The Third Target: A J. B. Collins Novel

  Why hadn’t I simply flown to Amman? Why hadn’t I met the king’s entourage at the palace and traveled with them across the Allenby Bridge, to the meetings they were scheduled to have in Ramallah and Jericho and then on up to Jerusalem? That was their plan. Why hadn’t I asked to be part of it?

  The reason was simple, though it did me no good now. I had flown from Beirut to Cyprus, and from Cyprus to Tel Aviv, for one simple reason: before I interviewed the king, I wanted to meet with the head of the Mossad.

  I had known Reuven Shiloah, the director of Israel’s nascent intelligence service, for several years—since before the Mossad had even been created, in fact. I had learned to trust him, and over the years, Reuven had come to trust me, too. Not fully, of course. He was a spy, after all. But he had seen firsthand that I would carefully use his insights but never quote him directly. His perspective was unique and useful for my readers, though I didn’t use him as a source often. And I had been helpful to him on numerous occasions as well. He had leaked several important stories to me. I had handled them sensitively, and he had been as pleased as my editors. I was, in effect, a direct pipeline for him to the White House and to members of Congress and, by extension, to other leaders. He had his reasons for feeding me information, and I had mine for accepting it. So over breakfast that morning at a little café in Tel Aviv near the bus station, I asked the Mossad director about the Jordanian king and his situation. The chain-smoking Israeli spy chief had stared at me through his round, gold-rimmed glasses and in hushed tones in a back corner booth confided to me his serious and growing concerns.

  “This is a terrible mistake,” Reuven said. “He should not be coming.”

  “Who, the king?” I asked, astonished. “Not come to Jerusalem? Why not?”

  “Is it not obvious, Collins?” he asked. “His Majesty is a marked man.”

  “You’re saying he’s not safe in Jerusalem, in his own city?” I pressed. “He’s not safe anywhere,” Reuven replied.

  “Do you know of a specific threat?” It’s not that I thought he was wrong, but hearing him say it left me deeply unsettled.

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “I have my gut, my instincts,” he said. “The mood is dark, full of rumors and danger. What has happened elsewhere can happen here. As you know, the prime minister of Iran was assassinated just a few months ago.”

  I nodded. Ali Razmara, Persia’s fifty-eighth prime minister, was only forty-nine years old when he was killed. He was the third to have been murdered while in office in recent years.

  I pulled a pad out of my bag and began to take notes.

  “There were several things notable about Razmara’s death,” Reuven continued. “He was slain in broad daylight. He was gunned down not by a foreigner but by a fellow Iranian. Indeed, the assailant was a fellow Moslem. And Razmara was walking into a mosque to pray. And Razmara’s death was not an isolated incident. Less than two weeks later, Zanganeh was assassinated as well.”

  He was referring now to Abdol-Hamid Zanganeh, Iran’s minister of education.

  “Zanganeh was also hit in broad daylight, in this case on the campus of Tehran University,” the Mossad director explained. “Very open. Very public. Lots of people. Hard to secure. The weapon was also a pistol. Small. Easily concealed. And who did it? A foreign spy agency? The Brits? The Americans? Us? No. In both cases, the assassins were Moslems, extremists, and locals.”

  Reuven went on to note that two years earlier someone had tried to assassinate the king of Iran, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This too, he reminded me, had happened in broad daylight. In fact, it had happened on the campus of Tehran University, and it too had been the work of an Iranian—not a foreign agent—an Islamic extremist using a pistol. Five bullets had been fired. Four missed their mark. But the fifth did not. Miraculously, it only grazed the king’s face, slightly wounding him. But a millimeter’s difference would have killed him instantly.

  “The assassin posed as a photographer—a member of the press—to get close to the king,” the Mossad chief added.

  “But that’s Iran, not Jordan,” I finally said, looking up from my notes. “The situation here is completely different.”

  “Is it?” he asked. “Certainly there are differences; I grant you that. Iran is ethnically Persian, and Jordan is ethnically Arab. Iran is largely a Shia Moslem nation, while Jordan is predominately Sunni. Iran has oil; Jordan does not. Iran is large and populous, and Jordan is not. But those differences are immaterial. What is important is the pattern.”

  “What pattern?”

  “Iran is a monarchy,” Reuven explained. “So is Jordan. The Pahlavi regime is moderate. So are the Hashemites. Iran is pro-British. So is Jordan. Indeed, it was a British colony. What’s more, Iran is pro-American. So is Jordan. And though they are quiet about it, Iran under the shah is one of two countries in the region that are on relatively friendly terms with Israel and the Jews. The other is Jordan.”

  At that, I had to push back. “Now wait a minute—Jordan just fought a war with you. That was only three years ago.”

  “Things are changing,” he said, opening another pack of cigarettes.

  “How so?”

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  “Reuven?”

  The Mossad chief glanced around the café. The regulars were starting to fill the place up.

  “This is totally off the record,” he said finally. “Really, A. B., you cannot use this—agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “I have your word?”

  “You do,” I said.

  “I’m serious. You cannot print it under any circumstances. But I’m going to tell you because it’s important for you to have some context of who King Abdullah is and what he really wants.”

  I nodded.

  “When I can give you this story, I will,” the Mossad chief added. “But we’re not there. Not yet.”

  “I understand, Reuven,” I replied. “Really, you have my word. You know me. I won’t burn you.”

  He lit his cigarette and scanned the room again. Then he lowered his voice and leaned toward me. “The king is quietly reaching out.”

  “To the Mossad?”

  “Through us, not to us.”

  “To whom, then?”

  “David Ben-Gurion,” he said.

  I was stunned. The king of Jordan was reaching out to Israel’s aging prime minister?

  “Why?” I asked, immediately intrigued.

  Again the director scanned the room, making sure no one was listening in on our conversation. Again he lowered his voice, so much so that I could barely hear him and had to lean forward even farther to catch every word over the din of the café.

  “His Majesty is probing the possibility of secret peace talks,” Reuven confided. “It seems he wants to meet with the PM personally. It’s very premature, of course, and all very deniable. But the king seems to be intimating that he wants to make peace with Israel.”

  I could not hold back my astonishment. “A treaty?”

  Reuven shifted in his seat. “Not exactly,” he said.

  “Too public?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “A private ‘understanding,’ then?” I asked.

  “Perhaps,” Reuven said, exhaling a lungful of blue smoke. “But even that brings with it great risks. The king knows he’s a marked man. Not by us. We don’t have a problem with him. He went to war with us in ’48. But we stopped him. We fought him to a standoff, and as far as we’re concerned, it’s over now. His real problem is the Egyptians and the Syrians and the Iraqis and the Saudis. They hate him. Hate doesn’t even begin to describe it. They don’t think he’s one of them. They don’t think he’s a team player. They don’t think the Hashemite Kingdom is going to be around for long anyway, so they’re all gunning for him. They all want him dead, and they’re all angling to seize his territory when he collapses.”

  “So if he opens a back channel with you and comes to an understa
nding, then maybe it’s ‘all quiet on the western front’ and he can focus his intelligence and security forces elsewhere?” I asked.

  “Something like that,” Reuven said with a shrug. “Anyway, I don’t believe the king wants war with Israel. He certainly doesn’t want to annihilate us like the others do. All the evidence says he’s not a fanatic. He’s a pragmatist. He’s someone we can work with. Like the shah.”

  “But the fanatics want the shah dead,” I noted.

  Reuven nodded.

  “Which is why you’re worried someone might try to kill the king—because you think he and the shah are cut from the same cloth,” I added.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” Reuven demurred. “What matters is what the fanatics think. Which brings us to Monday.”

  “You mean Riad el-Solh.”

  “Of course.”

  I was starting to understand Reuven’s concern now. On Monday, July 16, 1951—just four days earlier—Riad el-Solh, the former prime minister of Lebanon, had been assassinated. Like the shah and the king, el-Solh was a moderate, a pragmatist, and a much-respected regional statesman. His death would have been tragic enough, but he was not murdered in Beirut or in Tehran.

  “As you well know, the man was murdered in Amman,” Reuven said soberly, his piercing blue eyes flashing with anger. “He was gunned down at Marka Airport, just three kilometers from the palace. He’d been in Jordan visiting with the king, his longtime friend and political ally. Yet he was ruthlessly taken down by a three-man hit team. And I’ll give you a scoop. Nobody has this yet. One of the assailants was shot by the police. One committed suicide. But one is still at large.”

  The implications of that last sentence hit me hard. I just sat there, staring at my cold cup of coffee and untouched plate of eggs and dry toast, trying to make sense of it all. Then Reuven dug in his pocket, plunked down enough lirot to pay for both of our meals, and slipped out the side door without saying another word.

  3

  The crowd around me grew more frantic by the minute.

  The time had come. The muezzin’s call was over. The faithful were supposed to be in the mosque by now, washed and purified and ready for their noon prayers. But still the soldiers held their ground.

  I looked at these young men, barely out of high school, and wondered what they were made of. If they were rushed by this crowd, would they really fire? I wondered. If a disturbance erupted, how quickly would they respond? If someone threatened their ruler, would they really sacrifice their lives to protect him? How well trained, how disciplined were they? How deep did their loyalties to the throne truly run?

  We were about to find out.

  In mere moments, King Abdullah bin al-Hussein would be arriving just a few hundred steps from where I was standing. Could these young men really protect him? Or was the sixty-nine-year-old monarch truly in grave danger? Might extremists—perhaps someone in this very crowd—be plotting against him? Abdullah had only formally been on the throne for five years, since May 25, 1946, when the League of Nations granted Jordan its independence at the end of the British Mandate. Was it really possible that someone—or some group—was plotting to take him down and topple his entire kingdom?

  I knew from my conversation with Reuven Shiloah that morning that the Israelis were worried for the king’s safety. Surely they were not the only ones. Reuven had said that His Majesty had been strongly urged by his own Jordanian intelligence service not to make this trip to Jerusalem. At the very least, they had urged him to reschedule it. But he was not listening. He was his own man. He had business in the Holy City, a city he considered himself personally responsible for, and he would not be deterred. He was, after all, a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad. His forebearers had been responsible for governing Mecca and Medina for centuries. Now he was the guardian of some of Islam’s most revered landmarks. He simply would not cower or shrink away in the face of personal threats, however serious.

  That was the king’s way. I wasn’t sure it was wise, but I had to admit, privately at least, that I wasn’t protesting. After all, His Majesty was also being urged by his closest counselors not to speak to the Western press at all—and certainly not to agree to an interview with an American—but he was ignoring this advice too. Clearly he had something to say to the world and had decided to use me to say it, and for this I felt enormously grateful.

  I had worked for United Press International and the Associated Press for nearly ten years. I’d interviewed generals and commanders and local officials of all kinds. I had been posted in London, Paris, Bombay, and most recently Beirut. I’d met presidents and prime ministers and heads of state. But I had never even seen a king in the flesh, much less interviewed one, and I confess that the very notion of conversing with a monarch held for me a certain mystique that I cannot put into words.

  So this was it. If I didn’t do something quickly to get through this crowd and past these guards, I knew I would regret it for the rest of my life.

  I scanned the crowd, picked my target, and took my fate into my own hands. Wiping my palms on my trousers, I set my plan into motion. I began pushing aside several old men, then shoved a few teenage boys out of my way, working along the stone wall to my right, toward the soldiers. Immediately, curses came flying back at me thick and fierce, but those I had moved past didn’t have a chance. I was over six feet tall and nearly two hundred pounds. So I kept moving toward my target, and with a few more steps I was there. Without warning, I drove my elbow hard into the ribs of the burly young man with crooked teeth who minutes before had called me an infidel. He was probably about twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and I suspected he had far more experience street fighting than I did. But for the moment, at least, I had the advantage. I had a plan, and he was being blindsided.

  Infuriated, his eyes flashing with the same rage I had seen before, he took a swing at me with all his might. I knew it was coming, and I ducked in time, so his fist slammed into the stone wall behind me. At that moment, I embedded my right fist in his stomach. He doubled over, and I lunged at his waist, toppling him to the ground, whipping the bloodthirsty crowd around us into a frenzy. It didn’t take long for him to recover his wits and flip me over, but as he did, the whistles of the soldiers started blowing. I covered my face with my arms as he landed several blows. But before he could do any real damage, a half-dozen Jordanian guards descended upon us. They beat back the crowd with wooden clubs and soon were beating him, too, until they could pull him off me and clamp handcuffs on him. I received several kicks, one to my back and one to my stomach, and then I too was cuffed. But in the grand scheme, since I was on the bottom of the pile, I actually got the least of it, and when they realized I was not a Jordanian or a Moslem but a Westerner, the captain of the unit—a Captain Rajoub, according to the name on his uniform—looked horrified.

  “Who are you?” he demanded while his colleagues aimed their rifles at me.

  “I am a reporter,” I said in English, scooping my hat off the ground, dusting it off, and replacing it on my perspiration-soaked head as two soldiers rifled through my leather satchel.

  “From where?”

  “America,” I replied.

  There was no point in saying I was actually based in Beirut. It would just confuse the matter. And although I was fluent in Arabic, I spoke only in English since the whole point was to distinguish myself from the locals, to be as foreign as possible. America was a word I was sure these men knew. They didn’t love us. But they had the decency to fear us.

  “Papers!” the young captain insisted, bristling.

  I slowly reached into my suit pocket, careful not to make the boys with the rifles any more nervous than they already were. I pulled out my American passport and my AP credentials and handed them to him. The man opened the passport first, looked at the photo, then looked back at me.

  “Andrew?” he asked, his accent thick but his English passable, to my surprise. “Is that your name?”

  I nodded.
r />   “Andrew Bradley Collins?”

  I nodded again.

  “Born September 9, 1920?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Bar . . . Bar . . .”

  “Bar Harbor,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  It seemed ridiculous to be discussing my hometown. “It’s a little town in Maine.”

  The man just looked at me. Indeed, the whole crowd was staring at me, and many seemed ready to tear me limb from limb.

  “Why are you here?” Captain Rajoub asked.

  “I have a telegram,” I said, slowly reaching back into my breast pocket and pulling out the crumpled yellow sheet from Western Union. I handed it to the captain and watched as he read it.

  Then I saw his eyes widen.

  “You are supposed to meet His Majesty?” he asked, incredulous. “You’re meeting him here?”

  “I’m supposed to—I was trying to get this message to you, sir, but that lunatic there tried to kill me,” I said, pointing at the burly man being forcibly restrained by several soldiers from trying to attack me again.

  “You’re supposed to meet him now?”

  “Yes—if you and your boys will let me through.”

  Genuine fear flashed in the captain’s eyes. He and his men had arrested and very nearly shot a man who was supposed to be meeting with the king. For a moment, he was speechless. But only for a moment.

  “Right this way, sir,” he said at last. “Please, my friend, come—I will take you to His Majesty.”

  He turned to his dumbfounded men and barked a command in Arabic. Stunned by all that had just occurred, the soldiers immediately cleared a path. Then the captain beckoned me to follow him. I grabbed my satchel from the soldier holding it, straightened my tie, brushed myself off as best I could, and followed the captain onto the Temple Mount.

  My desperate plan had worked, and I could hardly believe my eyes.

  I was late, but I was in.

  4

  I desperately scanned the plaza but did not see him.