A Clear and Present Danger (15 page)

“Sir,” Slayton said, as the Wolf lit up another black Tunisian, “I am at your command.”

The Wolf nodded.

“Of course you are. one way or another. But you still have not told me what you have to offer to me. We are all specialists
here, you know.”

“I offer you a working knowledge of military aircraft, you have seen that I am able to take down any of your men—”

“You are not who you seem to be!” the Wolf shouted, his fist slamming down to the table. “I will find out who you are.”

Slayton felt the blood run cold in his veins.

ANDORRA

“Who is this American?”

Anthony asked it of Sigrid as they drove slowly down the narrow road from the castle into the city. She shifted into the lowest
gear, easing the Maserati through a series of ruts.

“An interesting possibility.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

She took her eyes off the road, a path, actually, made by some ancient herd of goats, and glared at him.

“If you dare say a word of your filthy suspicions—”

“You can’t threaten me. If I was to say anything, you know he would kill you.”

She looked away, back to the road, angrily.

“Do you remember Turin, my little
fraulein?
”

She refused to speak to him.

“Are you too overcome with tender memories, my dear? The memory of our little stop along the way? The inn outside of Trieste?”

She reached the highway and then turned to him, her voice loud and threatening.

“I never should have let that happen. You’re a swine, Anthony. I tell you, I will find some way of getting rid of you. You
don’t have much reason to be smug.”

Anthony laughed at her.

“Just get us to the bank, Sigrid. We’ll finish our business as soon as we can and then… who knows? Maybe we’ll have time
for a noon-time rest before we have to head back.”

The Wolf was without benefit of aides or guards. It was only he and Slayton, seated now in the Wolf’s study. The Wolf had,
however, a .45-caliber revolver pointed at Slay-ton’s heart.

“Now, let me say this just once more,” the Wolf said. “I find it hard to believe you’re an itinerant television crate maker.
Your talk is good. You’re an educated man, both by the book and by the street. Someone taught you well. If you’re an American
government agent, be assured that I shall soon know. I have certain connections there.”

“C.I.A.?” Slayton chanced.

The Wolf said nothing.

“Sure. You’re C.I.A. Lots of people back home wonder if the Company is ever going to be on our side, which is a good question.
Look, I’m telling you the truth. I’m not anybody’s agent. And I withdraw my offer to fall in with you. I think you’re stark,
raving mad.”

The Wolf stood up and walked to where Slayton sat. He clouted him on the side of the face with his revolver, then stepped
quickly back. The Wolf had seen Slayton’s speed, and was afraid of being overpowered.

“Listen, cockroach,” the Wolf said, “I’ll know soon enough. I have a man here with C.I.A. background. Yes. He’ll have a look
at you and then we’ll see.”

If it were true, Slayton knew his life wasn’t worth anything. He quickly calculated that the Wolf’s man must be the man who
had poisoned Senator Samuels. It was one thing to fool a man like the Wolf, whose vanity and megalomania could be used against
him; it was quite another to fool someone trained by the C.I.A. A spook was sure to spot him.

“And if I clear your next hurdle, what then? Am I taken into the club here? Or will you make some further claim against me?
Can’t you just accept the fact that I’m an overeducated, burned-out old hippie Vietnam vet? I mean, that could be a fair candidate
for the Legion.”

The Wolf considered his argument. It had a sensible ring to it. That he couldn’t deny.

“We’ll wait here and we’ll see,” the Wolf said, glancing at his wristwatch. He lit another black Tunisian.

“Yes, we shall see. Meanwhile, tell me more about your plans to… what did you say you were going to do with your friends
out there?”

“We’re building a new order,” the Wolf said. “A new order of valorous men. And women. We will assist those who should be running
the world’s important nations.”

“How exactly would you accomplish this?”

“By demonstrating our capabilities, of course. Already, my friend, we have made impressive strikes. The country we are most
interested in—yours, namely—has been shocked to its foundations.”

Slayton doubted that the nation at large was unduly upset by the deaths of Barlow Hurgett and Richard Samuels, however they
went. As yet, the nation was unaware of the Bush assassination attempt. The first two sorties into international terrorism
were perhaps shakedown missions, Slayton considered, designed only to test one’s own abilities and to monitor the retaliatory
actions of the other side.

The Wolf would have to make his move on President Reagan if he was to make a mark in the world, if he was to impress terrorist
organizations in other countries with whom he wished to ally. Anyone could kneecap an Italian ex-politician. It would take
a real leader among terrorists to bring down an American President. Or so it might make sense to someone like Slayton.

Of course, the Wolf was someone quite apart from Slayton.

“I notice that Reagan is still in office,” Slayton said. “I assume you mean to do something about that to promote yourself?”

“You are too insolent to be a good spy,” the Wolf said. “Perhaps you are not, after all. Perhaps you are too insolent and
too stupid, like most Americans.

“You ask about President Reagan. Let me tell you this: your people believe it is safe for the President of Hollywood to travel
to Japan. And that is exactly what we wish them to think.

“So he will travel to Japan, as scheduled. Oh yes, we know of the schedule, even if most Americans do not. He will be able
to leave the country.

“But the question is, will he be able to return?”

She had hit on a plan of action as they drove back from the city into the hills.

During the entire trip, Anthony yammered at her, nagged her about her meeting Slayton at the bar, demanded to know of any
intimacies. God, the man was no better than the Wolf! Men wanted only to possess women. They didn’t want to love them, to
honor them; and they certainly wouldn’t obey them. They only wanted to possess them, to Show them off to their friends—other
men.

Maybe the American was different. She had never spent any time to speak of with an American man. Perhaps Ben wasn’t representative.
What did it matter, anyway—a man’s nationality? She knew only that this American, Ben, was a man for whom she had looked for
a long time without finding. She knew that if given the opportunity and the time—time away from this dreadful prison life
with the tyrant she once somehow thought so dashing, so exciting—she could fall desperately in love with Ben. In fact, she
thought, she was already in love with him.

But there were two enormous obstacles: the Wolf and Anthony.

She had met the Wolf when she was only a girl in Hamburg, a student at the Polytechnic. The Wolf, who was using the name Rene
Laclerc at the time, was much younger, too, of course. Still virile.

He was simply a man who spent a great deal of time in the public libraries when she met him, a seemingly wealthy man; at least,
a man who didn’t need to work for someone each day. Whenever she had to use the library, he was there, always reading from
some ponderous work, as if he were on some desperate cycle of inhaling knowledge, as if deprived of books most of his life.

They would chat amiably in the library, not too familiarly; after all, she was German and he was French and there was still
quite a social gulf to span. But in time, they were meeting for meals and drinks together in the pubs of Hamburg.

It was at these times he would spin his adventurous tales: the time he nearly drowned in
fesh-fesh
, the Arabic word, he taught her, for a desert sand so fine that it can suck you up like a swamp; a battle somewhere in Morocco,
the French forces pursuing the Moroccan rebels for day after day, neither side having adequate supplies of water.

She remembered, as she drove, of that particular story, more for the strange delight in his telling it than the story itself.

“… Three of us had been eaten by the desert jackals as we slept. We woke to find their bodies, and to find that the enemy
had pulled out. They had a large lead on us. Later that day, we literally fell across them in the desert, never expecting
we would,” the Wolf, Laclerc, had told her.

“They had been set upon by the jackals themselves. Nearby was a well, left by nomads. We rushed to it. It was stuffed with
corpses, Moroccan corpses. We never knew why. The water had turned crimson.

“All of us took our cups from our belts and drank the red water. We drank to our fallen enemy. And then we buried them, with
their shoes off and their heads facing Mecca. A sign of respect to Islam and their combativeness.

“I shall never forget the words of our commander: ‘This day, you have done honor to France.’”

It was this compulsion with honor and glory, two words the Wolf used frequently every day she had known him, that eventually
replaced his passion for her. By then, however, she was traveling the world with him, to lands far from her small world of
Hamburg, West Germany. She had no home except that which he made for her.

That would be no more, if the rest of the day went well for her. She might have a man to help her out of the increasingly
insane and frightening existence in the Andorran mountains… and she might have someone to go to, someone special to her,
if only he could be touched after so many years’ separation by so vast an ocean. But… would he be insane, too?

Sigrid looked to the passenger side of the Maserati. Anthony leered at her. She spat in his face.

Slayton managed to read part of the letter on the Wolf’s desk. The Wolf was rummaging through a bookshelf, searching for some
volume of legal text to buttress a lesson he was giving Slayton at the moment. When his back was turned, Slayton stole a long
glance at the letter, which he had earlier noticed—couldn’t
not
notice—as the Wolf fingered it, occasionally glancing down at it.

Slayton read the final words of the piece, written in English, as they appeared to him, upside down:

“… amazing the things you learn with a library card. Love, Edw.”

The Wolf found his volume. Slayton sat back in his chair. His snooping had gone undetected.

“Here it is,” the Wolf said. “The words of our enemies, with whom we will deal harshly when the time is correct, when we have
our visibility and our consolidated power.

“Look, only last year, Charles Hernu, a ‘defense expert,’ so he says. Nothing but a Socialist party hack. He calls for the
Legion to be abolished, even the weakened Legion that we know today. And of course, the Communists. They call the Legion an
‘instrument of colonial conquest and repression of the people.’ Lies!

“But the most hurtful of all our enemies’ criticism comes from Antoine Sanguinetti. He says, ‘Once upon a time there were
the Three Musketeers, and the Pope had Zouaves. The Legion’s time has passed.’

“This Sanguinetti will pay for those words with his life.”

“And his death will be a killing rather than a murder?” Slayton said, mocking him.

“You will shut your mouth! You’re a man on trial!”

“And you’re a man who is mad.”

The Wolf struck him again with the butt of his revolver. This time, Slayton managed to grab his wrist. He was nearly in position
to send the Wolf flying over his back onto his own. But the door to the study opened.

Anthony scooped up the revolver, which had slid across the floor during the brief struggle. He shouted to Slayton, “Halt,
or I’ll shoot!”

Slayton stopped, released the Wolf.

“Thank you, Anthony. You have possibly saved the world a grievance. Now you mav do me one more service, Anthony. I want you
to take a close look at this man with me, the man you found trying to kill me. Talk to him if you wish; tell me if he is an
American spy.”

Anthony was both shocked and honored. He walked in a circle around Slayton. Sigrid, meanwhile, had taken a position near the
Wolf and was whispering into his ear.

The Wolf’s complexion went scarlet.

“Stop it!” he shouted. “Anthony, you are the traitor! Sleeping with my Sigrid!”

He waved his hand at Anthony, accusing him with his finger. Sigrid moved closer. She slipped a small pistol from her belt
and put it into the Wolf’s hand. In a rage, he pulled the trigger.

He caught Anthony in the bridge of his nose. His face was a bright blob of bone-spattered blood. He dropped instantly to the
floor, a bullet fatally lodged in the front of his brain.

“What?” the Wolf shouted. He moved about the study, as if dazed. “What?… what?… what?”

Sigrid tapped Slayton on the shoulder. Never had he seen more pleading in a human face.

“You must, please… Ben, oh Ben, you must get away from this place. You must help me escape it, too. Here, finish it off.”
She took the small pistol from the Wolf’s hand and gave it to Slayton.

Then she knelt over Anthony’s fallen body. Near his pulpy head was the Wolfs own .45-caliber revolver. She picked it up in
both hands and aimed it at the Wolfs head.

“Wait!” Slayton told her.

He crossed the room to her and took the revolver from her hand. She was quaking uncontrollably. Tears streamed from her eyes.

“Too much noise,” Slayton said.

The Wolf stood, paralyzed. Saliva began flowing from one corner of his mouth. An eye went bloodshot. His temples pounded visibly.

“Your Maserati,” Slayton said to her. “Is it outside, around the other column?”

“Yes.”

“Go there. Take this’ with you.” He handed her both handguns. “Don’t let anyone see them. No one has come in here, so I don’t
think the shot from your pistol was heard outside this room. We have to rely on the quiet.