Retribution (15 page)

Dartley couldn’t stay in the doorway and hope she would come back. He needed to take her off the street fast, find out what
he needed to know, and act on it. He
followed her in a hurry, came alongside her, circling her waist with his left arm and showing her his right hand.

“Make one stupid move, bitch, and I’ll crush every bone in your face with this hand.” Dartley’s French accent was not good
enough for him to make his words sound the way he wanted them to, but when she looked startled into his face. Claudine saw
the cold killer’s eyes mercilessly examining her slightest moves.

He walked with her long enough to let her panic subside, but not long enough for her to think of her next move. “I’ll offer
you a deal,” he said. “I want the Palestinians, not you. Give me them and I won’t hurt you.”

She seemed about to argue, so he led her firmly by the arm down a narrow medieval street, with buildings too close together
for even the smallest cars to travel over its cobblestones.

“You have my word,” he said, holding her by the bare upper arms as she clutched her purse to the bosom of her flower-patterned
dress. “I’ll let you go. I won’t hurt you. That much you’ll get. Nothing more.” He looked into her frightened eyes and felt
her body shaking with terror. He said, “You have very little time. Talk.”

Jean-Paul and Marcel sat in separate cars, the engines idling. They were at opposite ends of a short street, in sight of each
other. Beneath each man’s legs on the floor of the car, lay an Uzi submachine gun, along with six spare twenty-five round
magazines of 9mm
cartridges. Between the pair of them, they could account for a reasonable percentage of the lives in the old town flower market
if things went wrong.

They stayed in the cars, engines running, while Claudine moved back and forth between them. She was an additional guard against
the unexpected, ready to signal an emergency or even act as a diversion. She didn’t walk all the way to the cars each time,
but tried to vary the pattern of her movements, stopping to examine the flowers on a stall, walking first on one side of the
street, then on the other. The few people who noticed her, mostly stall merchants, who never missed a trick, assumed she was
a hustler. One merchant even decided that she was so pretty, if his business was good that day and her price reasonable, an
hour with her might be just what he needed.

Jean-Paul and Marcel both saw the man walk alongside her, circle her waist with his arm and talk with her. His back was turned
to Jean-Paul and he was too far way from the bespectacled, somewhat shortsighted Marcel to recognize him as an American in
the French clothes Dartley had bought in Paris. Marcel cursed, assuming that Claudine had accidentally run into an old flame,
of which he was convinced she had several thousand. Jean-Paul was hit with a pang of jealousy for the same reason, although
he would have put an estimate on her affairs at less than fifty.

Claudine seemed at first to be going willingly with him, perhaps hoping to talk him into leaving her now by making a promise
to see him later. When the
stranger steered her off the street into an alley, both men knew things were wrong. She hadn’t resisted leaving the street
because she knew it would be a signal to them. All three were clear on her primary orders, which were not to leave that street
for any reason but the most dire emergency. Suddenly both Jean-Paul and Marcel realized who the man with Claudine must be.

Marcel and Jean-Paul reacted the same way. They pocketed spare magazines, put each Uzi in a paper sack, and came at a half
run. They reached the opening to the alley at the same time and saw Claudine pushed against a door by the American.

Dartley’s cold eyes sent icy tingles down the woman’s spine. His eyes were like what she imagined a timber wolf’s eyes must
be as he slavered over his victim. Her mind was paralyzed.

She looked at the edge of the American’s right hand, which he was holding a few inches in front of her eyes. Was he going
to hit her? No, no, not her face! She would tell him anything. Jean-Paul would be able to handle him. Marcel would shoot him
in the back. She did not want to be hurt. The edge of the hand before her eyes had a long callus. She shrunk back against
the wood door, her throat too dry with fear to utter a sound.

His hand moved too fast for her eyes to follow. She heard a door board crack like a pistol shot next to her left ear.

The knife edge of the hand, with little flecks of
green door paint still attached, returned and hovered again in front of her face. The cold blue-green eyes looked into hers
unwaveringly.

His voice was calm and icy as his eyes.

“Tell me where to find the Palestinians.”

Marcel raised the paper sack with the Uzi inside to blow away the American.

Jean-Paul pushed it downward with his free hand before Marcel could fire. “You’ll hit Claudine!” he shouted.

Claudine turned her face as she heard Jean-Paul say her name. Dartley saw the two men also. He jerked the woman out of the
doorway and held her in front of him. He knew he was not being very noble, sheltering like his behind a woman’s body, but
she had tried to arrange his killing once before and those two guys weren’t holding bunches of flowers in those paper sacks.

“Hold off, assholes, or the lady dies,” Dartley shouted to them. Then he muttered in her ear, “You’re not out of this until
I let you go. Tell me first. Where are the Palestinians?”

She said nothing.

Dartley couldn’t tell whether she was so frightened now she couldn’t speak or whether she was playing for time, depending
on Jean-Paul and Marcel to rescue her. She was still clutching her purse to her breast, so Dartley reached around her and
wrenched it from her
grasp. Without opening the zipper, he could feel the pistol inside through the soft leather.

The two Frenchmen were walking him down. Claudine still hadn’t said a word. They wanted to get near enough to pull her away
and chop him up fine. He opened the purse zipper with his teeth and pulled the pistol out. It was a little Colt .22 automatic
with pearl grips, a lady’s gun but deadly enough at close range.

Dartley pushed the weapon forward in front of him and Claudine, letting the purse drop. A lipstick fell from it, some coins
and a ticket, at which Dartley took a half second to look. Nice–Barcelona on French railways. He cocked the pistol and squeezed
off a shot at the one with the spectacles but missed.

The bullet spanged off the cut stone wall next to Marcel’s head. Marcel, the intellectual, had never been under direct fire
before. The possibility of severe hurt was joltingly brought home to him. It was only Claudine’s little pistol and he had
a submachine gun. He raised the paper sack with the Uzi.

Jean-Paul saw that Marcel was going to shoot. He tried to swat the paper sack with his free hand again. Too late. The end
of the paper sack shredded, charred, and began to burn as the Uzi muzzle inside spat bullets and flame.

Dartley felt the shocks in Claudine’s body as four slugs hit her from the burst of fire. He now had to hold her sagging, lifeless
form in front of him.

When Jean-Paul saw the bleeding shattered body of his lover, her chin fallen on her chest, arms sagging,
knees buckling, a hideous expression of pain became set on his face.

“Cochon!”
he screamed at Marcel and loosed off a burst from his Uzi.

Marcel was just about to explain or apologize when his comrade’s bullets cut the voice box out of his neck, along with his
veins, arteries, and esophagus. He stopped trying to say something and looked down in amazement at the blood streaming from
his throat. Then he fell in a heap, and his Uzi, only partly concealed now in the smoldering paper sack, rattled on the cobblestones.

Dartley had not been standing and staring while this was going on. He dropped Claudine’s cadaver and took the only exit offered
him by kicking in a couple of door boards next to the one he had cracked with the side of his hand. The ancient wood was dry
and brittle and shattered under the violent impact of his kick. He shouldered his way into the house, still clutching the
little Colt .22. This was no great refuge, but it sure beat facing a man with an Uzi in a narrow alley.

He found himself in a storage area. From it he went into a large kitchen. Guessing that the front entrance to the house was
in the opposite direction to the alleyway back entrance, he followed a dark corridor which opened into a hallway, from which
rooms opened off. He saw a staircase and a street door, and he heard the surviving Frenchman somewhere behind him in the house.

Dartley opened and shut the street door softly after him. This street was nearly empty, with cars parked along both sides.
He ran into the street, then ducked down below the level of the car roofs and ran crabwise, looking back for Claudine’s avenger
to appear.

Jean-Paul stepped out of the doorway, the submachine gun held openly in his hands, a wild look in his eyes. Before the Frenchman
reached the street, Dartley threw himself down and rolled under a car. He lay on his back looking up at the rusty underside,
listening to the Frenchman’s approaching footsteps. There was no traffic or pedestrians—Dartley figured that maybe they changed
their minds about using this street when they saw someone with a submachine gun walking down the middle of it. Every now and
then, the footsteps paused. Dartley guessed his pursuer was looking into doorways or thought he heard something suspicious.
Then the steps would come closer again.

Where were the police? Why couldn’t he hear sirens? France was on a state of alert. What the hell was delaying everybody?
Two people had already been cut down by automatic gunfire. Surely someone would respond?

Dartley knew his sense of time was being slowed—what were seconds in reality seemed like minutes to him as he waited for those
approaching footsteps. Surely this Frenchman, in spite of his rage, knew he had only limited time in which to act before the
police came? Or was he so crazed by grief at Claudine’s death
that he no longer cared, intending first to kill Dartley and then shoot it out with the police?

Dartley saw his shoes. He was standing in the street only a few feet from the car Dartley was under. He must have been looking
around warily, wondering where in hell the American could have got to. Dartley was done waiting. He levered himself sideways
so that his arm and half his face emerged from under the car.

Jean-Paul glanced down startled and lowered the Uzi barrel to sweep this sudden threat almost at his feet. But Dartley was
already firing from beneath.

The first bullet punched through the Frenchman’s scrotum and came to a stop deep in his guts. The second and third little
lead projectiles bored through his abdominal muscles and chewed up his intestines. By the time Jean-Paul hit the asphalt,
he had twisted himself into a knot.

“Wait,” Naim said to Hasan.

They sat in the car Marcel had left with its engine running when he saw Claudine being abducted into the alley. They had headed
for the car when they saw the two Direct Action men go in the alley, abandoning the getaway cars. Neither had seen what had
happened to Claudine. Then they heard two bursts of automatic fire from the alley. Hasan was behind the steering wheel and
wanted to take off.

“Wait,” Naim repeated.

They watched and waited for more than a minute. People were running from the market in all directions,
many not sure from where the gunfire had come. Jittery from all the stories of terrorism, most seemed to be heading home by
the shortest routes, like frightened dogs.

They heard three pistol shots.

“We have to go,” Hasan said urgently.

“There’s hardly anyone left in the market,” Naim pointed out.

“The longer you wait, the fewer there will be.”

They heard approaching sirens.

“All right,” Naim said, pressing the button on the small radio transmitter in his hand.

The blast in the flower market heaved up a giant fountain of roses and carnations like fiery red lava from a volcano. The
blossoms plopped down in a hail over the old town.

The six surviving recruits from Abu Jeddah’s training camp flew from Damascus to Rabat in Morocco. From Morocco they crossed
by boat to Spain and were met by a wealthy Jordanian who took them to his villa at the luxury resort of Marbella. The five
youths and one girl, all eighteen or nineteen years old, had never seen anything like this before. So this was what the degenerate
West looked like—no rubble in the streets, no sandbagged barriers, no shell-pocked buildings…

The plan was for Naim to send for them when he reached Barcelona. They would take the train up the coast to Barcelona, traveling
separately on three different trains. Each would bring as his or her baggage the armaments the Jordanian had kept in store
for them. Until they heard from Naim, they were free to relax and enjoy themselves at the villa in Marbella.

Trouble started when the Jordanian made a play for Leila. The nineteen-year-old recruit was pretty and
liked to laugh and chatter, but beneath this cheerful exterior lay a hard resolve, forged and reinforced by the deaths of
her father and two brothers in the Beirut refugee camp of Shatila. The Jordanian was fat, soft, in his fifties, with an eye
for young flesh. He came into her room early in the morning and slipped into bed beside her. She was sleeping on her back.
He moved his right hand beneath the T-shirt she was wearing. The taut soft skin of her belly was warm beneath his touch. She
stirred in her sleep. Then he felt her left hand encircle and hold his swollen cock. Just as he was about to move closer,
he felt a stinging at the base of his penis. She was holding a knife blade to it. The Jordanian’s erection collapsed too fast
for any real damage to be done, though she did jab him twice in the ass with the knife point as he hurriedly left her bed.