A Clear and Present Danger Page 10

  She decided that she had heard nothing.

  A man on the roof of her building watched as she left the window. He signaled to another man, who in turn signaled to two more.

  Four men, two of them Americans, two Japanese, stepped through the darkness to the front of the roof edge. Silently, they let drop their rappelling ropes to a few feet above the ledge line of the new tenant’s floor. They secured the top ends by hooking them into the steel railings.

  Silently, the four made their way down the face of the apartment house, small steps at a time. Strapped to their backs were lightweight Uzi submachine guns.

  Inside the apartment building, a platoon of Americans made their way to an upper floor where the Italian woman lived. The elevator shaft was adjacent to her apartment and they did not wish to arouse the slightest suspicion of their coming. Like the men on the roof, the men in the stairwells also carried Uzis.

  “You saw nothing?” the Japanese man said to her when she returned to her tea at the table.

  “No. I was mistaken.”

  She took another sip of tea. She thought she heard something once again.

  When she looked up, she saw that he had heard it, too. He pulled a small pistol from his belt and advanced on the window, through the shadows.

  She picked up an AK-47, one of three lying on a butcherblock counter, and followed him.

  He waved to her, ordering her to wake the others. As she did so, the slumbering guests clutched at their weapons involuntarily. Their eyes fluttered open and cleared only after their hands were wrapped around AK-47s or Lugers, fingers set at the triggers. It was a discipline born of many dread nights, nights when a whimper or a cough could mean a life lost. They were guerrillas, and they were ready to make war on a second’s silent notice.

  One by one, the bodies in the room came to, stood up, guns clutched in hands.

  Outside, on the ledge, the four commandos could hear the rustling; they knew they had lost their only real weapon, the surprise element. There would be death now on each side. Eyes widened and the sweat began to pour.

  Commandos in the stairwells had reached their floor and were forming into flying wedge position at the door of the apartment, ready to charge through the barrier at the first crack of machine-gun fire. One of their number listened closely at the door. Something was different. The sounds of sleep had stopped.

  A glint of light flashed on the barrel of a commando’s Uzi—light refracted from a fog lamp in the Ginza.

  The scream of attack from inside the apartment came from first one and then a dozen or more young throats.

  Then the bullets sprayed.

  The commandos rushed through the two windows at the ledge, their Uzis sweeping the room in a horizontal, side-to-side shower of bullets. Only the sound of dropping bodies told the commandos they had hit their targets in the pitch black of the apartment.

  One of the American commandos felt fire at his throat and chin. A half-dozen bullets had made their mark. He made a futile attempt to stop the gush of blood flowing from his neck. He was thrown back by the force of the bullets, back toward the window. One more bullet crashed into his body, smashing his breast bone. He was thrown back wildly into the window, into the shards of glass and beyond. His balance and his breath and his strength at an end, the commando fell to the street, losing his life somewhere in the time it took for his broken body to hit the pavement.

  The door to the apartment had burst open in that instant and the room filled with more commandos; the men with the Uzis poured into the darkened studio, filling it with the dull popping repeater rhythm of their weapons. One of them fell immediately, hit by the fire of the Italian woman. Her shouted revolutionary slogan betrayed her position. The burp of a Uzi sliced through her abdomen and she pitched forward, then down to the floor.

  Someone, one of the Americans, shouted an end to the firing.

  A light switch was found and flipped on. Twenty-four youths lay dead on the floor of the apartment, most of them Japanese.

  The American commando on the street below was surrounded by Tokyo police officers, with more on the way, running up and down the Ginza in the shadows made by a hundred windows suddenly gone light.

  In the apartment, the only body removed was that of the commando felled as he broke through the door.

  The other riddled bodies were left where they were. The living left the premises as silently as they had arrived.

  … ANDORRA

  Ben Slayton scrambled out of his bed to the safety of the stone floor. He heard the rifle fire again. Then again.

  It was an almost leisurely sort of firing he heard, unaccompanied by return fire or the primal, savage screams of soldiers in combat. Could it be a firing range, Slayton wondered? He kept crawling toward the slits that were the windows of Sigrid’s loft.

  He raised his head over the edge of a slit in the wall. Though he could not immediately make out the meaning of what he saw below, he thought to look back at Sigrid. She had stirred herself and was now sitting up in bed, a sheet twisted around her thighs.

  Sigrid’s breasts were exposed to the chill of the morning air. The nipples were rigid. The light brown moss of her pubis glowed. Slayton was confused by his emotions, fear and lust welling in him simultaneously. He looked at her eyes and saw nothing more than a woman awakening to the unsurprising sights and sounds of her own home.

  Below him, on the broad plain Sigrid had pointed out to him the night before, were a score or more men moving about in some manner of precision. The few who barked out commands, in French, wore couvres-nuque, cloth sun protectors at their necks.

  A line of men fired carbines into the air, out over the drop-off at the limit of the plain, at the sound of a barked command. The shots echoed through the fog-shrouded mountain peaks. Slayton strained to hear clearly a chorus of voices as they chanted in French. He made out the words the third time it was called out:

  “Honneur et fidélité!… Honneur et fidélité!… ”

  The ritual came to an end. Slayton watched the men as they closed ranks, turned from the plain edge and marched toward the castle. He could not see directly below him to the ground. The small army simply disappeared.

  In her bed, Sigrid stretched and yawned.

  Slayton stood up and returned to her bed, dropping down heavily beside her.

  She didn’t wait for him to speak.

  “I lied to you,” she said. “I do not live here alone. Today, you will meet my family. Today you become one of us.”

  Fourteen

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 2:14 a.m., 16 March 1981

  The night was hard for Hamilton Winship. Each night had been hard since Slayton’s departure.

  He hadn’t slept this night, nor had he managed to rest more than five hours in a single twenty-four-hour period in the last month.

  Slayton had been so cock-sure of himself, so certain he could pull off the mission alone. It was, after all, what Winship had wanted: a lone agent.

  After all those years of waiting for the right man to come along, he had mistakenly assumed that his frustration would at last be ended; finally his great gurlt at being impotent to see justice delivered would wash away in a burst of covert actions.

  He had forgotten that the man he was waiting for, the man he needed on the outside while he handled arrangements from within, was a human being. A young man he would be sending out to face death, a young man of hopes and dreams. He was sick in the pit of his stomach.

  Winship and Slayton, during their final hours together in Washington, had recognized their fate. They were remote soldiers fighting at the outer edges of a new world war, a manner of war never fought in all the bloody history of man. They would fight against terrorists who stalked the world, not merely some battlefield—invisible warriors who wreaked their destruction often, sometimes preferably, on innocent people.

  And their most dangerous enemy, they both knew, was always the enemy within. Those who furtively permitted even the assassination of an American Pres
ident, those who would never raise their voices in unified outrage.

  Slayton was out there somewhere. Not hearing from him, not knowing, wore down Winship.

  They had decided on a brothel in Paris, not far from the headquarters of Interpol, as a place where Slayton could receive coded reports of Winship’s findings. Otherwise, they were not to be in communication with each other.

  Winship had told Slayton to move to Paris well before the date of President Reagan’s trip to Japan. Slayton would have to decide, based on what he might discover at Andorra or elsewhere, whether to scrub the President’s travel plans.

  Now that the trip was only a week off, Winship’s unease was increased. Had Slayton been killed?

  Of course, there was that chance. He had seen many men killed in his years at Treasury—men he knew, men whose families he knew. This time it was different. Ben Slayton seemed something of a wayward son to him. He believed Edith felt the same.

  He remembered calling him “that hippie” after their first meeting. He hadn’t thought of that in a long time.

  Edith slept peacefully beside him. He debated for a second or two on lighting a pipe. No, it would wake Edith.

  The telephone rang and he wasn’t surprised. Winship answered it before the first ring had stopped. Edith only grunted.

  “Yes, Winship here,” he said.

  He was told of the slaughter in a Tokyo apartment building.

  “All of them were killed?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They are all as we were told they would be?”

  “Yes, sir. Red Guards, every one of them.”

  “Thank you, Rodgers.”

  Winship settled back into the pillows he had propped up against the headboard and sighed, a long, satisfying whoosh of pure relief.

  The Japanese know how to handle these matters, he thought. Move in quickly and quietly and eliminate the cancer. Winship could be satisfied that the presence of American agents would be kept from the press. The Japanese intelligence services were very cooperative.

  Now he knew the President would be safe in his travels, even though he was still uncertain of Slayton. Perhaps their theory about the Wolf being the threat was incorrect, at least at this time. What possible connection could he have with the Red Guards?

  Winship and other high-level American intelligence officials had been tipped to the quiet assembly of Red Guard terrorists in advance of President Reagan’s still unannounced—that is, officially unannounced—trip to the Japanese capital. The source of the tip was European, and that was all Winship or anyone else knew of it. But it had proved right on the money. Right down to the last detail—the Italian woman and the studio apartment and terrorists brought singly to the premises so as to attract no attention in the vicinity of the Imperial Palace.

  Now he would be able to authorize the advance teams of Secret Service agents to Tokyo. The President’s trip could be on.

  Winship fell asleep.

  … ANDORRA

  Sigrid pecked him on the lips and climbed out of bed. She crossed the room to a pile of jumbled clothing, the garments she tore off when she and Slayton first stepped foot in the loft. They had wasted little time. Now she just as efficiently pulled her clothes back on.

  Slayton addressed her pale round buttocks, watching them disappear into denim confines.

  “Those men are your family?” His voice was incredulous.

  “My brothers in the struggle,” Sigrid said.

  “And why bring me into your clan, sister?”

  She turned and faced him.

  “You are a man of principle, as I said. I believe you will like us and what we seek to do with the world.”

  Slayton could barely contain himself. My God, I’ve found him! I was right! His thoughts reverberated loudly in his head.

  “Suppose I don’t like what you plan to do with the world? I don’t know if I Iike’the idea of anyone talking about taking action on a world scale. That sounds—”

  “You will like us,” Sigrid broke in. Then she smiled.

  Slayton shivered inwardly. It was her accent more than the words.

  “Just suppose.”

  “I do not suppose that. Now, get dressed and follow me. Come now.”

  She clapped her hands together. Slayton got up out of the bed and dressed, enjoying how Sigrid watched his body, wondering about all the men he had seen below on the plain. Was she the only woman here? By her appetite of the night before, he couldn’t imagine that she was.

  He followed her down from the loft, down a ladder leading to the ground floor he had entered last night. They picked their way around a pile of rocks massed around the entrance to an old corridor leading off the huge foyer of the castle column and proceeded, crouched over nearly double, down a blackened, dank passage leading to the open air.

  Sigrid and Slayton stepped out into the plain.

  He saw what had been darkened by the night, the rear portion of what remained of the castle. The plain formed a sort of courtyard, around which crumbled columns such as Sigrid’s tower were grouped.

  Slayton saw clusters of men standing in the entrances of the three other round castle sections. They appeared to be waiting for him to do something and they were not at all surprised by his presence.

  He turned toward Sigrid, seeking explanation.

  “You will walk out into the center of the plain, please,” she said to him.

  “Why?”

  “To be tested.”

  “Look—”

  “No. You look. You look up there.”

  Sigrid pointed to a parapet in one of the castle columns. Slayton looked up at the business end of a carbine equipped with a telescopic sight.

  “You must take the test, you see,” Sigrid said sweetly.

  Slayton looked up at the sharpshooter again, then to Sigrid.

  “Keep the bed warm for me, sister.”

  He turned his back on her and walked slowly out toward the center of the plain, understanding full well what it was like to have been a Christian among the lions in a Roman coliseum. He was to be this morning’s entertainment. If he lasted until the end of the show, so be it if not, his carcass could simply be shoved off the edge of the plain along with all the others Sigrid-the-spider-woman had lured up here.

  For several minutes, Slayton was left alone in the middle of the plain. He watched the men and they watched him. He could hear them sizing him up, deciding how best to humor themselves with his demise.

  Slayton breathed deeply. He tightened his muscles, then relaxed them, repeating this several times. Spreading his feet, he placed his hands on his hips. He shouted at the men in French, insulting their parentages.

  Two of the men standing together strode toward him, dropping their revolvers to the ground as they neared, as well as their gunbelts. They held in clenched fists, however, nine-inch wooden batons, steel-filled.

  Slayton waited until they were within three feet of him before he moved. Then, with a shrill cry, he seemed to leap straight off the ground, his legs somehow stretched out before him, his feet straightened at the ankles and pointed toward the hearts of his assailants like two sharp daggers hurling into their bodies.

  The stiff toes of his boots caught each man in the chest, stunning them, knocking the wind from them and pitching their heads forward. They reeled on their feet as Slayton nimbly twisted in the air and landed on his feet and hands after the perfectly executed jujitsu strike.

  Back on his feet and erect, Slayton rushed the men as they stumbled for their balance, as if intoxicated. He raised his right knee violently, then his left, giving each man a vicious slam in the jaw. They were now pushed backward, screaming. One man had caught his tongue between his teeth when Slayton connected with his hard knee. Blood poured from his lips.

  Slayton pursued them now as they retreated. He stomped his boot heel on the tops of their feet, injuring the delicate tarsal bones.

  His would-be assailants were now bobbling helplessly in their
pain. The men waiting were shouting their encouragement to their comrades.

  One man finally fell, covering his bleeding mouth with his hands. Slayton moved on the other man, managed to wrestle away his baton, chopped him on the throat with the rigidly held flat of his hand, and spun him around to face his cheering fellows.

  Slayton then rammed the baton savagely into his pants, under his buttocks and out between his legs.

  The injured Frenchman was given a hard shove and received the loud swat of Slayton’s boot on his rear end. He managed four or five steps toward the line of cheering men before he stumbled, sprawling to the ground at their feet.

  Then Slayton walked to the other man, still writhing in pain on the ground. He reached down, grabbed him by the hair, and cracked his head down on the hard ground.

  With one hand full of the Frenchman’s hair and the other gripped, viselike, around the tender cords below the thin skin of his neck, Slayton shouted to him in his tongue:

  “Eat the dirt! Eat it! Eat it!”

  The beaten man, his mouth full of blood and mucus, put his lips to the ground and groveled for a mouthful of the sandy mountain soil. Slayton yanked at his hair and turned his head. Satisfied that he had taken the soil into his mouth, Slayton pulled him to his feet and marched him to the line of his comrades, none of whom was cheering any longer.

  Behind the line of men, Slayton noticed a comparatively composed and noticeably older man. This one was dressed in a fine uniform and he calmly smoked a black Tunisian cigarette.

  Slayton had no time to study the man with the cigarette, the man who stood with his arm gently around the shoulders of Sigrid. His attention was drawn to the steel in his own back.

  One of the men had inserted the razor-sharp tip of a knife into the small of his back. If Slayton resisted his command to move back into the center of the plain, a kidney would be slit open. Slayton marched.

  When he reached the center, again, the man with the knife ordered him to turn around. Then Slayton was handed a knife of his own. The Frenchman squared himself and slashed the air with his knife, inviting Slayton to the fight, fair and square.