The Deceiver

Rowse was told to take a chair in the middle of the room. The furniture was almost entirely shrouded in dust sheets. Clearly, the villa was a holiday home for a wealthy family who had shut it up for the winter. The Libyans had simply taken it over for the night, which was why Rowse had not been blindfolded.

Al-Mansour removed a dust sheet and fastidiously seated himself in a brocade high-back chair. A single bulb hung over Rowse. Terpil took a nod from al-Mansour and lumbered over.

“Okay, boy, let’s talk. You’ve been going around Europe looking for arms. Very special weapons. What the hell are you really up to?”

“Researching a new novel. I’ve tried to explain that a dozen times. It’s a novel. That’s my job, that’s what I do. I write thriller novels. About soldiers, spies, terrorists—fictional ter­rorists.”

Terpil hit him once on the side of the face—not hard, but enough to indicate there was more where that came from and plenty of it.

“Cut the shit,” he said without animosity. “I’m going to get the truth anyway, one way or the other. Might as well keep it painless—all the same to me. Who are you really working for?”

Rowse let the story come out slowly, as he had been briefed, sometimes recalling things exactly, sometimes having to search his memory.

“Which magazine?”

“Soldier of Fortune.”

“Which edition?”

“April ... May, last year. No, May, not April.”

“What did the ad say?”

“ ‘Weapons expert needed, European area, for interesting assignment’ ... something like that. A box number.”

“Bullshit. I take that magazine every month. There was no such ad.”

“There was. You can check.”

“Oh, we will,” murmured al-Mansour from the corner of the room. He was making notes with a slim gold pen on a Gucci pad.

Rowse knew Terpil was bluffing. There had been such an ad in the columns of Soldier of Fortune. McCready had found it, and a few calls to his friends in the CIA and the FBI had ensured—or so Rowse fervently hoped—that the placer of the ad would not be available to deny he had ever received a reply from Mr. Thomas Rowse of England.

“So you wrote back.”

“Yep. Plain paper. Accommodation address. Giving my background, areas of expertise. Instructions for a reply, if any.”

“Which were?”

“Small ad in the London Daily Telegraph.” He recited the wording. He had memorized it.

“The ad appeared? They made contact?”

“Yep.”

“What date?”

Rowse gave it. Previous October. McCready had found that ad as well. It had been chosen at random, a perfectly genuine small advertisement from an innocent British citizen, but with wording that would suit. The Telegraph staff had agreed to alter the records to show it had been placed by someone in America and paid for in cash.

The interrogation went on. The phone call he had taken from America after placing a further ad in The New York Times. (That too had been found after hours of searching—a real ad listing a British phone number. Rowse’s own unlisted number had been changed to tally with it.)

“Why the roundabout way of getting in touch?”

“I figured I needed discretion in case the placer of the original ad was crazy. Also that my secretiveness might impress whoever it was.”

“And did it?”

“Apparently. The speaker said he liked it. Set up a meet.”

When? Last November. Where? The Georges Cinq in Paris. What was he like?

“Youngish, well dressed, well spoken. Not registered at the hotel. I checked. Called himself Galvin Pollard. Certainly phony. A yuppie type.”

“A what?”

“Young, upwardly mobile professional,” drawled al-Mansour. “You’re out of touch.”

Terpil went red. Of course. He had seen the term but forgotten it.

What did he say? He said he represented a group of ultra-radical people, Rowse replied, who were sick and tired of the Reagan Administration, of its hostility to the Soviet and Third Worlds, and particularly of the use of American planes and taxpayer money to bomb women and children in Tripoli the previous April.

“And he produced a list of what he wanted?”

“Yes.”

“This list?”

Rowse glanced at it. It was a copy of the list he had shown Kariagin in Vienna. The Russian must have a superb memory.

“Yes.”

“Claymore mines, for God’s sake. Semtex-H. Booby-trapped briefcases. This is high-tech stuff. What the hell did they want all that for?”

“He said his people wanted to strike a blow. A real blow. He mentioned the White House, and the Senate. He seemed particularly keen on the Senate.”

He allowed the money side of it to be dragged out of him. The account at the Kreditanstalt in Aachen with half a million dollars in it. (Thanks to McCready, there really was such an account, backdated to the appropriate period. And bank secrecy is not really all that good. The Libyans could confirm it if they wanted to.)

“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