A Clear and Present Danger Read online

  AT TAXPAYERS’ EXPENSE, six American congressmen pile out of the long, black limo into the classiest whorehouse in Munich. A tall redhead stands in the doorway, flaunting herself in a see-through blouse, moistening her lips with her tongue. Suddenly a shot rings out. Congressman Hurgett falls to the pavement, his head a bloody pulp. A note is found:

  “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

  The following month, Senator Samuels of Michigan dies mysteriously in Italy.

  Again a note:

  “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

  BEN SLAYTON: T-MAN has the same reaction as everyone else: “Who is it who has no regrets. What the hell is going on?”

  Books by Buck Sanders

  BEN SLAYTON: T-MAN #1

  A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

  BEN SLAYTON: T-MAN #2

  STAR OF EGYPT

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1981 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56616-2

  Contents

  Books by Buck Sanders

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  PART ONE

  One

  MUNICH. West Germany, Oktoberfest 1980

  He waited, supremely patient, in a tiny, darkened hotel room five stories above the noisy street.

  Tonight the drunken fools would come to him unawares. Though the precise hour was irrelevant, the time was indisputably now. The waiting didn’t matter. He would be here, they would be down below; and on this night, eventually, history would be made.

  He stared at the cobblestone entrance to the square as he smoked. The burning end of a black Tunisian cigarette illuminated his hard-set, determined face. Tonight there was not a trace of fear in those strange, shining eyes, one of which was brown and the other dark green.

  Yet once there had been fear in his eyes. Only once, though, a long time ago.

  Then, he had been a boy of seven years, which was also the last time he could remember his life being easy. His father had not yet abandoned the family altogether; home was a comfortable flat in a tidy working-class district of Marseilles; and there were frequent holidays in the surrounding mountains and woods of southern France.

  On one such occasion, his father had decided to take his son alone, to hunt. He had found himself waiting in a blind then, too.

  When a huge, heavily antlered buck stepped tentatively into the forest clearing ahead of him, the boy had frozen in some unaccountable terror. He had been unable to pull the trigger.

  Behind him, he could feel his father’s breath on his neck; he could sense his father’s cold anger. The boy had been ashamed, humiliated just as if his father had caught him masturbating.

  “Kill him!” his father had hissed.

  The buck’s nostrils flared and his ears twitched and the animal focused all senses toward the blind, alert to the slightest presence of danger.

  “Kill him, you sniveling bastard!” his father hissed again.

  The buck’s knees bent, positioned for flight. But the animal, too, was frozen with fright. The boy felt a numbness and then a fire in the armpit that held the butt of his rifle stock. His hands felt heavy and icy. There was a thudding sound in his head. Then an explosion.

  At first, the boy thought his skull had somehow detonated. Then he saw the thick spray of maroon blood shower the air of the forest clearing beyond the sights of his rifle, the ugly black hole between the buck’s fear-crazed eyes; the buck crumpling in sudden death. He had killed with a single, clean shot; his first shot and his first blood.

  Something had taken the boy through that momentary stark fear. Now something in him reveled. The boy felt a deep and primal satisfaction move swiftly through his body. His skin glowed, his breath came in rushes, his lips pulled back in a triumphant grin. He felt a tingling in his testicles.

  Nothing he had experienced, before or since, was more sublime than that first kill, even though it was only a deer.

  … He tamped out his cigarette and lit another.

  How many animals and how many men had he killed since the age of seven? And what was the difference? He grinned.

  Returning his eyes to the street leading into the square, now completely clogged with Oktoberfest celebrants, he thought of another moment in the past: sixteen years and eleven months ago, also in a crowded plaza, in the American city of Dallas; another man, much younger than he, waiting in a room with a gun.

  He stroked the chill steel of his weapon, a Mannlicher-Carcanño 6.5-millimeter. The same Spanish rifle the man in Dallas had used.

  Only this time, he thought, the Mannlicher-Carcaño would not bring about an end. This time, it would bring about a beginning.

  He grinned and continued to wait.

  “You must point them out to me, Frederick. You all look to me like penguins, black and white and waddling little fellows.”

  Then she laughed. It was a husky, low laugh, the sort of laugh that came from the lips of a woman who has drunk whisky every night for many years in the course of her professional life.

  She was speaking with a man named Heinz, a very short and very sweaty bald-headed functionary of a leading West German trade association. They had known one another for almost a decade on a strictly business basis, which had convinced her that he was a contemporary eunuch, a sexless attendant of other men’s women.

  Heinz wore a tuxedo, as did all the other men in the ballroom. The other women present were, for the most part, overweight and dour and married to the host Germans, a few hundred of Munich’s burghers.

  Also in the assembly were a few federal government lights in from Bonn, a half-dozen movie stars from Berlin, as well as a sprinkling of athletes. But virtually no unattached women. Even if there were women available, they could certainly not be attracted to the three men across the room to whom Frederick Heinz was discreetly pointing.

  She sighed when she saw them. Typical clientele. Middle-aged to doddering American politicians on a junket. She got them all, sooner or later. Once she had visited Washington and found, to her great surprise, that a good percentage of American politicians were actually handsome men. Why did these men never seem to make their way to her?

  “I see them,” she said to Heinz. “The usual swine.”

  “Madame Vilbel, you will please mind your tongue! These men are important to us. In America, they occupy great position in—”

  “Oh, Frederick, don’t be so political,” she interrupted. “You’re a pimp and nothing more, and I love you just the way you are.”

  Heinz wiped his brow and the top of his head with a handkerchief. “There is a difference, leibchen, between a politician and a pimp?”

  She laughed again and kissed his pate.

  “You will see to it our visitors are properly entertained,” Heinz said.
“And you will be remunerated in the customary fashion.”

  Before she left his side, Madame Vilbel leaned down and pinched Heinz on the left buttock.

  On the opposite end of the room, the three Americans talked among themselves. The heftiest of their number spoke:

  “You ought to see the way the common folk carry on this time of year in Bavaria. Jesus, it’ll run shivers down your goddam spine, I’m telling you. They get into the whole atavistic business of jumping around bonfires in their goddam lederhosen and if some guy in a silly-ass brush of a mustache was to stop by and tell them to kill the first Jew they see around, then goddam but that’s what they’d do!”

  “So, what’s so bad about that?” another of the Congressmen said, doubling over with laughter and causing the same reaction in his colleagues.

  “How about another drink?” the third man slurred.

  “Heads up, boys,” the first man said, the fat one. “I do believe the entertainment committee is upon us, bless her heart.”

  Madame Vilbel approached, smiled professionally, and took the fat man’s extended hand, which he kissed in elaborate continental style. It didn’t happen often any more, not after so many years and so many men, but Madame Vilbel felt a quick surge of revulsion. She shook it off.

  “You should like to see the city tonight, ja?” She looked each man in his glazed eyes. “Munich is at its best in October, and I am at your service, gentlemen. Shall we continue the evening at my place?”

  The three Congressmen agreed. The fat one, who felt compelled to introduce himself—“Barlow Hurgett, ma’am! Representing the noble Ninth District of the great state of South Carolina, the Grand Old Party, and the Moral Majority, yessiree!”—took her by the arm and led the way out of the room and the building.

  In the floodlit drive a Mercedes-Benz limousine waited, a chauffeur at the ready. Madame Vilbel nodded to the man behind the wheel. The four piled into the big car, and then without a word of instruction, the chauffeur pulled out into the street and sped down the autobahn toward Schwabing, the city’s bohemian quarter.

  Schwabing was a district of quaint old public squares, several beer gardens favored a half-century ago by an Austrian émigré born with the name Schickelgrüber, cheap hotels presently favored by transients who put a premium on privacy and a neighborhood tolerance for establishments such as that run by Madame Vilbel.

  Off the autobahn and now on the city’s surface streets, the going was slow. Throngs of beer-swigging, horn-blowing merrymakers stalled vehicle traffic, sometimes turning entire streets into gigantic open-air parties. The din and the drunkeness would grow louder and wilder before the dawn, which was what the man waiting in the window was counting on.

  The Mercedes finally made its way into the square. Its slow pace was followed through the telescopic lens clamped to the end of the Mannlicher-Carcaño’s barrel.

  The Oktoberfest mob was essentially good-natured, and allowed the limousine to glide through its numbers after a mere twenty minutes of attempting to tip it over.

  It stopped at the curb in front of a narrow brownstone. The chauffeur jumped out and opened the rear door. Madame Vilbel emerged first.

  The man in the window removed her from his sights, lowering the rifle a half inch to capture the next exit in telescopic field.

  Congressman Barlow Hurgett stepped out and tripped on the curb, landing face down on the sidewalk. Madame Vilbel and the two other Congressmen laughed wildly at the spectacle.

  The man in the window drew a bead on the broad, prostrate body. He inched the cross hairs to that exact spot between the clavicles that he knew from long experience was where a bullet would do the most efficient work.

  Gently, steadily, he squeezed the trigger. Then even before the bullet slammed into its target, he knew it would be true. He felt the tingling warmth spread through his body, the deep satisfaction of his kill.

  And he remembered: Only once had such a mission failed.

  In the darkness of the square, in the cacophony of the boozy Oktoberfest night, the crack of a rifle and an American Congressman’s instant death would go unnoticed for many crucial minutes. He had no need to hurry.

  He watched from the window as Barlow Hurgett’s brethren stepped over him, laughing and joking, he supposed, about the ludicrous appearance he made, sprawled as he was in a Munich gutter halfway between a limousine and a whorehouse. And he thought perhaps he could make out madame’s throaty laughter.

  He grinned. Then he lit a black cigarette and held it in his lips while he used both hands to break down the Mannlicher-Carcaño and pack it away in an unobtrusive case. He did so carefully, almost reverently.

  In the dim light of the cigarette, he located the single spent shell. He picked it up off the floor and placed it carefully on the window sill. Then he reached into a shirt pocket and removed a small slip of paper, which he rolled into a cylinder and stuffed inside the conspicuously placed shell.

  He left the room then, making his way slowly down the central staircase of the old hotel.

  When he reached the street, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, though he knew that soon there would be shrieking and panicked running, and police whistles.

  As he left the square, he heard the muffled sounds of a siren in the distance.

  Two

  Madame Vilbel wept. Her face was a series of hideous black-and-blue lines made by rivers of mascara and eyeliner. The harsh white light of a police torch shone on her, heightening the ghastly appearance.

  Barlow Hurgett’s two Congressional companions stood bug-eyed and trembling as police went about the customary tasks of preserving a murder scene for forensic examination: chalking the outline of the body, pushing ghoulish onlookers back beyond a barrier of sawbucks, searching windows and rooftops for any unusual activity, taking names, and trying to make sense of initial statements.

  The Congressmen were confused further by the fact that everything was playing in German.

  One of them said, “We don’t say anything until the Embassy sends us lawyers.” Hearing this, the other man soiled his trousers.

  A police photographer danced around the body, quickly shooting the bloody scene before the medics would drag away his subject. The photographer knew the fat man at his feet was dead, but nevertheless he would have to be quick about his work. Medics threw a fit when he asked for more time for all his shots, even when he was obviously photographing a corpse. As if anything could be done for the corpse!

  Another police car arrived, this one unmarked by flashers and sirens. A plainclothesman stepped out the passenger side of the front seat and made his way through the tight knot of curious locals.

  He spoke briefly to the chauffeur of the Mercedes limousine, who demonstrated with gestures how the American had stepped out of the Mercedes and then seemed to trip and fall, face down.

  The detective continued listening to the chauffeur while looking toward the upper windows of a hotel across the square from Madame Vilbel’s.

  Every window was lit, he noticed, except one. The fifth floor. Not only was that particular window dark, he saw, but it was halfway open to the chill night air.

  The detective signaled to a pair of uniformed officers, pointed to the window, and said, “We’re going up.”

  An extremely nervous concierge turned over a house passkey to the policemen after telling them, honestly, that he had no clear idea of who held the room on the fifth floor.

  “This kind of place,” the detective joked with the officers as they scaled the staircase, “employs people who don’t notice a thing.”

  The detective was not surprised to find the room empty. He was, however, surprised to find so conspicuous a piece of evidence as the cartridge shell on the window sill.

  Frowning with curiosity, he took a small leather pocket-bag from its place on his shoulder, zipped it open, and removed a tweezers and a glassine packet in which to drop this clue. The police laboratory would give it a closer look in the morning.

  Bu
t then he noticed the paper cylinder inside the shell. He fished it out, gingerly, using the tweezers. He unrolled it and read:

  Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien!

  The uniformed officers watched as he examined the bit of paper. Then the German detective shrugged, and said to his colleagues, “I don’t know what this is, men. I don’t happen to read French.”

  Three

  TURIN, Italy, 17 November 1980

  Andreotti DiNicolini told his American visitors that he had something special for them.

  He rose from the table and snapped a finger at the ubiquitous steward, who glided over from his station to refill glasses. The steward poured carefully from a linen-wrapped blottle of Château La Mission Haut Brion, vintage 1928.

  Crossing from one corner of his massive office suite to the other, DiNicolini wondered if his rivals at Renault-Dauphin had served the Americans so sumptuously; he wondered, conversely, if he were treating them too generously at this stage. How does one know, after all, how to properly grease a deal with Americans, the Americans being so righteous about such commonplace European business expenses?

  DiNicolini wanted this merger and he would do anything—absolutely anything—to see it through. The wine and these cigars, he thought, as he opened a Moroccan-bound humidor at the edge of his marble desk, were trifles. And so were the women he might be expected to deliver—unless these two wanted men, a situation he had encountered in the course of doing business more than once lately. The real worry would come when the Americans began hinting about off-the-books cash transactions.

  But these days, DiNicolini figured, what with the “Abscam” business he’d been reading about in the international press, perhaps he didn’t have much to worry about when it came to cash payments. At least, the demands would be somewhat reduced.

  Andreotti DiNicolini, the dashing young director of international development for Fiat Motors Italia, Ltd., might soon take his place among the industrial heroes of Western Europe if only he could bring this one off. If only he could duplicate what the French had accomplished last year, a limited partnership with American Motors Corporation. Duplicate, hell! DiNicolini would do considerably better than Renault. He would merge Fiat with one of the American “Big Three” automakers! He, Andreotti DiNicolini, would oversee the merger of Fiat with Chrysler Corporation!