sitting at a desk, listening to a radio, and reading a magazine called
Flying
. Behind the guard, fifteen numbered television monitors showed scenes of the vast museum complex, interior and exterior.

The guard looked up at his visitor and said, “You guys done?”

Khalil closed the door behind him, fired a bullet through the guard’s head, then walked to the monitors as the guard fell off his chair.

Khalil scanned the monitors until he saw the one that showed images of the hangar with the modern jet aircraft. He saw changing scenes of the exhibition space, recognizing the rolling staircase, then the F-111 with its canopy down. He also saw images of the theater, the exterior doorways where his car was parked, and various images of the atrium lobby. No one else seemed to be in the building.

He found the video recorders stacked on a countertop and pushed the Stop button of each one, then extracted all fifteen tapes and put them in his bag. He knelt beside the guard, removed the dead man’s wallet, found his shell casing, then left the security office and closed the door behind him.

Khalil walked quickly back through the atrium, and exited one of the front doors. He pulled on the door behind him and noted with pleasure that it was locked.

Khalil got into his rental car and drove off. He looked at the dashboard clock. It was 10:57 P.M.

He set his Satellite Navigator for Long Island MacArthur Airport, and within ten minutes was on the parkway heading north toward the Long Island Expressway.

He dwelt a moment on the last minutes in the lives of Mr. Satherwaite and Mr. McCoy. It occurred to him that one could never anticipate how a man was going to die. He found that interesting, and wondered how he would act in a similar situation. Satherwaite’s final arrogance had surprised him, and it occurred to Khalil that the man had found some courage in the last few seconds of his life. Or perhaps the man had so much evil in him that those last words were not courage at all—but pure hate. Asad Khalil realized that he himself would probably act as Satherwaite had in a similar situation.

Khalil thought of McCoy. This man had reacted in a predictable way, assuming he was a religious man. Or he had quickly found God in the last minute of his life. One never knew. In any case, Khalil appreciated the man’s choice of psalms.

Khalil swung off the parkway into the eastbound Long Island Expressway. There was not much traffic, and he kept up with the other vehicles, noting his speed on the speedometer’s metric scale at ninety kilometers per hour.

He knew full well that his time was running out—that these double murders would attract much attention.

The appearance of a robbery was very suspect, he knew, and sometime this evening, Mrs. McCoy would call the police and report her husband was missing and that no one answered the telephone at the museum.

Her story of Mr. McCoy meeting an Air Force comrade would cause the police to worry far less than Mrs. McCoy was worrying. But at some point, the corpses would be discovered. It would be some time before the police thought to go to the airport to see about the aircraft that Satherwaite arrived in. In fact, if McCoy never mentioned his friend’s method of arrival to his wife, it would never occur to the police to go to the airport at all.

In any case, no matter what Mrs. McCoy or the police did, Asad Khalil had time for his next act of vengeance.

Yet, as he drove, he felt, for the first time, the presence of danger, and he knew that somewhere, someone was stalking him. He was certain that his stalker did not know where he was, nor did his stalker completely comprehend his intentions. But Asad Khalil sensed that he, the Lion, was now being hunted, and that the unknown hunter understood, at the very least, the nature and substance of what he was hunting.

Khalil tried to conjure an image of this person—not his physical image, but his soul—but he could not penetrate this man’s being, except for the strong force of danger that the man radiated.

Asad Khalil came out of his trance-like state. He reflected, now, on his trail of corpses. General Waycliff and his wife would have been found no later than late Monday morning. At some point, a member of the Waycliff family would attempt to contact the deceased General’s old squadron mates. In fact, Khalil was surprised that by now, Monday evening, no one had telephoned McCoy. A telephone call to Paul Grey would not have found him able to come to the phone, nor would a call to Mr. Satherwaite be answered. But Khalil had the feeling that Mrs. McCoy, aside from her worry about her husband, might be given the additional worry, tonight or tomorrow, of a call from the Waycliff family or the Grey family, with the tragic news of the murders.

Soon, by tomorrow, he guessed, there would be many telephone calls, answered and unanswered. By tomorrow evening, his game would be drawing to a close. Perhaps sooner, perhaps later, if God was still with him.

Khalil saw a sign that said REST STOP, and he pulled off into a parking lot hidden from the road by trees. There were a few trucks parked in the big lot, as well as a few cars, but he parked away from them.

He retrieved Satherwaite’s Air Force overnight bag from the rear seat, and examined the contents, finding a liquor bottle, some underwear, prophylactics, toiletries, and a T-shirt, which depicted a jet fighter and the words NUKES, NAPALM, BOMBS, AND ROCKETS—FREE DELIVERY.

Khalil took Satherwaite’s bag and his own bag and walked into the woods behind the rest rooms. He retrieved all his money from Satherwaite’s wallet, and the money from McCoy’s wallet, which amounted to eighty-five dollars, and the guard’s wallet, which contained less than twenty dollars, and put the bills in his wallet.

Khalil scattered the contents of all three wallets in the undergrowth, and threw the wallets into the woods. He also scattered the contents of Satherwaite’s overnight bag, then flung the bag into a thicket of bushes. Finally, he removed the security videotapes from his overnight bag and threw them in different directions into the woods.

Khalil made his way back to his car, got in, and drove back onto the Expressway.

As he drove, he dropped the three .40 caliber shell casings onto the highway at intervals.

They had told him in Tripoli, “Do not waste too much time erasing fingerprints or worrying about other scientific evidence of your visits. By the time the police process all of this, you will be gone. But do not get caught with any evidence on your person. Even the most stupid policeman will become suspicious if he finds another man’s wallet in your pocket.”

Of course, there was the matter of the two Glocks, but Khalil did not consider that evidence—he considered the pistols as the last thing a policeman would see before he saw nothing at all. Still, it was good to divest himself of the other things, and to leave the automobile without obvious evidence in it.

He continued on, and his thoughts returned to home, to Malik, and Boris. He knew, as did Malik and Boris, that he could not play this game for very long. Malik had said to him, “It is not the game itself, my friend, it is how you choose to play it. You have chosen to have the Americans in Paris lay their hands on you, to make a grand entrance into America, to have them know who you are, what you look like, where and when you arrived. You yourself, Asad, have invented the rules of the game and made those rules more difficult for yourself. I understand why you do this, but you must understand that the odds are against you completing this mission, and you have only yourself to blame if you fall short of winning a complete victory.”

To which Khalil recalled saying, “The Americans never go into battle unless they’ve done all they can to assure victory before the first shot is fired. This is like shooting a lion from a vehicle with a telescopic sight. It is not victory at all—only slaughter. There are tribesmen in Africa who have guns, but who still hunt the lion with spears. What good is a physical victory without a spiritual or moral victory? I have not made the odds go against me—I have simply made the odds even, so that no matter who wins this game, I am the winner.”

Boris, who was present, commented, “Tell me that when you’re rotting in an American jail, and all your American Air Force demons are leading happy lives.”

Khalil recalled turning to Boris and saying, “I don’t expect you to understand.”

Boris had laughed and replied, “I understand, Mr. Lion. I understand quite well. And for your information, I don’t care if you kill those pilots or not. But you’d better be sure you don’t care either. If the hunt is more important than the kill, then take pictures of them as the sensitive Americans do on safari. But if you want to taste their blood, Mr. Lion, then you’d better think of another way to go to America.”

In the end, Asad Khalil had examined his heart and his soul, and had come to the conclusion that he could have it both ways—his game, his rules, their blood.

Asad Khalil saw the sign for MacArthur Airport and drove onto the exit ramp.