His day had started at 4.30 with the bleeping of his wrist-watch alarm. No breakfast, because he never took breakfast. No coffee.
No food, nothing to drink. He had dressed. He had stripped the weapon, rebuilt it, satisfied himself, and then unloaded and reloaded the magazine. He always checked the mechanism before firing because the Ruger/MAC Mark 1 was now vintage and occasionally liable to jam. At 5.30 he had left his room in the west quarter of Athens, in the student sector. The car had been waiting for him.
As he lolled in his chair, not asleep but relaxed, he could remember that he had felt no tension, less excitement, as he had thrown his bag into the back seat of the car, climbed into the front carrying the Ruger with the integral silencer in a large plastic shopping bag. The driver was good, no sweat. The driver was from the Colonel's staff, and he had travelled ahead a full month before so that he knew the city, the back-doubles they might need and the side streets. Colt had known the driver for eleven months, and he knew he was good because the Colonel had told him how the driver had once handled an ambush.
Colt had been taken to the hotel where the target was staying.. . He had seen the target leave the hotel… It was his decision as to when he should take out the target. As the target had come out of the hotel, his hand had stiffened on the grip of the Ruger in the plastic bag and he had eased his weight towards the passenger door. But the taxi rank outside the hotel had been full and idle and the target had been straight into a vehicle. They had followed, and he had let his feelings rip when the driver had lost the taxi at a traffic light. The driver had stayed calm and quartered the streets until the taxi was picked up again two full minutes later. The driver would have known it was his first time, didn't take offence at the yelling. The taxi had stopped eventually at a crossroads in a suburb, and the target had paid it off and walked straight to a man who waited on the pavement. The target and the man had walked away up a tree-lined road. It was as good a place as any. No cars parked in the road, no pedestrians.
The road was two hundred yards long and empty… It was as good a place as he could hope to find. He could remember the car pulling onto the verge 20 yards behind the target. He could rememeber calling out, because he wanted to separate the target from the man who masked him. He could remember the suppressed clattering noise of the firing on semi-automatic. The second man had lunged across the target, he could remember that, and he could remember that he had kept squeezing the trigger. He would have shot the second man anyway. It was too good a place to miss out on. But it would have been tidier if he could have separated them. It was just bad luck for the second man that it had been a good place. They had fallen, both of them, he could picture it exactly in his mind, and he could remember Kairallah, calling to him to get back to the car. There wasn't a great deal else to remember because it had all been pretty damn straightforward. Running for the car, the car going steadily, not too fast to the airport, and out onto the flight to Ankara. And even less to remember of the delay at Ankara before the connection to Baghdad. Actually, he had done well…
The thoughts, memories, lulled him. He had made his choice.
For the time being it was a one-bedroomed apartment on the sixth floor of the Haifa Street Housing Project. It was an open window looking out onto the wind-rippled waters of the Tigris and across to the A1 Jumhuriyah and A1 Ahrar bridges and over to the tower blocks of the foreign-money hotels. It was his bed, and he would lie on it.
He heard the scrape of the guard's feet as the man scrabbled to get to the door.
He heard the rap at the apartment's outer door. He pushed himself to his feet. He stood with his back to the open window.
The Colonel was a thick-set man. He smelled of lotion, from Paris. He was not tall, but there was nothing flabby about the weight of his body. He wore a plain olive-drab uniform, only the insignia of his rank on his shoulders, no medal ribbons. His calf-length paratrooper boots were not shined, they were streaked with the grey dust of the street.
He liked the Colonel. The Colonel, his patron, his friend, in his mind was without bullshit, but tonight there was no warmth, no smile even.
"Were you seen?"
"Seen? What do you mean, seen'"
"Were there any eyewitnesses to the shooting?''
" No. "
" Is there any possibility you could be identified?"
"Nobody saw me."
"Think hard. Could anybody have seen you to associate you with the car even?"
" The road was empty."
" You were seen by nobody?"
"Only by the target, and whoever was with him… "
"Whoever…?"
"They're both dead."
" Do you know who it was who was with the target?"
"I did not ask his name before I shot him, no."
He stood very still. He knew that the target was a writer, an exile. He had been told what the writer wrote about the regime and the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He had been told also, in whispered confidence, that two attempts against the target had failed. He was the Colonel's card…
Below him he could hear the passing wail of sirens, a familiar sound after dark had fallen over the city. The squads from the Department of Public Security always did their work at night, taking into custody those they claimed were a threat to the regime.
And the sirens escorted their prisoners from the Department to the Abu Ghraib gaol, and those who had not survived interrogation from the Abu Ghraib gaol to the Medical City Mortuary on the other side of the Al Sarafiyah Bridge.
" Y o u shot an American, Colt…"
"I killed the target."
"A C.I.A. American…"
The boy laughed out loud. He laughed in the face of the Colonel, and at the watcher standing against the door.
" So what,..?" he said.
"He was an intelligence officer."
"It was a good street, got me? It was great. It was dead, there was no one No nannies, maids, deliveries, really good. The target, he was already fidgety, I couldn't follow him all day, not a target who was that sharp. The street was right. If the American hadn't gone then he had my face, and he had the car. He had to go… and he should have chosen his friends more carefully."
At last the Colonel smiled, and there was the gravel growl of his chuckle. "And you did nothing stupid in Athens…?"
" You taught me what to d o. "
"… Nothing Colt-like, nothing wild? What did you do, Colt?
No girls, no boasting?"
" Y o u taught me. I'm clean. It was a good street, Colonel.
There was an opportunity and I took it."
" Y o u could not be identified?"
" I ' d go back, to Europe, because I know that I cannot be traced."
The Colonel laid his broad hands on the young man's shoulders.
He looked into the calm of the face, into the clear eyes.
"It was well done, Colt."
Amongst those few who knew Zulfiqar Khan, and what work he did, news of his killing spread fast. And with the news, fear.
In Paris, an engineering specialist in deep tunnelling in heavy rock strata, home on leave, made up his mind there and then to turn his back on the remaining two and a half years of his contract.
The tunnelling that the Frenchman was paid – and handsomely
– to supervise was off the road to Arbil, close to the village of Salahuddin, due north of Baghdad. The area so far excavated was the size of a football pitch, and deep enough for three levels of laboratories and workshops that would be concrete-lined. One more floor was required. The cavern was eminently suitable for the work intended for it. It was safe from air attack and shielded by the Karochooq mountain mass from satellite photography that would tell the siory of the purpose for which this rock cave was fashioned, News ol Dr Khan's murder had eddied amongst the foreign specialists on the project. By midday word had reached all the hard hat staffers. By late that night, two of those staffers were at Baghdad International airport. They had driven the two hundred miles from their Portacabin compound in the village of Salahuddin at high speed. They waited for the first flight out of Iraq on which there were seats. It might be to Jeddah, or to Karachi, or to Budapest.