(2013) Collateral Damage (4 page)

It was an editorial policy which had earned him much praise in
the West and the undying hatred of many of his regular Arab readers. On the Palestinian
question, for example, most of his enemies took the line that there could be no
conditional support. One was either for or against them. And in
his own
country even fellow moderates secretly bitched because
they envied him for his success with the kind of foreigners whose approbation they
themselves so desperately sought. Some of these enemies were violent people as accustomed
to turning to their guns as other men summon their lawyers. Yet he did not fear
for his life. As he often told his friends, he had completely succumbed to the enormous
assurance of the city in which he lived. He had come to the conclusion that an unspoken
conspiracy existed to make London the most civilized, outwardly non-violent capital
in the world. He constantly saw clues to this conspiracy in small things. Hyde Park
Corner, for instance, the race-track of the city around which cars sped six abreast.
Their drivers could steer across your bows with just the same amount of malice as
their French or Italian counterparts, but it was all oddly muted. Acts of considerable
motorized aggression were committed in a tight-lipped, unklaxoned silence. In Cairo
or Beirut a man might sound his horn at the merest suggestion of another car. Here
the silent traffic all seemed part of this odd covenant of restraint.

The city's ostentatiously unarmed policemen, transformed into
giants by their quaint Victorian headgear, were part of the same plot. He knew,
of course, because as a newspaperman he made it his business to know, that things
were not always as they seemed: that some of those same policemen, especially those
guarding certain embassies and airline offices, carried the newly issued American
revolver under their tunics. But the important thing was that the facade was still
more or less intact: rude behaviour was not expected and therefore, compared with
other capitals, was a rare occurrence. When it did happen people were outraged.

The publisher was one of those foreigners who lived in a manner
few Englishmen born in the reign of George VI could afford. It had become a habit,
at about 6 p.m. every Wednesday evening, to drive his Jaguar to his club in Pall
Mall for drinks with a friend and then on to dinner somewhere. Afterwards, if the
mood was right, they might cruise around Shepherd Market and pick up a couple of
the whores. Despite the sighting of the first Saudis and Iranians of the season,
you could still find quite a lively young thing for less than one hundred pounds.

Koller was placing his bomb under the driving-seat of the publisher's
metallic blue XJ6. There had been no trouble getting a door-key for it because the
name of the dealer who supplied it was still plastered across the back window. It
had been a simple matter to go there posing as a friend of the publisher and explain
that he had lost his keys and wanted another one.

At moments like this Koller worked very calmly. The nervousness
came before. Once he started, everything was all right.
A fatalism
came over him, something akin to that feeling of levitation sometimes experienced
by people who have survived a bad car crash: a sensation of hovering above events
watching his fate quite dispassionately.

He opened the driver's door and then, crouched on his haunches,
laid the executive case on the seat and opened it. The lid of the case would have
obscured the view of any passer-by on the pavement
who
happened to glance in the car, and Koller's body shielded it from observation from
the road. Carefully, he removed the clothes-peg and set the hands of the clock.
He checked that the battery connections were secure, and that the detonator was
correctly attached to the grey slabs of plastic explosive. For good measure he had
put in some extra slabs that were unconnected to the main charge, but was fairly
certain that it would be enough to set them off too. He didn't trust bombs. He much
preferred bullets, but his instructions in this case had been quite specific.

Even so he had brought with him a big FN Browning 13-shot service
automatic that did not improve the cut of his Harris
tweed
jacket. Ideally, he would have liked the gun he had in Paris, one of the new snub-nosed
.44 magnums, the sort some American police were beginning to carry as a backup gun
and guaranteed to stop a Mercedes if you got close enough. He was always fearful
that the butt of the huge Browning, which he kept in a shoulder-holster, was poking
out from beneath his jacket and constantly tugged at his left lapel to make sure
it
was well hidden.

He closed and re-locked the car door, then crossed the wide street
and walked down it a little way until he came to some black-painted iron railings
above the basement entrance to a large, white-painted Georgian town house.

It was the very worst time for a bomb. The evening rush-hour
was approaching its peak and the overspill from the main arteries of the city was
beginning to clog the side-streets. Several taxis passed the booby-trapped car.
Then a couple of teenagers from an international school, mostly
attended by the sons and daughters of diplomats, cycled slowly by.
Koller,
his mind frozen on his target, watched their progress with all the detachment of
a tennis umpire. First they were in court, then they were line ball, then they were
out. The fading spring sun cast long shadows.

The terrorist was standing about three hundred paces from the
car. He wondered whether that was far enough away. He thought it was, but you could
never really be sure with these things. He looked at his watch. Three minutes to
go. His man was slightly behind schedule; he should have been coming out of the
front door by now. He looked around. There was a gate in the railings with some
steps leading down to what was obviously a basement flat. It had a window in its
front door, but this was covered with a white muslin curtain. He went through the
gate and sat on the top step, so that he was slightly lower than the level of the
road. He was beginning to wish he had not included those extra slabs of explosive.
He just didn't know how powerful the bomb would be. It was the wrong bomb, of course,
he knew that. It was a very crude bomb indeed. He should have had one of the mercury-fused
types which you place under the driving-seat to detonate as soon as the car starts
moving and the wobbly chemical connects the circuit.

For some reason they didn't have that equipment in London just
as they only had pistols that looked as though you were carrying half a house-brick
under your jacket. If the publisher had not got into his car by the time it exploded
he was banking that the noise would bring him immediately to his front door and
that he would get him then. Koller calculated that the distance from where he was
sitting to the entrance of the publisher's apartment block was about three hundred
metres, perhaps slightly less. The accurate range of the Browning was no more than
seventy metres maximum. He would have to close in quickly, preferably to a range
of about ten metres. He couldn't miss him from there. Whether he could kill him
was another matter. It never ceased to amaze him how much lead human bone and tissue
could take.

Two minutes to go. The publisher had been delayed by a telephone
call. One of his contributors wanted to extend his deadline. He had a block; the
piece was a pig to write; the situation was so fluid it was like trying to write
on water. His deadline had already been extended once, but the publisher was a patient
man. 'Don't worry, my friend,' he said, 'the 24th will do. Perhaps the situation
will have solidified by then.
But no later.
OK?'

He put the receiver down, checked his trouser pockets for his
car keys, and walked down a short hallway hung with
Roberts
prints of idyllic Levantine harbours and Grecian ruins. He was on the first floor
and therefore in the habit of taking the stairs down as a token gesture towards
keeping fit, like his occasional games of squash. Why, he wondered, did journalists
need so much attention? They were like children. First of all they gave you nothing
but excuses as to why they had not done the thing they had promised to do. Then,
when they had done it, despite the fact that it was late and twice the length you
had asked for, they pestered you on the phone every day until you told them it was
a work of genius. Strangely, although they were usually quite poor, they rarely
quibbled about money. They seemed to be entirely held together by their enormous
egos.

Outside, Emma had rounded the corner from Toby's flat in Cadogan
Square and was about to pass the publisher's Jaguar. She had decided to take the
tube from Sloane Square rather than attempt the impossible and try to find a free
taxi at that time of the evening. Her mind was still battling with the problem of
how she would tell Dove she was leaving him. It was not helped in its task by the
first faint drumbeats of a hangover.

Thirty seconds to go.

Koller stamped out a cigarette, pulled the Browning from beneath
his jacket, slid back the cocking mechanism, sat with the weapon held loosely in
his two hands between his knees.

He watched the blonde-haired girl approach the car. She walked
slowly as if her mind was somewhere else. He could see she was a good-looking young
woman, wearing the same sort of boots with narrow, rolled jeans on top as the cabinet
minister's daughter. It would be a waste if she was killed. Hurry you fool, he thought,
walk faster. Schnell! Schnell! But Emma continued to walk like a somnambulist, looking
neither to left nor right, her Londoner's feet instinctively missing the dog turds
on the pavement.

The publisher emerged just as Emma was level with his car. At
the same time the bomb went off with two distinct reports. First there was the crumph
of the plastic explosive followed, perhaps a second later, by the dull whumf of
the petrol tank going up. The publisher was blown back inside the house while the
front door swung so far back against its hinges that it hit the hallway wall, bounced
forward again and slammed shut.

Across the street Koller's vision was rapidly becoming obscured
by the smoke from the blazing Jaguar. Seconds before the bomb went off he had been
up, pistol in hand, ready for the sprint down the road. But the blast had made him
drop down again. By the time he was running toward the burning car the front door
was shut tight and smoke was billowing across the road. There was a tinkling sound,
almost like running water, as the last glass fell out of two dozen shattered window-panes.

Koller was quite beside himself with rage. There was no doubt
that the whole operation had been a fiasco. And it wasn't his fault. They hadn't
given him the right equipment. They had fucked it up. Not him.

For half a minute he completely lost his head. His eyes smarting
from smoke, he ran around the rear of the Jaguar and started shooting at the obstinately
closed front door. He fired seven shots in rapid succession. The door was big and
old and made mostly of oak with cross-sections two-and-a-half inches thick. Because
he was standing below it most of his shots went high. Three hit the cross-sections,
which were sufficiently thick to slow the passage of the nine-millimetre round so
that by the time they were through the woodwork they were badly misshapen and virtually
spent. The other four rounds went through the panels between the cross-sections
with no trouble at all.

The Palestinian publisher, who had fallen in the entrance hallway
with his back to the wall, was beginning to pull himself up when the bullets began
to buzz around him like angry insects. It took him a couple of seconds to realise
what was happening.

He ran across the hall and took a great leap up the carpeted
stairway that led back to his apartment. As he did so one of the German terrorist's
last shots caught him high in his right arm. For a moment he was thrown against
the wall, but terror worked his limbs and he staggered up the four steps necessary
to put him beyond the bullets like a man on fire.

***

Alfred Gold, taxi driver, was motoring along Cadogan Gardens
on his way back towards the rank at Sloane Square, when he came upon an amazing
sight. A big car, it was too far gone to tell what type, was ablaze at the side
of the road. Standing as near to its rear bumper as the flames would allow was a
fair-haired man in a sports jacket, his knees slightly bent, his shoulders hunched
forward, and holding a pistol in both hands which he appeared to be firing at someone's
front door. Beyond the gunman, through the smoke, he could see somebody lying prone
on the pavement.

The taxi driver would not have considered himself in his wildest
dreams to be the stuff that heroes are made of. Afterwards, he told the reporters
that he just didn't think about it. He drove his taxi straight at Koller.

The terrorist had heard the taxi approach even as he was squeezing
off his last two shots at the door. He turned, saw the black Daimler diesel was
about to ram him, snapped off one shot at the windscreen, stepped onto the pavement
and ran to his right, inside the taxi's turning circle.

As soon as he saw the gun pointing at him Gold instinctively
braked, bringing the cab to rest with its front wheels just over the kerb. The shot
shattered the windscreen, went over the taxi driver's left shoulder, and out of
his vehicle through the back window. Blinded, Gold punched a hole in his frosted
windscreen while Koller, who was by now recovering his cool, ran around the side
of the taxi pumping two more shots into it as he went. One demolished the meter;
the second drilled through the passenger door and went out through the floorboards
by the accelerator, missing Gold's right foot by a couple of inches. The cabbie
slammed his vehicle into first, went right up on to the pavement, and then executed
a tight, three-hundred-and-sixtydegree turn.