A Clear and Present Danger
Read A Clear and Present Danger Online
Authors: Buck Sanders
AT TAXPAYERS’ EXPENSE, six American congressmen pile out of the long, black limo into the classiest whorehouse in Munich.
A tall redhead stands in the doorway, flaunting herself in a see-through blouse, moistening her lips with her tongue. Suddenly
a shot rings out. Congressman Hurgett falls to the pavement, his head a bloody pulp. A note is found:
“Non, je ne regrette rien.”
The following month, Senator Samuels of Michigan dies mysteriously in Italy.
Again a note:
“Non, je ne regrette rien.”
BEN SLAYTON: T-MAN has the same reaction as everyone else: “Who is it who has no regrets. What the hell is going on?”
BEN SLAYTON: T-MAN #1
A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER
BEN SLAYTON: T-MAN #2
STAR OF EGYPT
Published by
WARNER BOOKS
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1981 by Warner Books, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56616-2
Contents
One
MUNICH. West Germany, Oktoberfest 1980
He waited, supremely patient, in a tiny, darkened hotel room five stories above the noisy street.
Tonight the drunken fools would come to him unawares. Though the precise hour was irrelevant, the time was indisputably now.
The waiting didn’t matter. He would be here, they would be down below; and on this night, eventually, history would be made.
He stared at the cobblestone entrance to the square as he smoked. The burning end of a black Tunisian cigarette illuminated
his hard-set, determined face. Tonight there was not a trace of fear in those strange, shining eyes, one of which was brown
and the other dark green.
Yet once there had been fear in his eyes. Only once, though, a long time ago.
Then, he had been a boy of seven years, which was also the last time he could remember his life being easy. His father had
not yet abandoned the family altogether; home was a comfortable flat in a tidy working-class district of Marseilles; and there
were frequent holidays in the surrounding mountains and woods of southern France.
On one such occasion, his father had decided to take his son alone, to hunt. He had found himself waiting in a blind then,
too.
When a huge, heavily antlered buck stepped tentatively into the forest clearing ahead of him, the boy had frozen in some unaccountable
terror. He had been unable to pull the trigger.
Behind him, he could feel his father’s breath on his neck; he could sense his father’s cold anger. The boy had been ashamed,
humiliated just as if his father had caught him masturbating.
“Kill him!” his father had hissed.
The buck’s nostrils flared and his ears twitched and the animal focused all senses toward the blind, alert to the slightest
presence of danger.
“Kill him, you sniveling bastard!” his father hissed again.
The buck’s knees bent, positioned for flight. But the animal, too, was frozen with fright. The boy felt a numbness and then
a fire in the armpit that held the butt of his rifle stock. His hands felt heavy and icy. There was a thudding sound in his
head. Then an explosion.
At first, the boy thought his skull had somehow detonated. Then he saw the thick spray of maroon blood shower the air of the
forest clearing beyond the sights of his rifle, the ugly black hole between the buck’s fear-crazed eyes; the buck crumpling
in sudden death. He had killed with a single, clean shot; his first shot and his first blood.
Something had taken the boy through that momentary stark fear. Now something in him reveled. The boy felt a deep and primal
satisfaction move swiftly through his body. His skin glowed, his breath came in rushes, his lips pulled back in a triumphant
grin. He felt a tingling in his testicles.
Nothing he had experienced, before or since, was more sublime than that first kill, even though it was only a deer.
… He tamped out his cigarette and lit another.
How many animals and how many men had he killed since the age of seven? And what was the difference? He grinned.
Returning his eyes to the street leading into the square, now completely clogged with Oktoberfest celebrants, he thought of
another moment in the past: sixteen years and eleven months ago, also in a crowded plaza, in the American city of Dallas;
another man, much younger than he, waiting in a room with a gun.
He stroked the chill steel of his weapon, a Mannlicher-Carcanño 6.5-millimeter. The same Spanish rifle the man in Dallas had
used.
Only this time, he thought, the Mannlicher-Carcaño would not bring about an end. This time, it would bring about a beginning.
He grinned and continued to wait.
“You must point them out to me, Frederick. You all look to me like penguins, black and white and waddling little fellows.”
Then she laughed. It was a husky, low laugh, the sort of laugh that came from the lips of a woman who has drunk whisky every
night for many years in the course of her professional life.
She was speaking with a man named Heinz, a very short and very sweaty bald-headed functionary of a leading West German trade
association. They had known one another for almost a decade on a strictly business basis, which had convinced her that he
was a contemporary eunuch, a sexless attendant of other men’s women.
Heinz wore a tuxedo, as did all the other men in the ballroom. The other women present were, for the most part, overweight
and dour and married to the host Germans, a few hundred of Munich’s burghers.
Also in the assembly were a few federal government lights in from Bonn, a half-dozen movie stars from Berlin, as well as a
sprinkling of athletes. But virtually no unattached women. Even if there were women available, they could certainly not be
attracted to the three men across the room to whom Frederick Heinz was discreetly pointing.
She sighed when she saw them. Typical clientele. Middle-aged to doddering American politicians on a junket. She got them all,
sooner or later. Once she had visited Washington and found, to her great surprise, that a good percentage of American politicians
were actually handsome men. Why did these men never seem to make their way to her?
“I see them,” she said to Heinz. “The usual swine.”
“Madame Vilbel, you will please mind your tongue! These men are important to us. In America, they occupy great position in—”
“Oh, Frederick, don’t be so political,” she interrupted. “You’re a pimp and nothing more, and I love you just the way you
are.”
Heinz wiped his brow and the top of his head with a handkerchief. “There is a difference,
leibchen
, between a politician and a pimp?”
She laughed again and kissed his pate.
“You will see to it our visitors are properly entertained,” Heinz said. “And you will be remunerated in the customary fashion.”
Before she left his side, Madame Vilbel leaned down and pinched Heinz on the left buttock.
On the opposite end of the room, the three Americans talked among themselves. The heftiest of their number spoke:
“You ought to see the way the common folk carry on this time of year in Bavaria. Jesus, it’ll run shivers down your goddam
spine, I’m telling you. They get into the whole atavistic business of jumping around bonfires in their goddam lederhosen and
if some guy in a silly-ass brush of a mustache was to stop by and tell them to kill the first Jew they see around, then goddam
but that’s what they’d do!”
“So, what’s so bad about that?” another of the Congressmen said, doubling over with laughter and causing the same reaction
in his colleagues.
“How about another drink?” the third man slurred.
“Heads up, boys,” the first man said, the fat one. “I do believe the entertainment committee is upon us, bless her heart.”
Madame Vilbel approached, smiled professionally, and took the fat man’s extended hand, which he kissed in elaborate continental
style. It didn’t happen often any more, not after so many years and so many men, but Madame Vilbel felt a quick surge of revulsion.
She shook it off.
“You should like to see the city tonight,
ja
?” She looked each man in his glazed eyes. “Munich is at its best in October, and I am at your service, gentlemen. Shall we
continue the evening at my place?”
The three Congressmen agreed. The fat one, who felt compelled to introduce himself—“Barlow Hurgett, ma’am! Representing the
noble Ninth District of the great state of South Carolina, the Grand Old Party, and the Moral Majority, yessiree!”—took her
by the arm and led the way out of the room and the building.
In the floodlit drive a Mercedes-Benz limousine waited, a chauffeur at the ready. Madame Vilbel nodded to the man behind the
wheel. The four piled into the big car, and then without a word of instruction, the chauffeur pulled out into the street and
sped down the autobahn toward Schwabing, the city’s bohemian quarter.
Schwabing was a district of quaint old public squares, several beer gardens favored a half-century ago by an Austrian émigré
born with the name Schickelgrüber, cheap hotels presently favored by transients who put a premium on privacy and a neighborhood
tolerance for establishments such as that run by Madame Vilbel.
Off the autobahn and now on the city’s surface streets, the going was slow. Throngs of beer-swigging, horn-blowing merrymakers
stalled vehicle traffic, sometimes turning entire streets into gigantic open-air parties. The din and the drunkeness would
grow louder and wilder before the dawn, which was what the man waiting in the window was counting on.
The Mercedes finally made its way into the square. Its slow pace was followed through the telescopic lens clamped to the end
of the Mannlicher-Carcaño’s barrel.
The Oktoberfest mob was essentially good-natured, and allowed the limousine to glide through its numbers after a mere twenty
minutes of attempting to tip it over.
It stopped at the curb in front of a narrow brownstone. The chauffeur jumped out and opened the rear door. Madame Vilbel emerged
first.
The man in the window removed her from his sights, lowering the rifle a half inch to capture the next exit in telescopic field.
Congressman Barlow Hurgett stepped out and tripped on the curb, landing face down on the sidewalk. Madame Vilbel and the two
other Congressmen laughed wildly at the spectacle.
The man in the window drew a bead on the broad, prostrate body. He inched the cross hairs to that exact spot between the clavicles
that he knew from long experience was where a bullet would do the most efficient work.
Gently, steadily, he squeezed the trigger. Then even before the bullet slammed into its target, he knew it would be true.
He felt the tingling warmth spread through his body, the deep satisfaction of his kill.
And he remembered: Only once had such a mission failed.
In the darkness of the square, in the cacophony of the boozy Oktoberfest night, the crack of a rifle and an American Congressman’s
instant death would go unnoticed for many crucial minutes. He had no need to hurry.
He watched from the window as Barlow Hurgett’s brethren stepped over him, laughing and joking, he supposed, about the ludicrous
appearance he made, sprawled as he was in a Munich gutter halfway between a limousine and a whorehouse. And he thought perhaps
he could make out madame’s throaty laughter.
He grinned. Then he lit a black cigarette and held it in his lips while he used both hands to break down the Mannlicher-Carcaño
and pack it away in an unobtrusive case. He did so carefully, almost reverently.
In the dim light of the cigarette, he located the single spent shell. He picked it up off the floor and placed it carefully
on the window sill. Then he reached into a shirt pocket and removed a small slip of paper, which he rolled into a cylinder
and stuffed inside the conspicuously placed shell.
He left the room then, making his way slowly down the central staircase of the old hotel.
When he reached the street, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, though he knew that soon there would be shrieking and panicked
running, and police whistles.