The airfield was difficult to find — there were no signposts and eventually Joker had to ask for directions at a filling station. It was surrounded by trees so Joker didn’t see it until he was virtually on top of it. It turned out to be little more than a grass strip with a few hangars and a single-storey brick building on which there was a sign which said Farrell Aviation and a logo of a green propeller with a hawk above it. A line of small planes faced the grass landing strip, many of them with covers over their cowlings as if they didn’t get flown much. The asphalt road Joker was on wound through the trees and curved behind the hangars before widening out into a large area in front of the Farrell Aviation building where several cars were parked. Joker slowed his car down and pulled up in front of a hangar which had a large ‘For Rent’ sign on the door with the telephone number of a Baltimore real estate company. A bearded man in blue overalls appeared from the neighbouring hangar, wiping his hands on a rag. He stood looking at Joker for a second or two and then walked over. Joker got out of his car and stood looking up at the hangar.
“You interested?” the man said. His voice was laconic, almost sleepy, but his eyes were sharp and alert.
“Could be,” answered Joker, “but not for me, my brother-in-law services small planes, he’s looking for a base near Baltimore.”
“You’re English, right?” said the man.
Joker nodded. “Yeah, my sister married a guy from Boston. You get much business here?”
The man shrugged. “Not really, not what you’d call passing trade. There’s no Flight Service Station here, and no fuel. You have to pull your own business in, pretty much. What sort of work does your brother-in-law do?”
“Small planes, Cessnas mostly. He buys up wrecks, does them up and sells them. There’s always a market for 152s and 172s.”
“Oh sure,” the man agreed.
“You run your own business?” Joker asked.
“Yeah, routine servicing mainly. I have my regulars and there’s a small flying club based here. We used to have a flying school but they closed.”
“What about Farrell? They do okay?”
The man nodded. “Leasing, mainly. They own most of the hangars here. They do an eye-in-the-sky service for a few radio stations — you know, watching the traffic jams, stuff like that. And they do some film and television work. They do okay.”
“Farrell? That’s an Irish name, right?”
“Pat’s Irish all right,” said the man. “He’s even painted green stripes on most of his planes.”
Joker took a pen from his jacket pocket and wrote down the name of the company handling the leasing of the empty hangar. “I’ll pass this on to my brother-in-law,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”
“Sure, hope you decide to move in. It’d be good to have fresh faces around.”
The man walked back to his hangar while Joker climbed back into his car. He drove slowly down the road and through the trees. There were many other things he wanted to ask the man, but he knew that he would be pushing his luck if he’d prolonged the conversation — it wouldn’t take much to set alarm bells ringing over at the Farrell building.
A few hundred yards before the asphalt road joined the main highway, Joker saw a track which wound into the trees and he stopped for a closer look. It appeared to be overgrown and hadn’t been used in a while. There was no-one around so he turned off the road and drove cautiously down the track. When he was sure he was far enough away from the road so that he couldn’t be seen, he stopped the car. He took his binoculars from the back seat and his bottle of whisky from the trunk, and walked through the trees. He walked for half a mile or so until he reached a spot where he could see the front of the Farrell building in the distance, but remain well hidden from the airfield. He dropped down next to a wide chestnut tree and sat with his back propped up against it. His view was restricted by the trees between him and the airfield but he could see the cars parked in front of the building, and the main entrance. He focused the binoculars on the car number plates and found that he could read them easily, so he knew he’d have no problem seeing the face of anyone who went into or came out of the building. He uncapped the whisky bottle and drank deeply. He might be in for a long wait, but he had nowhere else to go.
Cole Howard read through the FBI file on Ilich Ramirez Sanchez on the direct flight from Phoenix to New York. Coach Class was almost empty and he had a whole row to himself, so he stretched out and put his briefcase on the seat next to his. A stewardess asked him if he wanted a drink and Howard caught himself about to ask for a whisky and Coke. He ordered an orange juice instead.
The file on Sanchez was about five times as thick as those of Matthew Bailey and Mary Hennessy, and included reports from virtually every intelligence agency in the world. The first page contained a list of the aliases the terrorist had used: Carlos Andres Martinez-Torres, Ahmed Adil Fawaz, Carlos Martinez, Hector Lugo Dupont, Nagi Abubaker Ahmed, Flick Ramirez, Glenn Gebhard, Cenon Marie Clarke, Adolf Jose Muller Bernal, and his real name — Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. He was born on October 12, 1949, in Caracas, Venezuela, the son of a millionaire lawyer, Dr Jose Altagracia Ramirez. The lawyer, whose politics tended towards the extreme Left, named his three sons after Lenin: Ilich, Lenin and Vladimir. The boys spent most of their childhood travelling around Latin America and the Caribbean with their mother, Elba Maria, who was separated from their father. When he was seventeen, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was sent by his father to a Cuban guerrilla training camp near Havana, and in 1969 he enrolled in the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, regarded by many as a terrorists’ finishing school, and the following year he joined one of the world’s most notorious terrorist organisations: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The stewardess returned with his orange juice and Howard thanked her. He rubbed his eyes. Reading under the artificial lights was a strain, but there was still a huge amount to get through. He sipped his juice and began to read again. In 1971 Carlos was invited by Dr Wadi Haddad, the operational chief of the PFLP, to a guerrilla seminar at a PFLP camp in the south of Lebanon along with young terrorists from the Japanese Red Army and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and shortly afterwards he was assigned to the PFLP’s foreign operations bureau, assisting in the machine-gun attack at Tel Aviv Airport which killed twenty-five and injured seventy-seven.
In July 1973 he took over the organisation’s European terrorist cell, the Commando Boudia. In December of that year Carlos tried to assassinate Edward Sieff, the president of British retail stores chain, Marks and Spencer, because of his close links with Israel. He talked his way into Sieff’s London home and shot his target in the face at point blank range — his favourite method of assassination. Incredibly, Sieff’s teeth absorbed most of the bullet’s impact and he survived. In 1974 Carlos threw a bomb into the London branch of the Israeli Bank of Hapoalim. A typist was injured. He moved to France and with Commando Boudia planted car bombs in front of the offices of various Jewish magazines, and threw an M26 fragmentation grenade into a newspaper kiosk on St. Germain-des-Pres, killing two and injuring thirty-four. The following year Carlos and his team managed to get hold of Russian anti-tank bazookas and a three-man team flew out from the Middle East to help operate them. In January 1975 they fired one of the RPG-7s at an El Al plane at Orly Airport. They missed, and instead hit a Yugoslav plane. Later that year Carlos masterminded the kidnapping of the OPEC ministers in Vienna, taking them at gunpoint on a hijacked plane to North Africa where he was paid an $800,000 ransom before setting them free. Carlos was also linked to a whole series of terrorist attacks, kidnapping and murders, including the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the bombing of a French nuclear plant, and helping the Japanese Red Army attack the French Embassy in The Hague where they took the ambassador and his staff hostage.