Four in the morning, or close to it, he was on a chunk of Interstate in Missouri or maybe Iowa—he wasn’t too sure where he was, his mind was running all over the place. The median strip was broad here and you couldn’t see the lights of cars in the other lane. The traffic was virtually nonexistent—it was like he was the only driver on the road, a trucker’s Flying Dutchman or something out of a Dave Dudley song, doomed to ride empty highways until the end of time.
Crazy.
There were lights in his mirror. High beams, somebody coming up fast. He moved to his right, hugging the shoulder.
The other vehicle moved out and hovered alongside him. For a mindless instant he had the thought that it was the man with the deep-set eyes, the killer come to kill him. But this wasn’t even a truck, this was a car, and it was just sort of dipsy-doodling along next to Waldron. Waldron wondered what was the matter with the damn fool.
Then the car passed him in a quick burst of speed and Waldron saw what it was.
The guy was drunk.
He got past Waldron’s rig, cut in abruptly, then almost drove off the road before he got the wheel straightened out again. He couldn’t keep the car in line, he kept wandering off to the left or the right, he was all over the road.
A fucking menace, Waldron thought.
He took his own foot off the gas and let the car pull away from him, watching the taillights get smaller in the distance. Only when the car was out of sight did Waldron bring his truck back up to running speed.
His mind wandered then, drifting along some byway, and he came back into present time to note that he was driving faster than usual, pushing past the speed limit. He found he was still doing it even after he noticed it.
Why?
When the taillights came into view, he realized what he’d subconsciously been doing all along. He was looking for the drunk driver, and there he was. He recognized the taillights. Even if he hadn’t, he’d recognize the way the car swung from side to side, raising gravel on the shoulder, then wandering way over into the left-hand lane and back again.
Drivers like that were dangerous. They killed people every day and the cops couldn’t keep the bastards off the roads. Look at this crazy son of a bitch, look at him, for God sake, he was all over the place, he was sure to kill himself if he didn’t kill someone else first.
Downhill stretch coming up. Waldron was loaded up with kitchen appliances, just a hair under his maximum gross weight. Give him a stretch of downhill loaded like that, hell, wasn’t anyone could run away from him going downhill.
He looked at the weaving car in front of him. Nobody else out in front, nobody in his mirror. Something quickened in his chest. He got a flash of deep-set eyes and a knowing smile.
He put the gas pedal on the floor.
Like a Dog in the Street
The capture of the man called Anselmo amounted to the gathering together of innumerable threads, many of them wispy and frail. For almost two years the terrorist had been the target of massive manhunt operations launched by not one but over a dozen nations. The one valid photograph of him, its focus blurred and indistinct, had been reproduced and broadcast throughout the world; his features—the jagged and irregular yellow teeth, the too-small upturned nose, the underslung jaw, the bushy eyebrows grown together into a single thick, dark line—were as familiar to the general public as they were to counterintelligence professionals and Interpol agents.
Bit by bit, little by little, the threads began to link up. In a cafe in a working-class neighborhood in Milan, two men sat sipping espresso laced with anisette. They spoke of an interregional soccer match, and of the possibility of work stoppage by the truck dispatchers. Then their voices dropped, and one spoke quickly and quietly of Anselmo while the other took careful note of every word.
In a suburb of Asunción, a portly gentleman wearing the uniform of a brigadier general in the Paraguayan army shared the front seat of a four-year-old Chevrolet Impala with a slender young man wearing the uniform of a chauffeur. The general talked while the chauffeur listened. While Anselmo was not mentioned by name, he was the subject of the conversation. At its conclusion the chauffeur gave the general an envelope containing currency in the amount of two thousand German marks. Three hours later the chauffeur—who was not a chauffeur—was on a plane for Mexico City. The following afternoon the general—who was not really a general—was dead of what the attending physician diagnosed as a massive myocardial infarction.
In Paris, in the ninth arrondissement, three security officers, one of them French, entered an apartment which had been under surveillance for several weeks. It proved to be empty. Surveillance was continued but no one returned to the apartment during the course of the following month. A thoroughgoing analysis of various papers and detritus found in the apartment was relayed in due course to authorities in London and Tel Aviv.
In West Berlin, a man and woman, both in their twenties, both blond and fair-skinned and blue-eyed and looking enough alike to be brother and sister, made the acquaintance of a dark-haired and full-bodied young woman at a cabaret called Justine’s. The three shared a bottle of sparkling Burgundy, then repaired to a small apartment on the Bergenstrasse where they shared several marijuana cigarettes, half a bottle of Almspach brandy, and a bed. The blond couple did certain things which the dark-haired young woman found quite painful, but she gave every appearance of enjoying the activity. Later, when she appeared to be asleep, the blond man and woman talked at some length. The dark-haired young woman, who was in fact awake throughout this conversation, was still awake later on when the other two lay sprawled beside her, snoring lustily. She dressed and left quickly, pausing only long enough to slit their throats with a kitchen knife. Her flight to Beirut landed shortly before two in the afternoon, and within an hour after that she was talking with a middle-aged Armenian gentleman in the back room of a travel agency.
Bits and pieces. Threads, frail threads, coming together to form a net . . .
And throughout it all the man called Anselmo remained as active as ever. A Pan Am flight bound for Belgrade blew up in the air over Austria. A telephone call claiming credit for the deed on behalf of the Popular Front for Croatian Autonomy was logged at the airline’s New York offices scant minutes before an explosion shredded the jetliner.
A week earlier, rumors had begun drifting around that Anselmo was working with the Croats.
In Jerusalem, less than a quarter of a mile from the Wailing Wall, four gunmen burst into a Sephardic synagogue during morning services. They shot and killed twenty-eight members of the congregation before they themselves were rooted out and shot down by police officers. The dead gunmen proved to be members of a leftist movement aimed at securing the independence of Puerto Rico from the United States. But why should Puerto Rican extremists be mounting a terrorist operation against Israel?
The common denominator was Anselmo.
An embassy in Washington. A police barracks in Strabane, in Northern Ireland. A labor union in Buenos Aires.
Anselmo.
Assassinations. The Spanish ambassador to Sweden shot down in the streets of Stockholm. The sister-in-law of the premier of Iraq. The Research and Development head of a multinational oil company. A British journalist. An Indonesian general. An African head of state.
Anselmo.
Hijacking and kidnapping. Ransom demands. Outrages.
Anselmo. Always Anselmo.
Of course it was not always his hand on the trigger. When the Puerto Rican gunmen shot up the Jerusalem synagogue, Anselmo was playing solitaire in a dimly lit basement room in Pretoria. When a firebomb roasted the Iraqi premier’s sister-in-law, Anselmo was flashing a savage yellow smile in Bolivia. It was not Anselmo’s hand that forced a dagger between the ribs of General Suprandoro in Jakarta; the hand belonged to a nubile young lady from Thailand, but it was Anselmo who had given her her instructions, Anselmo who had decreed that Suprandoro must die and who had staged and scripted his death.
Bits and pieces. A
couple of words scrawled on the back of an envelope. A scrap of conversation overheard. Bits, pieces, scraps. Threads, if you will.
Threads braided together can make strong rope. Strands of interwoven rope comprise a net.
When the net dropped around Anselmo, Nahum Grodin held its ends in his knobby hands.
It was early summer. For three days a dry wind had been blowing relentlessly. The town of Al-dhareesh, a small Arab settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan, yielded to the wind as to a conquering army. The women tended their cooking fires. Men sat at small tables in their courtyards sipping cups of sweet black coffee. The yellow dogs that ran through the narrow streets seemed to stay more in the shadows than was their custom, scurrying from doorway to doorway, keeping their distance from passing humans.
“Even the dogs feel it,” Nahum Grodin said. His Hebrew bore Russian and Polish overtones. “Look at them. The way they slink around.”
“The wind,” Gershon Meir said.
“Anselmo.”
“The wind,” Meir insisted. A sabra, he had the unromantic outlook of the native-born. He was Grodin’s immediate subordinate in the counter-terror division of Shin Bet, and the older man knew there was no difference in the keenness both felt at the prospect of springing a trap upon Anselmo. But Grodin felt it all in the air while Meir felt nothing but the dry wind off the desert.
“The same wind blows over the whole country,” Grodin said. “And yet it’s different here. The way those damned yellow dogs stay in the shadows.”
“You make too much of the Arabs’ mongrel dogs.”
“And their children?”
“What children?”
“Aha!” Grodin extended a forefinger. “The dogs keep to the shadows. The children stay in their huts and avoid the streets altogether. Don’t tell me, my friend, that the wind is enough to keep children from their play.”
“So the townspeople know he’s here. They shelter him. That’s nothing new.”
“A few know he’s here. The ones planning the raid across the Jordan, perhaps a handful of others. The rest are like the dogs and the children. They sense something in the air.”
Gershon Meir looked at his superior officer. He considered the set of his jaw, the reined excitement that glinted in his pale blue eyes. “Something in the air,” he said.
“Yes. You feel something yourself, Gershon. Admit it.”
“I feel too damned much caffeine in my blood. That last cup of coffee was a mistake.”
“You feel more than caffeine.”
Meir shrugged but said nothing.
“He’s here, Gershon.”
“Yes, I think he is. But we have been so close to him so many times—”
“This time we have him.”
“When he’s behind bars, that’s when I’ll say we have him.”
“Or when he’s dead.”
Again the younger man looked at Grodin, a sharp look this time. Grodin’s right hand, knuckles swollen with arthritis, rested on the butt of his holstered machine pistol.
“Or when he’s dead,” Gershon Meir agreed.
Whether it was merely the wind or something special in the air, the man called Anselmo felt it, too. He set down his little cup of coffee—it was sweeter than he liked it—and worried his chin with the tips of his fingers. With no apparent concern he studied the five men in the room with him. They were local Arabs ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-eight. Anselmo had met one of them before in Beirut and knew two of the others by reputation. The remaining two were unequivocally guaranteed by their comrades. Anselmo did not specifically trust them—he had never in his life placed full trust in another human being—but neither did he specifically distrust them. They were village Arabs, politically unsophisticated and mentally uncomplicated, desperate young men who would perform any act and undertake any risk. Anselmo had known and used just that sort of man throughout the world. He could not have functioned without such men.
Something in the air . . .
He went to a window, inched the burlap curtain aside with the edge of his palm. He saw nothing remarkable, yet a special perception more reliable than eyesight told him the town was swarming with Israelis. He did not have to see them to be certain of their presence.
He turned, considered his five companions. They were to cross the river that night. By dawn they would have established their position. A school bus loaded with between fifty and sixty retarded childen would slow down before making a left turn at the corner where Anselmo and his men would be posted. It would be child’s play—he bared his teeth in a smile at the phrase—child’s play to shoot the tires out of the bus. In a matter of minutes all of the Jewish children and their driver would be dead at the side of the road. In a few more minutes Anselmo and the Arabs would have scattered and made good their escape.
A perfect act of terror, mindless, meaningless, unquestionably dramatic. The Jews would retaliate, of course, and of course their retaliation would find the wrong target, and the situation would deteriorate. And in the overall scheme of things—
But was there an overall scheme of things? At times, most often late at night just before his mind slipped over the edge into sleep, then Anselmo could see the outline of some sort of master plan, some way in which all the component parts of terror which he juggled moved together to make a new world. The image of the plan hovered at such times right at the perimeter of his inner vision, trembling at the edge of thought. He could almost see it, as one can almost see God in a haze of opium.
The rest of the time he saw no master plan and had no need to search for one. The existential act of terror, theatrical as thunder, seemed to him to be a perfectly satisfactory end in itself. Let the children bleed at the roadside. Let the plane explode overhead. Let the rifle crack.
Let the world take note.
He turned once more to the window but left the curtain in place, merely testing the texture of the burlap with his fingertips. Out there in the darkness. Troops, police officers. Should he wait in the shadows for them to pass? No, he decided quickly. The village was small and they could search it house by house with little difficulty. He could pass as an Arab—he was garbed as one now—but if he was the man they were looking for they would know him when they saw him.
He could send these five out, sacrifice them to suicidal combat while he made good his own escape. It would be a small sacrifice. They were unimportant, expendable; he was Anselmo. But if the Jews had encircled the town a diversion would have little effect.
He snapped his head back, thrust his chin forward. A sudden gesture. Time was his enemy, only drawing the net tighter around him. The longer he delayed, the greater his vulnerability. Better a bad decision than no decision at all.
“Wait here for me,” he told his men, his Arabic low and guttural. “I would see how the wind blows.”
He began to open the door, disturbing the rest of a scrawny long-muzzled dog. The animal whined softly and took itself off to the side. Anselmo slipped through the open door and let it close behind him.
The moon overhead was just past fullness. There were no clouds to block it. The dry wind had blown them all away days ago. Anselmo reached through his loose clothing, touched the Walther automatic on his hip, the long-bladed hunting knife in a sheath strapped to his thigh, the smaller knife fastened with tape to the inside of his left forearm. Around his waist an oilcloth money belt rested next to his skin. It held four passports in as many names and a few thousand dollars in the currencies of half a dozen countries. Anselmo could travel readily, crossing borders as another man would cross the street. If only he could first get out of Al-dhareesh.
He moved quickly and sinuously, keeping to the shadows, letting his eyes and ears perform a quick reconnaissance before moving onward. Twice he spotted armed uniformed men and withdrew before he was seen, changing direction, scurrying through a yard and down an alleyway.
They were everywhere.
Just as he caught sight of still another Israeli patrol on
a street corner, gunfire broke out a few hundred yards to his left. There was a ragged volley of pistol fire answered by several bursts from what he identified as an Uzi machine pistol. Then silence.
His five men, he thought. Caught in the house or on the street in front of it, and if he’d stayed there he’d have been caught with them. From the sound of it, they hadn’t made much trouble. His lip curled and a spot of red danced in his forebrain. He only hoped the five had been shot dead so that they couldn’t inform the Jews of his own presence.
As if they had to. As if the bastards didn’t already know . . .
A three-man patrol turned into the street a dozen houses to Anselmo’s left. One of the men kicked at the earth as he walked and the dust billowed around his feet in the moonlight. Anselmo cursed the men and the moonlight and circled around the side of a house and slipped away from the men.
But there was no way out. All the streets were blocked. Once Anselmo drew his Walther and took deliberate aim at a pair of uniformed men. They were within easy range and his finger trembled on the trigger. It would be so nice to kill them, but where was the profit in it? Their companions would be on him in an instant.
If you teach a rat to solve mazes, presenting it over a period of months with mazes of increasing difficulty and finally placing it in a maze which is truly unsolvable, the rat will do a curious thing. He will scurry about in an attempt to solve the maze, becoming increasingly inefficient in his efforts, and ultimately he will sit down in a corner and devour his own feet.
There was no way out of Al-dhareesh and the Israelis were closing in, searching the village house by house, moving ever nearer to Anselmo, cutting down his space. He tucked himself into a corner where a four-foot wall of sun-baked earth butted against the wall of a house. He sat on his haunches and pressed himself into the shadows.