Book #5 in the Ian Barclay series. An entire American family cut down in the sleepy Dutch countryside. U.S. tour groups shredded to ribbons outside Buckingham Palace's stately halls and in Paris' bustling marketplace. all courtesy of the New Arab Social Front, a splinter group of the PLO determined to keep European countries from signing a treaty that could end terrorism once and for all.
Release date:
September 26, 2009
Publisher:
Grand Central Publishing
Print pages:
112
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“It’s just like a picture postcard,” Cheryl said, looking out the car window at the tulips and windmills.
Her husband, Barry, who was driving, nodded and the car wavered on the roadway as he gazed out over the rectangles of color
made by different tulip varieties in the fields.
“Flowers make me throw up,” said one of their twin twelve-year-old daughters in the backseat.
“Let’s go to Amsterdam right now,” her sister said. “I want to see the punks.”
“Grody tulips.”
They had left Philadelphia four days previously, landed in Brussels and spent two days there before hiring a car. They hit
Ghent, Brughes, Antwerp— cathedrals, moats with swans, diamond centers—before heading north into Holland. The twins had quit
on the food, surviving now on French fries and chocolate.
“Only ten more days to go,” one had said to the other.
“Can we stop at the next town?” the second asked. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Barry decided on a belt of Scotch from his bottle, next time they stopped. He had already killed one of the two duty-free
bottles they brought in. If things kept going like they were, he’d soon have to turn to local stuff because Scotch cost an
arm and a leg here. Cheryl’s voice droned on in a long account from a guidebook about how and why the Dutch built dikes and
dammed inland seas. One of the girls said she really needed to go to the bathroom.
“Hey, look at that big windmill over there, with its sails turning,” Barry said.
“Windmills suck,” one of his daughters said.
Barry wasn’t listening. He had a new Minolta Professional Maxxum 9000, which he had already used on various color bands of
flowers. The contrast between this weathered, battered windmill and the scarlet tulips in the fields at its base would really
show what this camera could do. He pulled the car off ,the road onto a dirt track leading to the mill. His daughters groaned.
“I need you for scale,” he said, making his wife and the twins stand with their backs to the windmill. No one was around to
disturb him, so he had a chance to make fine adjustments for different shots to see how they would turn out.
“Daddy, someone is coming,” one of his daughters said after a while.
She was right. A black Mercedes was moving slowly over the dirt road toward them. The local farmer wouldn’t own such a car,
Barry decided. These were probably tourists like themselves. You only had to stop at a beautiful spot for someone else to
decide it was worth their while to pull in also. He went on taking pictures and heard the car stop behind him.
“Barry, it’s the three men who were watching us in Antwerp,” his wife said urgently.
He saw fear in her eyes and turned around to face the newcomers. All three had gotten out of the car, two from the front,
one from the back, leaving three doors hanging open. The engine was still running. The men were in their mid-twenties, well-dressed
and groomed, Mediterranean in appearance. He couldn’t say for sure these were the same three who had frightened his wife and
daughters at the hotel in Antwerp. He hadn’t caught a close look at them then and hadn’t wanted to add to the hysteria by
appearing alarmed. His wife had claimed they were being watched by them and that they were Arabs. This was possible, he conceded
to her, but as Americans they had no need to fear them. The diamond centers in Antwerp were crowded with Orthodox Jews in
beards, black hats, and black coats. Even if these men were Arabs and even if they meant trouble, they were not going to pass
over targets like that to bother with Yanks named Halloran. Yet his wife and the twins claimed they were followed.
“It’s them, Barry. I’m sure of it.”
“I’m scared, Daddy.”
Without being obvious about it, Barry snapped a shot of the three men and advanced the film. He photographed them again. “Nice
day,” he said.
One of the men nodded.
“Let’s go, kids,” Barry said and turned toward his car.
The man who had nodded to Barry nodded again, this time to the one who had been in the backseat of the Mercedes. This man
reached inside the car and brought out a Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun. He cocked the weapon and waved it at Barry to
make him join his wife and children against the wall of the windmill.
As Barry went he talked in a calm, reasonable voice, slowly enough for people with a poor grasp of English to understand.
“Let my family go. Keep me hostage or shoot me, but let them go. Killing women and children won’t help your cause. No one
agrees with killing women and children.”
“We picked you because of your woman and girl children,” said the man who had been doing the nodding. He spoke in accented
but clearly understandable English. “If we let anyone go, it will be you.”
“Are you crazy?” Barry shouted at him. “You think shooting that seventy-year-old man in a wheelchair on the Achille Lauro got you converts to the Arab cause?”
“I understand your point,” the man said. He could
not have been more than twenty-five and spoke politely, even kindly. “We do not enjoy killing a mother and her children. We
must harden our hearts to do it.” He beckoned to the man with the gun. “Ali, this talk achieves nothing.”
Ali caught the two adults at chest level in a single burst of fire. He had to lower the submachine gun barrel to cut the twins
across the middle in a second burst.
The man who had done the talking now said in Arabic, “Go over them once more, Ali.” While he watched Ali empty his thirty-round
magazine of 9mm bullets into the bodies, he shouted over the gunshots to the third man, “He photographed us, Hasan. Open that
camera and expose the film.”
Blue-gray gunsmoke drifted in the clear Dutch air toward the tulip fields. Traffic moved on the road. There was no indication
anyone had heard or seen anything. Naim Shabaan was pleased with the way neither Ali nor Hasan had hesitated to obey his orders.
They were going to work well together as a team. He snapped the thick stalk of a weed and used it to trace an Islamic star
and crescent—symbols of peace and life— on the windmill wall, dipping the end of the stalk into blood oozing from the wounds
in Barry Halloran’s back.
Charley Woodgate sat at the long kitchen table of his farmhouse near Frederick, Maryland, and worked on the trigger mechanism
of a rifle. For many years
Charley had made a good living as a gunsmith. Also sitting at the table was his old friend Herbert Malleson, whom he often
referred to as the Viscount for his rather grand British manner. Like Charley the Englishman was a free lance of sorts, earning
his way in Washington by providing intelligence to those willing to pay for it. Sometimes they had the same customers, Charley
providing them with customized weapons. Both men were in their sixties, healthy and fit, though Woodgate walked with a bad
limp from a leg wound received at Monte Cassino, as the Allies drove the Germans northward through Italy.
As Woodgate worked on the trigger mechanism, Malleson leafed through that day’s issues of the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times, as always looking for the real story behind the news.
“‘In The Hague today, a spokesman for the Dutch government denounced the murder of the Halloran family as a brutal and senseless
crime,’” Malleson read from one of the papers. “They don’t mention a word about Holland agreeing to sign the Ostend Concordance.”
“The what?” Charley asked.
“The Halloran murders were brutal but not senseless. The Dutch government doesn’t want the real story to get out. They were
warned not to announce their intention of signing the Concordance.”
“What Concordance?”
“The Ostend Concordance is the American-sponsored international treaty committing its participants to close cooperation in
fighting terrorists. The U.S., Canada,
Israel, and Japan have already signed, but the agreement is meaningless without the inclusion of the European Common Market
countries. If even one influential Common Market country refuses to sign, the Ostend Concordance is dead.”
“I suppose I’m being a bit dense today,” Charley Woodgate said, looking up from his work, “but surely the killing of this
American family in Holland would only strengthen the Dutch government’s determination to sign, instead of weakening it?”
“The terrorists who don’t want this treaty put into effect know they’ve already lost Holland. It’s the first Common Market
country to agree—but only the first. If they can make the Dutch suffer for it, other countries will think twice before announcing
their intention to sign.”
“Hit the tourist trade?” Charley suggested.
“That’s what I think,” Malleson agreed, “and that’s why the Dutch government is not linking these killings to its announcenent
to sign, saying that the murders are senseless and the work of a madman. They go to the trouble of stating that they can find
no political motivation, which is bullshit. They don’t want Americans to cancel their trips. It was bad enough last year,
when so many American tourists stayed away. If the vacationers’ dollars don’t come in again this summer, the Dutch treasury
will feel the pinch.”
“That would explain why they went after Americans instead of Dutch people,” Charley said. “Do you think it’s the Belgian Communist
Fighting Cells or the
German Red Army Faction or some Dutch group of terrorists who did it?”
“The newspapers don’t report it, but the story is that the killers left a star and crescent scrawled in blood. That could
make them Iranians or Arabs or anyone in sympathy with them.”
“Or someone who wants the authorities to think he is.”
“Maybe,” Malleson allowed. “Anyway I’m going to look into it. This looks like just the start of things. There may be something
for Richard in this. Is he still up in Maine?”
“Yes. I suppose I should nose around too.” Charley Woodgate was Richard Dartley’s uncle and he acted as contact for the professional
assassin. Herbert Malleson often served as Dartley’s paid intelligence and logistics expert. They had no doubt that Dartley’s
survival so far in his chosen career was a result of their joint efforts on his behalf—Woodgate’s careful screening of his
assignments and Malleson’s support systems. Dartley himself never allowed them to think otherwise.
They went on with their tasks in silence in the farmhouse kitchen, each buried in his own thoughts. When Malleson gathered
up his newspapers and announced he was going home, Woodgate asked him, “You think they’ll strike in Holland again?”
“Definitely, if only to show everyone that the Hallorans’ deaths were not an isolated, senseless act. They will want their
message to come across loud and clear.”
Charley grimaced. Malleson had an eerie talent for predicting future events.
English was the only common language shared by the Dutch military intelligence agent and the Israeli colonel who met his flight
at Tel Aviv. They both spoke it well. Gerrit van Gilder did not reveal his rank, which made Colonel Yitzhak Bikel wonder if
the Dutchman ranked lower than him or very much outranked him. He suspected the latter. Van Gilder also would not want to
make it look like Dutch intelligence had to send a very senior man on what was only a routine job for the Israelis, something
that could safely be entrusted to a colonel.
Driving in from the airport, Bikel briefed van Gilder. “The June 4–New Arab Social Front, which made the threats against your
government, is a breakaway group from the PLO. They’re anti-Arafat and pro-Syrian. They probably skim money from most of the
Arab oil-producing countries in a sort of protection racket and then buy arms on the free market.”
Van Gilder said impatiently, “They didn’t send me down here on a background study, Colonel. We want action. I’d like to be
back in Amsterdam tonight with something to show for my trip.”
Bikel smiled. The Dutchman did not realize what a compliment he was paying the Israelis by having these expectations. Or maybe
he did, and this was what was making him a little irritable. Holland had to come to Israel for help.
The colonel said, “The Front’s operational headquarters are in a building at the southern edge of Ain Khilwe, a Palestinian
district of Sidon.”
Van Gilder knew that the port of Sidon was less than two hundred kilometers away, north along the coast of Lebanon. “I want
to go.”
That’s not possible. We could not risk a non-Jewish Dutch national falling into our enemies’ hands from a downed Israeli aircraft.
Your queen would have to apologize to them. We would look bad.”
“But I must see that the building is destroyed,” van Gilder insisted.
“We will provide you with full-color aerial reconnaissance shots. Before and after.”
“How will I know it was the Front’s headquarters?”
“You will hear the com. . .
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