“Oh, please—not expel,” drawled al-Mansour. “Just decline to admit. And well, the reason was that I wished to talk to you in complete privacy. Even in my homeland there are formalities, records to be kept, the curiosity of superiors to satisfy. Here—nothing but peace and quiet.”
“And the facility,” thought Rowse, “to carry out a quiet liquidation and leave the Cypriot authorities with a British body to explain.”
“So,” he said aloud, “I must thank you for your courtesy in agreeing to help me with my research.”
Hakim al-Mansour laughed softly. “I think the time for that particular foolishness is over, Mr. Rowse. You see, before certain—animals—put him out of his misery, your late friend Herr Kleist was quite communicative.”
Rowse spun around on him, bitterly angry. “The papers said he was killed by the drug people, in revenge for what he did to them.”
“Alas, no. The people who did to him what was done do indeed deal in drugs. But their principal enthusiasm is for planting bombs in public places, principally in Britain.”
“But why? Why should those bloody Paddies have been interested in Ulrich?”
“They weren’t, my dear Rowse. They were interested in finding out what you were really up to in Hamburg, and they thought your friend might know. Or suspect. And he did. He seemed to believe your tarradiddle about “fictional” American terrorists masked a quite different purpose. That information, coupled with further messages received from Vienna, brought me to the view that you might be an interesting man to talk to. I hope you are, Mr. Rowse; for your sake, I sincerely hope you are. And the time has come to talk. But not here.”
Two men had appeared behind Rowse. They were big and olive-skinned.
“I think we should go for a little ride,” said al-Mansour.
“Is this the sort of ride from which one returns?” asked Rowse.
Hakim al-Mansour rose. “That depends very much on whether you are able to answer a few simple questions to my satisfaction,” he said.
McCready was waiting for the car when it emerged from the portico of the Apollonia onto the road, having been tipped off by Danny across the valley. He saw the Libyans’ car—with Rowse in the back seat between the two heavies—turn away from the hotel.
“Do we follow, boss?” asked Bill from the rear seat of the Orion.
“No,” said McCready. To try and follow without lights would have been suicide on those hairpin curves. To put on headlights would give the game away. Al-Mansour had chosen his terrain well. “If he comes back, he’ll tell us what went on. If not ... well, at least he’s in play at last. The bait is being examined. We’ll know by morning whether it has been taken or rejected. By the way, Bill, can you enter that hotel unseen?”
Bill looked as if he had been grievously insulted.
“Slip that under Rowse’s door,” said McCready, and he passed the sergeant a tourist brochure.
The drive took an hour. Rowse forced himself not to look around. But twice, after the Libyan driver had negotiated hairpin bends, Rowse could look back the way they had come. There was no moving wash of another car’s headlights behind them. Twice the driver pulled to the side of the road, doused his lights, and waited for five minutes. No one came past them. Just before midnight, they arrived at a substantial villa and drove through wrought-iron gates. Rowse was decanted and pushed through the door, which was opened by another heavyweight Libyan. With al-Mansour himself, that made five. Too heavy odds.
And there was another man waiting for them in the large drawing room into which he was pushed, a heavy-set, jowly, big-bellied man in his late forties with a brutal, coarsened face and big red hands. He was clearly not a Libyan. In fact, Rowse easily recognized him though he gave no sign. The face had been in McCready’s rogue’s gallery, shown to him as a face he might one day see if he agreed to plunge into the world of terrorism and the Middle East.
Frank Terpil was a CIA renegade, fired by the Agency in 1971. Soon after, he had gravitated to his true and very lucrative vocation in life—supplying torture equipment, terrorist tricks, and expertise to Uganda’s Idi Amin. Before the Ugandan monster was toppled and his hideous State Research Bureau broken up, he had introduced the American to Muammar Qaddafi. Since then Terpil, sometimes in association with another renegade, Edwin Wilson, had specialized in providing a vast range of terrorist equipment and technology to the most extreme groups around the Middle East, always remaining the servitor of the Libyan dictator.
Even by then, Terpil had been well out of the Western intelligence community for fifteen years, but he was still regarded in Libya as the “American” expert. It suited him well to hide the fact that by the late 1980s, he was completely out of touch.
Rowse was told to take a chair in the middle of the room. The furniture was almost entirely shrouded in dust sheets. Clearly, the villa was a holiday home for a wealthy family who had shut it up for the winter. The Libyans had simply taken it over for the night, which was why Rowse had not been blindfolded.
Al-Mansour removed a dust sheet and fastidiously seated himself in a brocade high-back chair. A single bulb hung over Rowse. Terpil took a nod from al-Mansour and lumbered over.
“Okay, boy, let’s talk. You’ve been going around Europe looking for arms. Very special weapons. What the hell are you really up to?”
“Researching a new novel. I’ve tried to explain that a dozen times. It’s a novel. That’s my job, that’s what I do. I write thriller novels. About soldiers, spies, terrorists—fictional terrorists.”
Terpil hit him once on the side of the face—not hard, but enough to indicate there was more where that came from and plenty of it.
“Cut the shit,” he said without animosity. “I’m going to get the truth anyway, one way or the other. Might as well keep it painless—all the same to me. Who are you really working for?”
Rowse let the story come out slowly, as he had been briefed, sometimes recalling things exactly, sometimes having to search his memory.
“Which magazine?”
“Soldier of Fortune.”
“Which edition?”
“April ... May, last year. No, May, not April.”
“What did the ad say?”
“ ‘Weapons expert needed, European area, for interesting assignment’ ... something like that. A box number.”
“Bullshit. I take that magazine every month. There was no such ad.”
“There was. You can check.”
“Oh, we will,” murmured al-Mansour from the corner of the room. He was making notes with a slim gold pen on a Gucci pad.
Rowse knew Terpil was bluffing. There had been such an ad in the columns of Soldier of Fortune. McCready had found it, and a few calls to his friends in the CIA and the FBI had ensured—or so Rowse fervently hoped—that the placer of the ad would not be available to deny he had ever received a reply from Mr. Thomas Rowse of England.
“So you wrote back.”
“Yep. Plain paper. Accommodation address. Giving my background, areas of expertise. Instructions for a reply, if any.”
“Which were?”
“Small ad in the London Daily Telegraph.” He recited the wording. He had memorized it.
“The ad appeared? They made contact?”
“Yep.”
“What date?”
Rowse gave it. Previous October. McCready had found that ad as well. It had been chosen at random, a perfectly genuine small advertisement from an innocent British citizen, but with wording that would suit. The Telegraph staff had agreed to alter the records to show it had been placed by someone in America and paid for in cash.
The interrogation went on. The phone call he had taken from America after placing a further ad in The New York Times. (That too had been found after hours of searching—a real ad listing a British phone number. Rowse’s own unlisted number had been changed to tally with it.)