The Deceiver

  “So what did you get involved for?”

  “There was a twenty percent commission. A hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Peanuts.”

  “Not to me.”

  “You write thriller novels, remember.”

  “Which don’t sell all that well. Despite the publisher’s blurb. I wanted to make a few bob.”

  “Bob?”

  “Shillings,” murmured al-Mansour. “British equivalent for “greenbacks” or “dough.”

  At four in the morning, Terpil and al-Mansour went into a huddle. They talked quietly in an adjacent room.

  “Could there really be a radical group in the States prepared to carry out a major outrage at the White House and the Senate?” asked al-Mansour.

  “Sure,” said the burly American who hated his homeland. “In a country that size, you get all kinds of weirdos. Jesus, one Claymore mine in a briefcase on the lawn of the White House. Can you imagine it?”

  Al-Mansour could. The Claymore is one of the most devastating antipersonnel weapons ever invented. Shaped like a disk, it leaps into the air when detonated, then sends thousands of ball-bearings outward from the perimeter of the disk at waist-height. A moving sheet of these missiles will slice through hundreds of human beings. Loosed in an average railway concourse, a Claymore will leave few of the thousands of commuters in the area alive. For this reason, the sale of the Claymore is fiercely vetted by America. But there are always replicas. ...

  At half-past four, the two men returned to the sitting room. Although Rowse did not know it, the gods were smiling on him that night. Al-Mansour needed to bring something to his Leader without further delay to satisfy the insistent pressure for revenge against America; Terpil needed to prove to his hosts that he was still the man they needed to advise them about America and the West. Finally, both men believed Rowse for the reason that most men believe: because they wanted to.

  “You may go, Mr. Rowse,” said al-Mansour mildly. “We will check, of course, and I will be in touch. Stay at the Apollonia until I or someone sent by me gets in touch.”

  The two heavies who had brought him drove him back and dropped him at the hotel doorway before driving off. When he entered his room, he switched on the light, for the dawn was not yet bright enough to fill his west-facing room. Across the valley, Bill, who was on the shift, activated his communicator and awoke McCready in his hotel room in Pedhoulas.

  Rowse stooped to pick something from the carpet inside his room. It was a brochure inviting visitors to visit the historic Kykko Monastery and admire the Golden Icon of the Virgin. A single script in pencil beside the paragraph said “Ten A.M.”

  Rowse set his alarm for three hours’ sleep. “Screw McCready,” he said as he drifted off.

  Chapter 4

  Kykko, the largest monastery in Cyprus, was founded in the twelfth century by the Byzantine emperors. They chose their spot well, bearing in mind that the lives of monks are supposed to be spent in isolation, meditation, and solitude.

  The vast edifice stands high on a peak west of the Marathassa Valley in a situation so remote that only two roads lead to it, one from each side. Finally, below the monastery, the two roads blend into one, and a single lane leads upward to the monastery gate.

  Like the emperors of Byzantium, McCready, too, chose his spot well. Danny had stayed behind in the stone hut across the valley from the hotel, watching the curtained windows of the room where Rowse slept, while Bill, on a motorcycle acquired for him locally by the Greek-speaking Marks, had ridden ahead to Kykko. At dawn, the SAS sergeant was well hidden in the pines above the single track to the monastery.

  He saw McCready himself arrive, driven by Marks, and he watched to see who else came. Had any of the Irish trio appeared, or the Libyan car (they had noted its number), McCready would have been alerted by three warning blips on the communicator and would have vaporized. But only the usual stream of tourists—most of them Greek and Cypriot—trundled up the track on that May morning.

  During the night the head of station in Nicosia had sent one of his young staffers up to Pedhoulas with several messages from London and a third communicator. Each sergeant now had one, aside from McCready.

  At half-past eight Danny reported that Rowse had appeared on the terrace and taken a light breakfast of rolls and coffee. There was no sign of Mahoney and his two friends, or Rowse’s girl from the evening before, or any of the other guests at the hotel.

  “He’s looking tired,” said Danny.

  “No one said this would be a holiday for any of us,” snapped McCready from his seat in the courtyard of the monastery twenty miles away.

  At twenty-past nine Rowse left. Danny reported it. Rowse drove out of Pedhoulas, past the great painted church of the Archangel Michael that dominated the mountain village, and turned northwest on the road to Kykko. Danny continued his watch on the hotel. At half-past nine the maid entered Rowse’s room and drew the curtains back. That made life easier for Danny. Other curtains were withdrawn on the facade of the hotel facing the valley. Despite the rising sun in his eyes, the sergeant was rewarded by the sight of Monica Browne doing ten minutes of deep-breathing exercises quite naked in front of her window.

  “Beats South Armagh,” murmured the appreciative veteran.

  At ten to ten, Bill reported that Rowse had come into sight, climbing the steep and winding track to Kykko. McCready rose and went inside, wondering at the labor that had brought these massive stones so high into the mountain peaks, and at the skill of the masters who had painted the frescoes in the gold leaf, scarlet, and blue that decorated the incense-sweet interior.

  Rowse found McCready in front of the famous Golden Icon of the Virgin. Outside, Bill insured that Rowse had not grown a tail, and he gave McCready two double-blips on the communicator in the senior agent’s breast pocket.

  “It seems you’re clean,” murmured McCready as Rowse appeared beside him. There was no strangeness in talking in a low voice; all around them, the other tourists conversed in whispers, too, as if afraid to disturb the calm of the shrine.

  “So shall we start at the beginning?” said McCready. “I remember seeing you off at the Valletta airport on your very brief visit to Tripoli. Since then, if you please, every detail.” Rowse started at the beginning.

  “Ah, so you met the notorious Hakim al-Mansour,” said McCready after a few minutes. “I hardly dared hope he’d turn up at the airport himself. Kariagin’s message from Vienna must have tickled his fancy. Go on.”

  Part of Rowse’s narrative McCready could confirm from his own and the sergeants’ observations—the sallow-faced young agent who had followed Rowse back to Valletta and seen him on the Cyprus flight, the second agent at Nicosia who had tailed him until he left for the mountains.

  “Did you see my two sergeants? Your two former colleagues?”

  “No, never. I remain to be convinced they’re even there,” said Rowse. Together they stared up at the Madonna who, with calm and pitying eyes, stared back down at them.

  “Oh, they’re here, all right,” said McCready. “One’s outside at the moment, just to see that neither you nor I was followed. Actually, they’re taking quite a lot of pleasure in your adventures. When this is all over, you can have a drink together. Not yet. So ... after you arrived at the hotel?”

  Rowse skipped through to the moment he first saw Mahoney and his two cronies.

  “Wait a minute, the girl. Who is she?”

  “Just a vacation pickup. An American race-horse breeder waiting for the arrival of three Arab stallions she bought last week at the Hama yearling sales in Syria. Monica Browne. With an “e.” No problem, just a dining companion.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Sam. Quite sure. Just a civilian. And a very pretty one, as it happens.”

  “So we noticed,” muttered McCready. “Go on.”

  Rowse narrated the arrival of Mahoney and the suspicious glances his companion had intercepted across the terrace.

  “
You think he recognized you? From that filling station forecourt?”

  “He couldn’t have done,” said Rowse. “I had a wool cap down to my eyes and stubble all over my face, and I was half-hidden by the petrol pumps. No, he’d stare like that at any Englishman as soon as he heard the accent. You know how much he hates us all.”

  “Maybe. Go on.”

  It was the sudden appearance of Hakim al-Mansour and the nightlong interrogation by Frank Terpil that really interested McCready. He made Rowse stop a dozen times to clarify tiny points. The Deceiver was carrying a hard-cover book on Cypriot Byzantine churches and monasteries. As Rowse talked, he made copious notes in the book, writing over the Greek text. No mark appeared from the point of his pencil—that would only come later when the chemicals were applied. To any bystander, he was just a tourist making notes on what he saw around him.

  “So far, so good,” mused McCready. “Their arms shipment operation seems to be on hold, ready for some “go” order. Mahoney and al-Mansour turning up at the same hotel in Cyprus is too much to mean anything else. What we have to know is when, where, and how. Land, sea, or air? From where and to where? And the carrier—truck, air freight or cargo ship?”

  “You’re still sure they’ll go ahead? Not call the whole thing off?”

  “I’m sure.”

  There was no need to tell Rowse why he was sure. Rowse had no need to know. But there had been another message from the Libyan doctor who attended Muammar Qaddafi. It would be a multipackage shipment, when it came. Some of the weapons would be for the Basque separatists, the ETA. More would be for the French ultra-Left group, the Action Directe. Another consignment for the small but lethal Belgian terrorists, the CCC. A large present for the German Red Army Faction—at least half, no doubt, to be used on bars frequented by U.S. servicemen. More than half the shipment was for the IRA.

  It was reported that one of the IRA’s tasks would be the assassination of the American ambassador to London. McCready suspected that the IRA, mindful of its fund-raising operations in America, would farm that job out—probably to the Germans of the Faction, successors to the Baader-Meinhof gang, who were diminished in numbers but still deadly and prepared to take contract work in exchange for arms.

  “Did they ask where you would want the shipment for the American terror group, if they agree to sell?” McCready asked Rowse.

  “Yes.”

  “And you told them?”

  “Anywhere in Western Europe.”

  “Plans for getting it to the States?”

  “Told them what you said. I’d remove the consignment, which is quite small in bulk, from wherever they delivered it to a rented garage known only to me. I’d return with a camper van or mobile home, with hidden compartments behind the walls. Drive the van north through Denmark, on the ferry to Sweden, up to Norway and take it on one of the many freighters crossing to Canada. Just another tourist on a wildlife-watching vacation.”

  “They like that?”

  “Terpil did. Said it was neat and clean. Al-Mansour objected that it would mean crossing several national frontiers. I pointed out that in the holiday season, camper vans pour across Europe, and that at each stage I would say I was picking up my wife and kids at the next capital’s airport after they flew in. He nodded several times.”

  “All right. We’ve made our pitch. Now we have to wait and see if you’ve convinced them. Or if their greed for revenge against the White House will outweigh natural caution. It has been known.”

  “What happens next?” asked Rowse.

  “You go back to the hotel. If they swallow the American scheme and include your package in the shipment, al-Mansour will contact you, either personally or by courier. Follow his instructions to the letter. I’ll only close in on you for a situation report when the coast is clear.”

  “And if they don’t swallow it?”

  “Then they’ll try to silence you. Probably ask Mahoney and his boys to do the job as a sign of good faith. That’ll give you your chance at Mahoney. And the sergeants will be close by. They’ll move in to pull you out alive.”

  “The hell they will,” thought Rowse. That would blow away London’s awareness of the plot. The Irish would scatter, and the whole shipment would reach them by another route at another time and place. If al-Mansour came for him directly or indirectly, he would be on his own.

  “Do you want a warning bleeper?” asked McCready. “Something to bring us running?”

  “No,” said Rowse shortly. There was no point in having one. No one would come.

  “Then go back to the hotel and wait,” said McCready. “And try not to tire yourself to exhaustion with the pretty Mrs. Browne. With an ‘e.’ You might need your strength later.”

  McCready then drifted away into the throng. He too knew he could not intervene if the Libyans or the Irish came for Rowse. What he had decided to do, in case the Libyan fox had not believed Rowse, was to bring in a far larger team of watchers and to keep an eye on Mahoney. When he moved, the Irish arms consignment would be moving. Now that he had found Mahoney, the IRA man was the better bet as a trace to the shipment.

  Rowse completed his tour of the monastery and emerged into the brilliant sunshine to find his car. Bill, from his cover under the pines up on the hill below the tomb of the late President Makarios, watched him go and alerted Danny that their man was on his way back. Ten minutes later, McCready left, driven by Marks. On the way down the hill they gave a lift to a Cypriot peasant standing by the roadside and thus brought Bill back to Pedhoulas.

  Fifteen minutes into the forty-minute drive, McCready’s communicator crackled into life. It was Danny.

  “Mahoney and his men have just entered our man’s room. They’re ransacking it. Giving it a right going over. Shall I get out on the road and warn him?”

  “No,” said McCready. “Stay put and keep in touch.”

  “If I speed up, we might be able to overtake him,” suggested Marks.

  McCready glanced at his watch. An empty gesture. He was not even calculating the miles and the speed to Pedhoulas.

  “Too late,” he said. “We’d never catch him.”

  “Poor old Tom,” said Bill from the back.

  Unusually with subordinates, Sam McCready lost his temper. “If we fail, if that load of shit gets through, poor old shoppers at Harrods, poor old tourists in Hyde Park, poor old women and children all over our bloody country,” he snapped.

  There was silence all the way to Pedhoulas.

  Rowse’s key was still hanging on its hook in the reception lobby. He took it himself—there was no one behind the desk—and walked upstairs. The lock to his room was undamaged; Mahoney had used the key and replaced it in the lobby. But the door was unlocked. Rowse thought the maid might still be bed-making, so he walked right in.

  As he entered, a powerful shove from the man behind the door sent him staggering forward. The door slammed shut, access to it barred by the stocky one. Danny’s long-range photographs had been sent down to Nicosia with the courier before dawn, faxed to London, and identified. The stocky one was Tim O’Herlihy, a killer from the Derry Brigade; the beefy ginger-haired one by the fireplace Eamonn Kane, an enforcer from West Belfast. Mahoney sat in the room’s only armchair, his back to the window, whose curtains had been drawn to filter the brilliant daylight.

  Without a word Kane grabbed the staggering Englishman, spun him around, and flattened him against the wall. Skilled hands ran quickly over Rowse’s short-sleeved shirt and down each leg of his trousers. If he had been carrying McCready’s offered bleeper, it would have been discovered and ended the game there and then.

  The room was a mess, every drawer opened and emptied, the contents of the wardrobe scattered all over. Rowse’s only consolation was that he carried nothing that an author on a research trip would not have had—notebooks, story outline, tourist maps, brochures, portable typewriter, clothes, and washkit. His passport was in his back trouser pocket. Kane fished it out and tossed it to Mahoney. Mahone
y flicked through it, but it told him nothing he did not already know.

  “So, Sass-man, now perhaps you’ll tell me just what the fuck you’re doing here.”

  There was the usual charming smile on his face, but it did not reach the eyes.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said Rowse indignantly.

  Kane swung a fist that caught Rowse in the solar plexus. He could have avoided it, but O’Herlihy was behind him and Kane was to one side. The odds were loaded, even without Mahoney. These men were not Sunday-school teachers. Rowse grunted and doubled, leaning against the wall and breathing heavily.

  “Don’t you now? Don’t you now?” said Mahoney without rising. “Well, normally I have other ways than words of explaining myself, but for you, Sass-man, I’ll make an exception. A friend of mine in Hamburg identified you there a couple of weeks back. Tom Rowse, former captain in the Special Air Service Regiment, well-known fan club of the Irish people, asking some very funny questions. Two tours in the Emerald Isle behind him, and now he turns up in the middle of Cyprus just when my friends and I are trying to have a nice quiet holiday. So once again, what are you doing here?”

  “Look,” said Rowse. “Okay, I was in the regiment. But I quit. Couldn’t take any more of it. Denounced them all, the bastards, three years ago. I’m out, well out. The British Establishment wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire. Now I write novels for a living. Thriller novels. That’s it.”

  Mahoney nodded to O’Herlihy. The punch from behind caught him in the kidneys. He cried out and dropped to his knees. Despite the odds, he could have fought back and finished at least one of them, maybe two, before going down himself for the last time. But he took the pain and slumped to his knees.

  Despite Mahoney’s arrogance, Rowse suspected the terrorist chief was puzzled. He must have noticed Rowse and Hakim al-Mansour in conversation on the terrace last night, before driving off. Rowse had returned from that all-night session, and Mahoney was on the point of receiving a very big favor from al-Mansour. No, the IRA man had not turned lethal—yet. He was just having fun.