Retribution (6 page)

Richard Dartley was an exception to this rule. She had cooked steaks for them in her Washington apartment, saying that she
supposed she should be grateful he had not become a vegetarian.

“Or a celibate,” Dartley added.

She smiled.

After dinner she slipped out of her caftan and strode naked on high heels into her bedroom. Dartley
followed her in and found her standing before a full-length mirror, brushing her blonde hair over her shoulders. The large,
proud globes of her breasts were reflected in the mirror. His eyes roved over her broad shoulders, down her back to where
it narrowed sharply to her waist, the cleft at the base of her spine, the smooth curves of her ass. He felt his cock stiffen.

He kicked off his shoes and discarded his clothes. Walking up behind her, he placed his hands on her shoulders and looked
at her breasts in the mirror. Her nipples were erect and the areolae were dark and distended. His hands slid from her shoulders
and stroked her breasts.

He pressed his body into her back, letting her feel his stiff dick. She turned to face him and they tightly embraced.

He led her across the room and pushed her down on the bed. She lay back with her eyes shut, waiting submissively for him to
take his pleasure with her.

Naim had them do a dry run the previous day and everything had worked perfectly, with the timing just right. Hasan had the
most objections, so Naim had him take the main part, which Naim himself would take the following day. Hasan’s objections were
reasonable.

“They told us that Oxford University exists for its students, not tourists,” Hasan said. “Christ Church College was getting
so crowded, they have to limit tourists to small groups between 9:30 to noon and 2:00 to 4:30. You even have to pay an entrance
fee. It’s
crazy to go into any restricted environment like that when the streets are open and unwatched.”

“I agree,” Naim said. “It’ll be the last place they will expect terrorists to strike. I’m sure all three of us would be taken
in for questioning if we set foot within a mile of London Airport. But they won’t be watching for us at Christ Church.”

Hasan gesticulated with his hands. “Why Christ Church? Why not Westminster Abbey?”

“Because that would be taken as an attack on religion,” Naim explained. “Ilt’s Christ Church
College
we’re targeting. Why that one? Two reasons. It is old and beautiful and draws tourists. The second reason is more important.
Of all the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, Christ Church supplies by far the greatest number of members of Parliament. In a
single act we will show them that nothing they revere is safe from us.”

Hasan smiled slowly. “It is worth the risk,” he said.

Six months before Naim had spent three days visiting Oxford. He had spent some time then at Christ Church College and knew
exactly where he would go. On the second day Hasan and Ali drove to Oxford separately along the M40 and A40. Naim took an
express train from Paddington Station, a journey of about an hour which he hoped to complete unnoticed. But he had no such
luck. A moderately insane elderly woman with dried flowers in her straw hat sat next to him, informed him that he was a kind-looking
young man and proceeded to tell him what was on her mind.
Pigeons were robbing all the seeds from her bird feeder, bullying away the little songbirds.

Naim nodded sympathetically to her and looked around desperately for another empty seat. There wasn’t one.

She told him her bird feeder was on top of an antique stone column around which ivy grew. She claimed it had been the centerpiece
of her garden— before the pigeons discovered it. She had clapped her hands and shouted at them. This worked at first and then
not at all. In fact one afternoon one of the pigeons landed on her shoulder, obviously expecting to be fed. Quite clearly
she needed to take action urgently then. Didn’t the kind-looking man agree?

Naim nodded and avoided the eye of a man smirking at his predicament. Normally Naim would not have minded at all listening
to her patter. But today he wanted to pass unnoticed. He did not utter a word in case his Arabic-accented English might draw
further attention to him.

She said she had a brilliant idea. She would take the bird feeder off the stone column and hang it from a bamboo pole stuck
in the ground. The ligfit weight of the small birds would hardly affect it, but heavy pigeons trying to land on the feeder
would cause the bamboo and feeder to whip back and forth and dislodge the pigeons.

Naim smiled brightly to demonstrate his appreciation of this maneuver.

This was the kind of occurrence he had been
warned about in training. Once an operation was under way in earnest, simple everyday things which can be depended upon not
to change suddenly show remarkable ability to do so. The Americans had a phrase for it: anything that can happen will. For
a century the English were famous for not talking to strangers on trains. Here was the exception to prove that rule. He somehow
managed to mumble and smile his way until the train neared Oxford, when he fled from his seat. Damn, some of those passengers
would remember the foreigner pestered by the crazy bird lady.

He walked down the hill from the station and caught a red bus to Carfax, a major Oxford intersection. Ali met him on St. Aldate’s
Street and handed him a briefcase out the car window.

“Join Hasan,” Naim said unnecessarily to Ali, who drove away. Yesterday they had all come to Oxford together in one car.

Tom Tower stood nearby over the main gate of Christ Church College. Hasan had carried an empty briefcase yesterday and had
not been asked to check it or reveal its contents. But why should he? They were in the heart of peaceful England.

“If you care to wait, sir,” one of the men at the gate said to him after he had paid admission, “I will be giving a short
talk on some points of interest to these Japanese and American gentlemen following you.”

Naim looked back and saw a dozen or so men who might be academics or medical doctors on a convention outing. “How long will
I have to wait?”

“No more than three or four minutes, sir.”

“Thank you, I will.”

He lingered a little, then wandered casually into Tom Quad. Having opened the briefcase, he set the digital timer for six
minutes and spent an anxious moment as he snapped the current on. A misconnection or fault in the circuit could have set the
bomb off. Hooking the device to its live power source was always the most dangerous point in handling delayed-action mechanisms.
Naim set down the briefcase against the base of the building’s ancient stone wall. Then he walked away quickly toward the
east side of the quad. He turned right into Peckwater Quad and hurried on to the smallest of the college’s four quads, Canterbury.
Outside the back gates of the college, Hasan and Ali waited in their cars. He joined Hasan and Ali followed them, ready to
run interference if they were chased.

“Christ Church was Henry the Eighth’s favorite Oxford college,” the guide announced in a slightly bored way to the law professors
from Japan and the United States. They were attending some event at one of the other colleges and came around here in batches
of two nations at a time. Already today they’d had the Italians and Nigerians. He ushered them into Tom Quad, looked for a
moment for the other visitor, decided he hadn’t waited, and promptly forgot him. A fountain played on the green lawn of the
quad. “Garden parties are held here. But, gentlemen, please don’t walk
on the grass. That privilege is reserved for members of the college,” by which he meant the teaching staff.

The visitors looked suitably impressed.

The guide pointed upward. “Tom Tower, over the main gate, was begun by Cardinal Wolsey, who founded Christ Church in 1525,
and finished in the next century by Sir Christopher Wren. Its seven-ton bell, known as Great Tom, tolls a hundred and one
times at 9:05
P.M
. This was curfew time for the hundred and one original students, and the custom has been kept on. No doubt it tolls at five
minutes past the hour to accommodate the objection of a student who pointed out that Oxford is five minutes west of the Greenwich
meridian, east of London.”

The law professors politely tittered at this distinction.

Inside the briefcase the last few seconds of the six minutes set on the digital timer’s liquid crystal display flicked backward
to four zeros. The automatic switches connected the battery to the fuse circuits. The fuse ignited the plastic explosive.
The charge blew the three-inch steel nails packed tightly around it through the disintegrating briefcase leather. The stone
wall behind the charge directed its force into the quad.

The nails passed through the bodies of the nearest law professors without stopping.

Dartley first became aware of the Oxford attack that afternoon on a London street. The early editions of the evening papers
carried it in banner headlines, and he saw more about it on the television news. No mention of the Ostend Concordance or that
the attackers might be Arab. A Northern Ireland clergyman on a visit to Oxford was certain this was the work of the Provisional
IRA.

Six of the thirteen law professors had died within an hour of the explosion, cut to pieces by steel nails. Four others and
their guide were badly injured, with two not expected to survive. The chief constable said that he had nothing further to
say to the press at this, stage, but that the police had received important information and that arrests were imminent.

Having taken an early train to Oxford next morning, Dartley avoided the main gate of Christ Church and spent some hours prowling
student hangouts and
bookstores close to that college. It was as if an unwritten pact had been made among the students not to speak of the incident
and return to normal life immediately. Dartley reflected that on an American campus students would be compering to tell TV
cameras how traumatized their lives were by the bombing. Here it was cold politeness and sealed lips.

In a little lunch place he spotted a student who was almost certainly an Arab. The young man was alone, sitting at a small
table at which there was one other chair.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” Dartley asked, settling himself in the vacant chair.

The student looked up from his food, a greasy mess of brown meat, gravy, potatoes, and soggy cabbage. He looked more than
startled, maybe a bit frightened. His eyes flickered to several empty tables that Dartley might have taken. His eyes met the
American’s cold, green killer’s eyes for a moment and he said, “No, I do not mind.”

Dartley made no attempt to politely ease into conversation. “Yesterday’s incident: may be rough on you.”

The student looked down at his food. “Why?”

“Palestinians did it.”

He looked up angrily. “I am not Palestinian. I am from Kuwait. If you know anything, you will know that we jail terrorists,
not help them.”

Dartley nodded and continued staring at the student. “Are you an American newspaperman?” the student asked.

“Sometimes I claim I am, but no one believes me.”

“Oh. Very well, I will not ask who you are.”

“Nor I you,” Dartley said agreeably, adding, “if we get along.”

The student was made angry again by this veiled threat. “I have a status in this country. My government sent me to Christ
Church—”

“You could be found in the river in a burlap bag,” Dartley told him in a low, serious voice.

There was a certain earnest note of conviction in the American’s voice which made the Kuwaiti sit very still.

Dartley went on, “I want to hear what you Arab students have been saying to each other. Do you all know that Palestinians
were responsible?”

“I haven’t seen another Arab student since early yesterday. Maybe they are staying in their rooms today. I should have.”

“Don’t play games with me. Someone told you something.”

“I swear to you, I have not spoken with a fellow Arab since early yesterday.”

“What did he say?”

“Go on.”

“It happened the day before yesterday. She was near the back gate of Christ Church and saw a man come out. She paid no notice
until he hailed another man nearer her in Arabic. They did not notice her. She desperately wanted to talk with them, I think
because one of them was very handsome. But she held back because she is a Moslem woman and also because she
was dressed in a style some Arabs would consider immodest. She followed them and listened so she could tell by their accents
where they were from. If they had been Saudis or Kuwaitis, she would not have dared approach them, since so many of us are
highly conservative. But these were Palestinians and she is an Egyptian. Most of those two nationalities are liberal by strict
Islamic standards. Just as she was about to call to them a car drove up, then they jumped in and sped away.”

“What did she hear them say?”

“The one who came out of Christ Church sounded pleased and said something about the timing being correct. The handsome one
who met him said that a lot of this college’s students become members of Parliament. Then he said something that puzzled her.
He said that next time they would not travel so far, they would bring things right to Fleet Street’s doorstep.”