Heartland (10 page)

Read Heartland Online

Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Heartland
5.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“What did my wife say to you?” Rossiter asked gently.
Laura glanced at him, her eyes red rimmed. “She knew you were there.”
“What'd you tell her?”
Laura shook her head. “Nothing. I was frightened.”
“Then she doesn't know for sure.”
“She knows, Peter! Goddamn it, she called Minneapolis and they told her you weren't up there. If she didn't know about us, then why would she have
called my number?”
One more piece of shit in an already overloaded pot. “Laura …”
“Don't say it,” she said. “You've got your hands full now, so don't lie to me just to keep me quiet. When everything is settled at work, and you've had time to think this all out, then talk to me. But no lies, Peter. No false promises. I'm thirty years old, you're forty. We're old enough now for the truth.”
He reached out to touch her cheek, but she brushed his hand away. They continued in silence.
It was fifteen minutes before eight when they finally made it to the elevator complex, where they were stopped by the police.
Rossiter jumped out of the car. “Get out of here now, Laura, or I'll have the cops take you away. I'll call you as soon as I can.”
She looked at him and smiled wanly. “Good luck,” she said. She turned around and headed back into the city.
Rossiter jumped into the back seat of one of the waiting cruisers, and they headed across the staging area toward the main office. There were fire engines, ambulances, police cars, and people everywhere.
“What's the status?” he asked.
“They've found two other bombs, and they're looking for more.”
“When were they set to go off?”
“No way of telling for sure, Mr. Rossiter, but soon,” one of the cops said.
“There's too many people here. If this thing blows, it'll go sky high. I want you to get everyone nonessential the hell out of here. Immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” the cop said.
They pulled up at the main office, which faced the dock itself. The gigantic grain ship
Akai Maru
was lit up like a Christmas tree in the fog.
Rossiter jumped out of the cruiser and raced inside the building. It was jammed with policemen and elevator personnel. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. Telephones were ringing, and near the front window two police officers were tending portable radios, which hissed and blared with messages from the search teams below.
“Listen up, everyone!” Rossiter shbuted. The noise did not diminish.
He jumped up on a desk. “Listen up!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.
Everyone turned his way now, and the noise began to subside.
“I want everyone not directly connected with the bomb search to get the hell out of here, and away from the elevator. Right now!”
“Pete! In here!” the night manager shouted from the doorway to Rossiter's office.
Rossiter jumped down from the desk, and hurried across to his office, where Carl, the chief engineer, and two plainclothes detectives stood around a small, seedy-looking old man seated on a chair in the middle of the room. He was smiling.
“Who the hell are you?” Rossiter demanded.
“He won't give us a thing …” one of the detectives started, but the little man smiled.
“Louie Benario,” he said in a soft voice.
The detectives looked at him in amazement.
“Who sent you to sabotage my elevator, and why?”
Benario laughed out loud, and he pointed up to the clock, which showed one minute until eight. “It's too late!”
They all looked at the clock as the second hand swept up toward the hour, then at each other.
“Sound the siren!” Rossiter screamed. “Get everyone out of here!”
“Too late, too late,” Benario sang. “My pretty, my pretty fire.”
A dull explosion sounded from somewhere below them. Then something shook the building, and another, much larger explosion sent a part of the ceiling down.
“Jesus,” someone swore as the lights went out, and then all hell broke loose as the entire elevator complex burst apart in a gigantic explosion that sent flames and debris nearly one thousand feet into the air, breaking windows over a two-mile radius and burrying the office area beneath thousands of tons of concrete, steel, and burning grain.
The hot North African sun hammered the open docks at the ferry terminal within the protected harbor of Tripoli. It was a few minutes after noon, and several last-minute passengers for the boat to Palermo shuffled across the quay and boarded. A thick miasma hung in the windless air over the minarets and domed mosques of the surprisingly oriental Libyan capital. Within the city, the noon traffic was heavy. Although much of the population slept during the hottest part of the day, business still had to continue; the country, despite its protestations to the contrary, had been irrevocably influenced by the West.
Among the final passengers was a tall, well-built Frenchman, with thick black hair, wide, dark eyes, and a handsome face that would have been more at home on the rocky beaches of Cap d'Antibes than here in this
forsaken place of dust and poverty.
He was dressed plainly in a short-sleeved safari suit and soft desert boots. He carried two pieces of soft leather luggage.
At the head of the gangway, he was greeted by the ship's purser and deck officer, and a steward was assigned to show him to his first-class cabin for the thirty-hour trip.
“Have a pleasant voyage, Monsieur Riemé,” the purser said, touching the bill of his cap.
“
Merci
, I will.” He followed his steward forward to his cabin, where he ordered a bottle of good white wine and a light lunch of fish soup. He ate the soup and some bread, drank one small glass of the wine. He then poured the rest of it in his bathroom sink, careful to rinse all traces of the wine away.
He lay down and slept for one hour. When he got up, he rang his steward and ordered a bottle of bourbon and a bucket of ice. When it came he poured a small tot into a glass, sloshed a bit of it on his bed and on the carpeted deck, as if he had had an accident, and sent the remainder of the bottle after the wine down the sink.
Then he settled down to wait until nightfall, smoking Gauloise cigarettes one after another.
Henri Riemé, at twenty-nine, was young enough to have missed General de Gaulle's terrible betrayal of the French officer corps in Algeria during the fifties and sixties, but his father and three of his uncles had been left out in the cold and hung by fanatics.
For a time afterwards (his mother called those days the horrible years), the Riemé family had sunk into obscurity, the mother, Uncle Paul, and Henri living in a small flat on the Left Bank of Paris.
In the sixties, and into the seventies, when young Henri was attending school, it seemed as if the family would never make its mark on French history beyond the footnote in the texts listing the father and uncles among those purged.
It seemed that way until the Sorbonne, where young Henri, who was studying engineering, met Robert Sossoin, a radical from Marseille. They roomed together for two years. Then Henri had to drop out of school for lack of money. But meanwhile Sossoin had filled his head with Communist doctrine.
“The Communist Party is the future of France, Henri,” Sossoin would argue endlessly.
“Look what it has done to the Soviet Union,” Riemé would counter.
“Ah, the grand experiment you speak of now. You expect that in such a short time, with such a large nation, with so many different peoples, miracles can or should occur? It is only after time and effort, only after the sweat of the worker's brow runs hard and fast, that miracles will happen. There is no starvation in Russia. There are no homeless. They have brought themselves from a backward icebox of a nation to the most powerful country on this earth,” Sossoin said fervently. “We must align ourselves with them. We must free France from the stagnating grip of capitalism.”
Even those high-sounding words did not completely sway young Henri, however. His conversion did not come until nearly a year after he had dropped out of college, when he was working as a waiter at a touristy Left Bank café.
His uncle had died several months earlier, and his mother was ill, in need of hospital care. She was too
proud to accept state care, and Henri was too poor to afford private doctors. At that propitious moment, Robert Sossoin showed up, offered money, and thus recruited Henri into the LPN—Le Poing Noir (The Black Fist). The LPN's avowed aim was redistribution of wealth by taking it forcibly out of the hands of the rich and placing it in the pockets of the deserving worker.
For the next few whirlwind years, Henri and his newfound group robbed department stores and banks, their targets becoming larger and larger, their methods more and more sophisticated, and the price on their heads ever greater.
In 1977, their activities came to the attention of the KGB resident in Paris, who contacted the LPN leadership and arranged for reorganization and training.
Riemé was one of the men selected to go to Libya and then Moscow for terrorist schooling: hand-to-hand combat, demolitions, and weapons, as well as secret codes, radio work, and languages, primarily Russian and English.
Eventually their control officer, whose real name they never knew, pronounced them ready to return to France to do some real work.
The officer was a little man, with intense eyes and a dark complexion. Sitting now aboard the ferryboat, Riemé remembered well that last meeting after they had graduated, when the little man clapped him proudly on the shoulder.
“You will become a first-class assassin to rival Carlos himself. An assassin for freedom.”
Henri had been startled. He had thought of himself as an administrator, or perhaps a soldier, like his father and uncles. But an assassin? There was something faintly dirty about the notion.
Within two months of returning to France, however, he had been ordered to assassinate a minor political figure in Nancy, which he did with such sophistication and dispatch—and with such congratulations from his comrades afterward—that he was hooked. He had found his place. He was an assassin. An expert. His mother, who had died despite her operation, would have been proud of him, as would his father and uncles.
“For them,” he had told himself. “For France, and for my family.”
Those phrases had become his talisman, his prayer to the gods, before, during, and after each job.
And now there was a new assignment. It was the first to come directly from his little control officer. It would be a terrible blow against capitalism in France.
“The rich will tremble in fear,” the little man had told him one week ago in Tripoli. The meeting had been arranged through a complicated line of intermediaries.
“But why this one?” Riemé had asked, studying a photograph. It showed a man in his early fifties, coming out of a modern glass-and-steel building, apparently in Paris.
“His name is Gérard Louis Dreyfus,” the little man said. The name meant nothing to Riemé. “He is one of the most wealthy and most powerful of the international grain merchants. From France, he controls a huge portion of the world's food supply.”
“I still do not see …” Riemé began, but the little man continued as if he had never been interrupted.
“I ask you, Henri, is there starvation in the world?”
Riemé nodded.
“Then it is the people who control the food to whom we must look. Men like Louis Dreyfus, who is known as the Octopus. He steals the grain of France and other nations,
and then sells the food to the very rich for obscene profits. A man who does not deserve to live.”
“The assassination of one man in such a large business would do nothing to stop it,” Reimé argued.
“On the contrary, Henri. The Louis Dreyfus business is very special. It is entirely owned and operated by one family. By one man. Gérard. Eliminate him, and the business would take years to recover, if it ever would.”
“Others would take its place.”
The little man nodded sagely. “Not quickly. Not efficiently. And certainly not in France.”
“For France,” Riemé had said softly.
During the next five days, the plan, at once simple and yet stunning in its savagery, emerged. The LPN in Paris had made the arrangements, and Riemé was on his way.
It was just before midnight when Riemé rose from his chair and took off his shirt, laying it aside. Across the cabin, he opened one of his suitcases and extracted a thin, rubber life vest with a carbon-dioxide cartridge, which he donned. Then he put his shirt back on, making sure it totally hid the vest. If he was seen on deck, he wanted no one to notice it.
Next he unpacked a few of his clothes and scattered them around the room, leaving his wallet and passport lying conspicuously on the small writing table, as if he meant to return to his cabin. He would no longer need them, however.
At the door he listened, and when he heard nothing except the ever-present throb of the ship's diesels, he opened the door and slipped out.
He hurried down the corridor and out the hatch onto the main deck, where he waited for several moments.
There was no one about. Most of the passengers were already asleep in their cabins; only a few of them were in the bar forward.
Riemé moved aft, keeping in the shadows close to the bulkheads so that the officers on duty above on the bridge would have no chance of spotting him. The sound of the ship's engines was much louder at the stern, and he could hear the prop churning the water twenty feet below the rail.
Checking one last time to make sure no one was on deck to see him, he quickly climbed over the rail and jumped.
The boiling sea came up at him incredibly fast, and he hit badly, plunging fifteen feet beneath the water. He grappled with the carbon-dioxide cartridge beneath his shirt, finally found it, and gave a sharp tug on the lanyard. For a moment nothing seemed to happen, but then the vest tightened against his chest, ripping his shirt, and he shot up to the surface.
The ship was already a couple of hundred yards away. He cocked his head to listen for any sounds of an alarm, but there was nothing. It would be morning before it was discovered he was missing. They would find the empty wine and liquor bottles, and would come to the easy conclusion that poor Monsieur Riemé had gotten perhaps a bit too drunk, taken a stroll on the deck, and simply fallen overboard. An unfortunate but not uncommon occurrence.
Within twenty minutes, the ship was gone from sight, even its highest lights lost over the horizon. Riemé opened the large side pocket on his vest, removed the radio in its waterproof container, activated it, and held the antenna as high out of the water as he could.
For twenty minutes he bobbed up and down on the empty sea like that, utterly alone, even the stars overhead somewhat obscured by a thin haze. At last he heard the faint buzz-saw noise of an approaching boat.
He twisted around until he was able to pick out the lights, which flashed on and off at ten-second intervals, almost as if something were wrong with the electrical circuits. Then he took out his small but powerful strobe light, flipped it on, and held it out of the water.
Immediately the boat turned directly toward him, slowing down as it approached.
“Like clockwork,” the little man had told him. “This job will go so smoothly that you will be in and out of France before the authorities have any idea what hit them.”
 
The pickup had come at 12:43 A.M. Less than twenty-three hours later, at 22:28 P.M., Riemé was climbing into a legally registered, two-door Peugeot in Marseille, and heading north toward Paris five hundred miles away.
Near dawn he stopped at a small inn near the town of Briare on the Loire River, registering as Bennette Roget, a salesman from Le Havre. At this point he was less than one hundred miles from his target, on the Avenue de la Grande Armée, near the Arc de Triomphe.
He slept a few hours and had a moderately large breakfast. He took his time the rest of the way into Paris, arriving there shortly before noon. He went directly to an address on the Left Bank, which turned out to be a parking garage in a rundown section of similar structures.
With the car parked safely inside, next to a dark-blue, nondescript van he had been assured would be there,
Rieme laid his head back on the car seat, closed his eyes, and mentally readied himself for his task.
The weapon he would use was already in the van. After killing the afternoon at a movie, he would drive across the river to the office building, where he would park at exactly 6:00 P.M. Within five minutes, Gérard Louis Dreyfus would come out to his waiting limousine. Riemé would kill him and drive immediately back here. He'd take the car back to Marseille. A boat would be waiting there to take him to Barcelona and his plane to Moscow. There he would be given a new identity, and in due time another assignment.
 
André Blenault, chief comptroller for Louis Dreyfus operations in Paris, stepped out of his office on the third floor and hurried down to the receptionist near the elevator, hugging a fat briefcase to his chest. He was in a foul mood this afternoon, as he had been since one week ago last Sunday, when the cable from New York had arrived.

Other books

Not Stupid by Anna Kennedy
Heat by Joanna Blake
The Charlotte Chronicles by Jen Frederick
Orrie's Story by Thomas Berger
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith
Rulers of Deception by Katie Jennings