The Deceiver (39 page)

“So what?” said Rowse. “I’m out, well out. I write novels for a living now. That’s all.”

Seamus O’Keefe thought it over. “Could be,” he admitted. “If the Brits were sending undercover men into my pub, they’d hardly use a man with his face plastered all over so many books. Or would they?”

“They might,” said Rowse, “but not me. ‘Cause I wouldn’t work for them anymore. We had quite a parting of the ways.”

“So I heard, to be sure. Well then, SAS man, come and have a drink. A real drink. For old times’ sake.”

He kicked the wedge away from the door and held it open. On the tiles, the big man hauled himself to his hands and knees. Rowse passed through the door. O’Keefe paused to whisper in the big man’s ear.

In the bar Uli Kleist was still at his table. The girls had gone. The manager and the enormous doorman stood by his table. As Rowse passed, he raised an eyebrow. If Rowse had said so, he would have fought, even though the odds were impossible.

Rowse shook his head. “It’s all right, Uli,” he said. “Stay cool. Go home. I’ll see you.”

O’Keefe took Rowse to his own apartment. They drank Jamesons with water.

“Tell me about this ‘research,’ SAS man,” said O’Keefe quietly.

Rowse knew there were two others in the passage within call. No need for any more violence. He told O’Keefe the outline of the plot of his intended next novel.

“Not about the lads in Belfast, then?” said O’Keefe.

“Can’t use the same plot twice,” said Rowse. “The publishers wouldn’t have it. This one’s about America.”

They talked through the night. And drank. Rowse had a rock-hard head for whiskey, which was just as well. O’Keefe let him go at dawn. He walked back to his hotel to blow away the whiskey fumes.

The others worked on Kleist in the abandoned warehouse to which they had taken him after Rowse left the club. The big doorman held him down, and another Palestinian used the instruments.

Uli Kleist was very tough, but the Palestinians had learned about pain in South Beirut. Kleist took all he could, but he talked before dawn. They let him die as the sun rose. It was a welcome release.

The big Irishman from the men’s room watched and listened, occasionally dabbing his bleeding mouth. His orders from O’Keefe were to find out what the German knew about Rowse’s presence in Hamburg. When it was over, he reported what he had learned. The IRA station head nodded.

“I thought there was more to it than a novel,” he said. Later, he sent a cable to a man in Vienna. It was carefully worded.

When Rowse left O’Keefe’s flat and walked back through the waking city to the railway station hotel, one of his minders moved quietly in behind him. The other kept watch on the abandoned warehouse but did not interfere.

In the lunch hour, Rowse ate a large bratwürst, heavily laced with sweet German mustard. He bought it from a
Schnellimbiss
, one of those stands on streetcorners that prepare the delicious sausages as snacks for those in a hurry. As he ate, he talked out of the side of his mouth to the man beside him.

“Do you think O’Keefe believed you?” asked McCready.

“He may have done. It’s a plausible enough explanation. Thriller writers, after all, have to research some odd things in some strange places. But he may have had doubts. He’s no fool.”

“Do you think Kleist believed you?”

Rowse laughed. “No, not Uli. He’s convinced I’m some sort of renegade turned mercenary, looking for arms on behalf of a client. He was too polite to say so, but the novel-research story didn’t fool
him
.”

“Ah,” said McCready. “Well, perhaps last night was an added bonus. You’re certainly getting yourself noticed. Let’s see if Vienna gets you farther down the trail. By the way, you booked yourself on a flight tomorrow morning. Pay cash at the airport.”

The Vienna flight was via Frankfurt and took off on time. Rowse was in business class. After takeoff, the stewardess distributed newspapers. As it was an internal flight, there were no English ones. Rowse could speak halting German and decipher headlines. The one covering much of the lower half of the front page of the
Morgenpost
did not need deciphering.

The face in the picture had its eyes closed and was surrounded by garbage. The headline read,
SLAYER OF DRUG BARONS FOUND DEAD.
The text below said two garbage collectors had found the body near a rubbish bin close to the docks. The police were treating the case as a gangland revenge killing.

Rowse, however, knew better. He suspected that an intervention by his SAS minders could have saved his German friend. He rose and walked through the curtains down the aisle to the economy-class toilets. Near the rear of the plane, he dropped the newspaper into the lap of a rumpled-looking man reading the in-flight magazine.

“You bastard,” he hissed.

Somewhat to Rowse’s surprise, Major Kariagin took his call at the Soviet Embassy at his first attempt. Rowse spoke in Russian.

SAS soldiers—most especially the officers—have to be multitalented creatures. As the basic SAS fighting unit has only four men, a wide spectrum of proficiencies is necessary. Within the four-man group, all will have advanced medical training, and all will be able to handle a radio. They will have several languages among them, apart from their varied fighting skills. As the SAS has operated in Malaya, Indonesia, Oman, and Central and South America, apart from its NATO role, the favored languages have always been Malay, Arabic, and Spanish. For the NATO role, the preferred proficiencies have been Russian (of course) and one or two Allied languages. Rowse spoke French, Russian, and Irish Gaelic.

For a complete stranger to telephone Major Kariagin at the embassy was not so odd, bearing in mind the major’s secondary task of keeping an eye on the stream of applications made to the Czech arms outlet, Omnipol.

Intergovernmental applications were made to the Husak government in Prague. They did not concern him. Others, from more dubious sources, came to the external office of Omnipol, based in neutral Vienna. Kariagin saw them all. Some he approved, some he referred to Moscow for a decision, others he vetoed out of hand. What he did not tell Moscow was that his judgment could be influenced by a generous tip. He agreed to meet Rowse that evening at Sacher’s.

Kariagin did not look like a caricature Russian. He was smooth, groomed, barbered, and well tailored. He was known at the famous restaurant. The headwaiter showed him to a corner table away from the orchestra and the babble of the voices of the other diners. The two men sat and ordered
Schnitzel
with a dry, light Austrian red wine.

Rowse explained his need for information for his next novel.

Kariagin listened politely. “These American terrorists …” he said when Rowse had finished.

“Fictional terrorists,” said Rowse.

“Of course. These fictional American terrorists—what would they be looking for?”

Rowse passed over a typed sheet that he took from his breast pocket. The Russian read the list, raised an eyebrow, and passed it back.

“Impossible,” he said. “You are talking to the wrong man. Why did you come to see me?”

“A friend in Hamburg said you were extremely well informed.”

“Let me change the question: Why come to see anyone? Why not make it up? It is for a novel, after all.”

“Authenticity,” said Rowse. “The modern novelist cannot get things hopelessly wrong. Too many readers today are not fooled by schoolboy howlers in the text.”

“I’m afraid you are still in the wrong place, Mr. Rowse. That list contains some items that simply do not come under the heading of conventional weaponry. Booby-trapped briefcases, Claymore mines—these are simply not provided by the Socialist bloc. Why not use simpler weaponry in your … novel?”

“Because the terrorists—”

“Fictional terrorists,” murmured Kariagin.

“Of course. The fictional terrorists apparently—that is, as I intend them in the book … wish to carry out an outrage involving the White House. Mere rifles obtainable in a Texan gunshop will not do.”

“I cannot help you,” said the Russian, wiping his lips. “These are the days of
glasnost
. Weaponry of the type of the Claymore mine, which in any case is American and unobtainable—”

“There is an East Bloc copy,” said Rowse.

“—are simply not provided, except between government and government, and only then for legitimate defense purposes. My country would never dream of supplying such materiel or sanctioning its supply by a friendly state.”

“Like Czechoslovakia.”

“As you say, like Czechoslovakia.”

“And yet these weapons do appear in the hands of certain terrorist groups,” said Rowse. “The Palestinians, for example.”

“Possibly, but I have not the faintest idea how,” said the Russian. He made to rise. “And now, if you will excuse me—”

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” said Rowse, “but in the pursuit of authenticity, I do have a modest research fund.”

He lifted the corner of his folded newspaper, which lay on the third chair at the table. A slim white envelope rested between the pages. Kariagin sat down again, extracted the envelope, and glanced at the Deutschmark bills inside. He looked thoughtful, then slipped the envelope into his breast pocket.

“If I were you, and wished to acquire certain kinds of materiel to sell on to a group of American terrorists—all fictional, of course—I think I might go to Tripoli and try to seek an interview with a certain Colonel Hakim al-Mansour. And now, I really must rush. Good night, Mr. Rowse.”

“So far, so good,” McCready said as they stood side by side in the men’s room of a sleazy bar near the river. The two SAS sergeants had confirmed that neither man was being tailed, or the meeting could not have taken place. “I think you should go there.”

“What about a visa?”

“The Libyan People’s Bureau at Valletta would be your best chance. If they grant a visa without delay, it will mean you have been preannounced.”

“You think Kariagin will tip off Tripoli?” asked Rowse.

“Oh, I think so. Otherwise, why advise you to go there? Yes, Kariagin was offering his friend al-Mansour the chance to have a look at you and check out your ridiculous story a bit more deeply. At least no one believes the novel-research story anymore. You have crossed the first hurdle. The bad guys really are beginning to think you’re a renegade trying to make a fast buck by working for some shadowy group of American madmen. Al-Mansour will want a lot more than that, of course.”

Rowse flew from Vienna to Rome and thence to the capital of Malta. Two days later—no need to rush them off their feet, said McCready—he made his application to the People’s Bureau for a visa to visit Tripoli. The reason he gave was a desire to do research for a book on the amazing progress of the People’s Jamahariya. The visa came through in twenty-four hours.

The following morning, Rowse took the Libyan Airways flight from Valletta to Tripoli. As the ochre-brown coast of Tripolitania came into view across the glittering blue Mediterranean, he thought of Colonel David Stirling and the others, Paddy Mayne, Jock Lewis, Reilly, Almonds, Cooper, and the rest, the first of the SAS men, just after the group’s formation, who had raided and blasted German bases along this coast more than a decade before he was born.

And he thought of McCready’s words in the Valletta airport as the two minders waited in the car: “I’m afraid Tripoli is one place I cannot follow you. This is where you lose your backup. When you go in there, you will be alone.”

Like his predecessors in 1941, some of whom were still buried down there in the desert, he would find that in Libya, he was completely alone.

The airliner tipped one wing and began to drop toward the Tripoli airport.

AT FIRST, THERE SEEMED
to be no problem. Rowse had been sitting in economy class and was one of the last out of the airliner. He followed the other passengers down the steps into the blazing sun of a Libyan morning.

From the observation terrace of the modern white airport building, a pair of impassive eyes picked him out, and binoculars trained briefly on him as he crossed the tarmac toward the Arrivals door. After several seconds the binoculars were laid aside, and a few calm words were muttered in Arabic.

Rowse entered the air-conditioned cool of the terminal and took his place at the end of the queue waiting for passport clearance. The sloe-eyed immigration officers took their time, scanning every page of each passport, gazing at each passenger’s face, comparing it lengthily with the passport photo, and consulting a manual that was kept out of sight beneath their desks. Libyan passport holders were in a separate queue.

Two American oil engineers who had been in the smoking section and were behind Rowse made up the rear of the queue. It took twenty minutes for Rowse to reach the passport desk.

The green-uniformed officer took his passport, opened it, and glanced down at a note beneath the grill. Without expression, he raised his gaze and nodded to someone behind Rowse. There was a tug at Rowse’s elbow. He turned. Another green uniform—younger, courteous but firm. Two armed soldiers stood farther back.

“Would you please come with me?” the young officer said in passable English.

“Is there something wrong?” asked Rowse. The two Americans had gone silent. In a dictatorship the removal of a passenger from the passport queue is a great conversation-stopper.

The young officer at his elbow reached under the grill and retrieved Rowse’s passport.

“This way, if you please,” he said. The two soldiers closed up from behind, one at each elbow. The officer walked, Rowse followed, the soldiers came behind. They turned out of the main concourse and down a long white passage. At the far end, on the left, the officer opened a door and gestured to Rowse to enter. The soldiers took up position at either side of the door.

The officer followed Rowse inside and closed the door. It was a bare white room with barred windows. A table and two facing chairs stood in the center, nothing else. A portrait of Muammar Qaddafi hung on one wall. Rowse took one of the chairs; the officer sat down facing him and began to study the passport.