“Why the roundabout way of getting in touch?”
“I figured I needed discretion in case the placer of the original ad was crazy. Also that my secretiveness might impress whoever it was.”
“And did it?”
“Apparently. The speaker said he liked it. Set up a meet.”
When? Last November. Where? The Georges Cinq in Paris. What was he like?
“Youngish, well dressed, well spoken. Not registered at the hotel. I checked. Called himself Galvin Pollard. Certainly phony. A yuppie type.”
“A what?”
“Young, upwardly mobile professional,” drawled al-Mansour. “You’re out of touch.”
Terpil went red. Of course. He had seen the term but forgotten it.
What did he say? He said he represented a group of ultra-radical people, Rowse replied, who were sick and tired of the Reagan Administration, of its hostility to the Soviet and Third Worlds, and particularly of the use of American planes and taxpayer money to bomb women and children in Tripoli the previous April.
“And he produced a list of what he wanted?”
“Yes.”
“This list?”
Rowse glanced at it. It was a copy of the list he had shown Kariagin in Vienna. The Russian must have a superb memory.
“Yes.”
“Claymore mines, for God’s sake. Semtex-H. Booby-trapped briefcases. This is high-tech stuff. What the hell did they want all that for?”
“He said his people wanted to strike a blow. A real blow. He mentioned the White House, and the Senate. He seemed particularly keen on the Senate.”
He allowed the money side of it to be dragged out of him. The account at the Kreditanstalt in Aachen with half a million dollars in it. (Thanks to McCready, there really was such an account, backdated to the appropriate period. And bank secrecy is not really all that good. The Libyans could confirm it if they wanted to.)
“So what did you get involved for?”
“There was a twenty percent commission. A hundred thousand dollars.”
“Peanuts.”
“Not to me.”
“You write thriller novels, remember.”
“Which don’t sell all that well. Despite the publisher’s blurb. I wanted to make a few bob.”
“Bob?”
“Shillings,” murmured al-Mansour. “British equivalent for “greenbacks” or “dough.”
At four in the morning, Terpil and al-Mansour went into a huddle. They talked quietly in an adjacent room.
“Could there really be a radical group in the States prepared to carry out a major outrage at the White House and the Senate?” asked al-Mansour.
“Sure,” said the burly American who hated his homeland. “In a country that size, you get all kinds of weirdos. Jesus, one Claymore mine in a briefcase on the lawn of the White House. Can you imagine it?”
Al-Mansour could. The Claymore is one of the most devastating antipersonnel weapons ever invented. Shaped like a disk, it leaps into the air when detonated, then sends thousands of ball-bearings outward from the perimeter of the disk at waist-height. A moving sheet of these missiles will slice through hundreds of human beings. Loosed in an average railway concourse, a Claymore will leave few of the thousands of commuters in the area alive. For this reason, the sale of the Claymore is fiercely vetted by America. But there are always replicas. ...
At half-past four, the two men returned to the sitting room. Although Rowse did not know it, the gods were smiling on him that night. Al-Mansour needed to bring something to his Leader without further delay to satisfy the insistent pressure for revenge against America; Terpil needed to prove to his hosts that he was still the man they needed to advise them about America and the West. Finally, both men believed Rowse for the reason that most men believe: because they wanted to.
“You may go, Mr. Rowse,” said al-Mansour mildly. “We will check, of course, and I will be in touch. Stay at the Apollonia until I or someone sent by me gets in touch.”
The two heavies who had brought him drove him back and dropped him at the hotel doorway before driving off. When he entered his room, he switched on the light, for the dawn was not yet bright enough to fill his west-facing room. Across the valley, Bill, who was on the shift, activated his communicator and awoke McCready in his hotel room in Pedhoulas.
Rowse stooped to pick something from the carpet inside his room. It was a brochure inviting visitors to visit the historic Kykko Monastery and admire the Golden Icon of the Virgin. A single script in pencil beside the paragraph said “Ten A.M.”
Rowse set his alarm for three hours’ sleep. “Screw McCready,” he said as he drifted off.
Chapter 4
Kykko, the largest monastery in Cyprus, was founded in the twelfth century by the Byzantine emperors. They chose their spot well, bearing in mind that the lives of monks are supposed to be spent in isolation, meditation, and solitude.
The vast edifice stands high on a peak west of the Marathassa Valley in a situation so remote that only two roads lead to it, one from each side. Finally, below the monastery, the two roads blend into one, and a single lane leads upward to the monastery gate.
Like the emperors of Byzantium, McCready, too, chose his spot well. Danny had stayed behind in the stone hut across the valley from the hotel, watching the curtained windows of the room where Rowse slept, while Bill, on a motorcycle acquired for him locally by the Greek-speaking Marks, had ridden ahead to Kykko. At dawn, the SAS sergeant was well hidden in the pines above the single track to the monastery.
He saw McCready himself arrive, driven by Marks, and he watched to see who else came. Had any of the Irish trio appeared, or the Libyan car (they had noted its number), McCready would have been alerted by three warning blips on the communicator and would have vaporized. But only the usual stream of tourists—most of them Greek and Cypriot—trundled up the track on that May morning.
During the night the head of station in Nicosia had sent one of his young staffers up to Pedhoulas with several messages from London and a third communicator. Each sergeant now had one, aside from McCready.
At half-past eight Danny reported that Rowse had appeared on the terrace and taken a light breakfast of rolls and coffee. There was no sign of Mahoney and his two friends, or Rowse’s girl from the evening before, or any of the other guests at the hotel.
“He’s looking tired,” said Danny.
“No one said this would be a holiday for any of us,” snapped McCready from his seat in the courtyard of the monastery twenty miles away.
At twenty-past nine Rowse left. Danny reported it. Rowse drove out of Pedhoulas, past the great painted church of the Archangel Michael that dominated the mountain village, and turned northwest on the road to Kykko. Danny continued his watch on the hotel. At half-past nine the maid entered Rowse’s room and drew the curtains back. That made life easier for Danny. Other curtains were withdrawn on the facade of the hotel facing the valley. Despite the rising sun in his eyes, the sergeant was rewarded by the sight of Monica Browne doing ten minutes of deep-breathing exercises quite naked in front of her window.
“Beats South Armagh,” murmured the appreciative veteran.
At ten to ten, Bill reported that Rowse had come into sight, climbing the steep and winding track to Kykko. McCready rose and went inside, wondering at the labor that had brought these massive stones so high into the mountain peaks, and at the skill of the masters who had painted the frescoes in the gold leaf, scarlet, and blue that decorated the incense-sweet interior.