Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) (11 page)

For thirty minutes the matter of Bristol was thrashed out. Bletchley’s final recommendation did not include censure of the methods used. He merely suggested a periodic check to ensure the target did not return to Bristol and that the time was ripe to notify their friend in Chippenham that his daughter’s killer had been hounded from the city and would trouble no more youngsters there in the future.

The committee moved on to other matters. However, when the time came, Macpherson would trace the subsequent trouble with Bletchley back to that day.

With time on his hands de Villiers walked along the creek to the boat-building yard by Al Maktoum Bridge. He sat on a bale of cotton and watched the
abra
ferry crews below.

Dubai, he knew, had, long before the days of oil production, achieved an initial layer of wealth from a highly efficient pearling fleet. It was an operation that was cost-effective because of the evil treatment of the divers by their
nakhoudas
(skippers). The pearling dhows spent the diving season out on a glass-calm sea at the hottest time of the year. Daily diving rations consisted of a little water, a few dates and some rice, since underfed divers were able to stay underwater for longer.

There were seldom lemons to halt scurvy—too costly—and no spare fresh water to wash off the salt, so sores erupted and deep ulcers suppurated. For some the end came from blood poisoning, while many died from the agonizing sting of red jellyfish, the whip of stingrays or a sudden shark attack.

Japanese cultured pearls ruined the market in the 1950s and deprived the divers of their thankless livelihood. The Maktoum boat-builders then turned their hands to motorized dhows, many fast enough to outrun pirate sloops and Indian Coast Guard patrol launches. These boats became the basis of Dubai’s great wealth through the reexport of gold, mainly to India.

De Villiers returned to his hotel to change his shirt, for even in winter Dubai can be uncomfortably hot. He took a battered Mercedes cab to the Djera side of the creek and was quickly caught up in a honking line of jammed Toyotas. It was January 12, 1977, the day of his appointment.

He knew nothing of the client but presumed he was local and wealthy. Eight weeks earlier he had arrived in Dubai only to be told that the man was ill. The meeting was postponed and de Villiers was well compensated for his wasted time. He had worked for Arabs before, both in North Africa and the Gulf. Two years previously he had drowned an Egyptian fundamentalist leader at Zamalek in Cairo, and Meier had lethally rigged the stereo gear of one Saudi prince at the behest of another. De Villiers wondered if this time the target might be an Israeli. If so he would have to wage war with his principles. He respected the Israelis and might well turn down a contract to kill one. He had in the past rejected work for supporters of Pol Pot and Colombian drug kings. He had murdered many innocents for money from dubious sources but he saw no reason why he should not indulge his personal foibles from time to time.

Thanks to the carefully nurtured reputation of the Clinic, de Villiers had no shortage of jobs and could afford to be selective. Often he would split the Clinic in two, and sometimes the three of them were simultaneously at work on separate contracts. Meier and Davies operated well on their own, but it was as a threesome that the Clinic was most devastatingly effective. Even the most carefully protected target was doomed once his or her details, and the up-front payment from the client, had entered the Clinic’s ledger via one of de Villiers’s three international booking agents, the largest of which was Tadnams of Earls Court, London.

Of the many contract killers for hire in Europe and
the Americas, de Villiers had an unrivaled reputation for successful, “no foul play suspected” results. In the increasingly competitive market of the mid-seventies, this specialization began to pay off. There were too many killers chasing too few jobs, and it reached the point where in Birmingham, England, one amateur advertised, with the thinnest veneer of subtlety, in the local yellow pages. In 1976, in Chicago, over a quarter of the contract killings recorded by the police involved the deaths of contract killers taken out by one another. For all but a few specialists—the “scum de la scum,” to use Davies’s term—it had become a buyers’ market with operators accepting fees of less than half pre-1976 rates.

There was no lessening in demand. Far from it—rather a flood of amateur killers, mostly unemployed and often unemployable by reason of their emotional state, Vietnam veterans, washed up by the U.S. withdrawal the previous year. Many were charging $500 for a straight killing which, after allowing for their expenses and the agent’s percentage, often worked out at a profit of around $100. Such low prices soon stimulated increased activity at the bottom end of the market. Frustrated citizens were now finding the local contract agency a financially viable method of ridding themselves of noisy neighbors or irritating mothers-in-law.

The cab driver, a locally employed Palestinian, turned to de Villiers. “Abu Daoud is free,” he said, his eyes aglow with pride.

They were inching through a crowd of chanting, laughing Arabs—all Palestinians, de Villiers presumed—who brandished old rifles or camel sticks and had all but paralyzed the traffic. The cause of the rejoicing was the abject surrender that morning of the French government to terrorist coercion. Over the weekend the Paris police had arrested Abu Daoud, the notorious founder of Black September, who stood accused of organizing the Munich
Olympics terror attack of 1976, which killed eleven Israeli athletes. Now, after a hastily convened court hearing, the French deported him to Algiers—a free man and the cause of great joy among all Palestinians.

Perhaps the client would turn out to be a Palestinian. But no, there were plenty of ex-PLO killers about. More likely, de Villiers felt, a Gulf oil sheikh with a personal grudge. There was every likelihood that de Villiers would be met by a mere representative of the client. Or even the representative of a representative. That was why he never sent Meier or Davies to meet a client. You needed to be razor-sharp on these occasions. He remembered the time he had rendezvoused with a Dutch representative who had actually tried to redirect him, boomeranglike, toward his own boss, the real client. Instinct, rather than any identifiable slip on the part of the Dutchman, had alerted de Villiers, who decided to have Tadnams send him a photograph of their original client, the Dutchman’s employer. Embarrassment was avoided and the outcome had been a double fee for the removal of the originally intended target
and
the disloyal representative.

De Villiers paid off his joyful cabbie in a deserted side street and walked for five minutes through the shuttered gold market. The hotel was plush and discreet. Following the written instructions received via Tadnams, de Villiers nodded politely at the reception desk, avoiding eye contact with its occupant, and crossed to the hairdresser’s salon at the far end of the entrance hall. No hair was being cut, no beards trimmed. Like everyone else, around noon the barber was hors de combat.

The salon’s inner door was labeled “Staff Only” and hung with a planner chart of bookings. De Villiers closed this door behind him. He was now inside a walnut-paneled elevator that responded to only two buttons, an up and a down. Ascending to an indeterminate level, he
emerged into a corridor hung with Persian and Baluchi rugs, where he was met by a girl of eleven or so with a shy smile. He followed her down the passageway admiring the intricate sewing of her patterned jellaba. Her neck, ears and wrists jangled with beaten silver ornaments of South Arabian style, probably Yemeni.

The girl entered a long and richly furnished drawing room. The subtle scent of burnt
leban
(frankincense) was pleasing and in keeping with the general air of Arab high living that the room exuded. An elaborate brass lamp stood in each of the four corners, their bulbs hidden within giant crystal geodes, so that each cabbagelike rock gave forth an orange luminescence that glimmered back from the tapestries and the tasseled cushions.

“Come, help me rise, my little love.” The voice was gentle. As de Villiers’s vision grew accustomed to his low-lit surroundings he saw the girl take the hand of an old man slumped in a leather armchair.

He exchanged greetings. The man introduced himself as Sheikh Amr bin Issa in the passable English of most Gulf Arab businessmen. His was a once strong face creased and prematurely aged by suffering and rendered ashen by illness.

“Sit close, sir, for my voice is weak.” The girl helped the sheikh without difficulty, for he was painfully thin, even emaciated. He bade her bring coffee.

“I do not know your name, only your unenviable reputation. I will waste no time with preamble, for the pain will soon come again.”

The sheikh explained that he owned an expanding chain of retail grocery outlets in the Gulf, Turkey and Iraq. Before long he would open new branches in Cyprus and Iran.

“I have sufficient profit for reinvestment to pay $2 million annually to the Palestinian cause. My sons are at
college in England, and last summer I had no thought of summoning a killer such as you.”

The sheikh coughed and took minutes to recover from the pain. If this was his client, de Villiers reflected, he would need to have a contract agreed without delay, for the mantle of death clung close.

The girl brought coffee in a silver
dhille
with an elegant beak, and tiny cups of fine china. When she was gone the sheikh continued.

“Shamsa, my granddaughter, lost her father seven years ago fighting the Sultanate troops in Dhofar, my homeland. Three of her uncles have also been killed in that sorry conflict. Four of my six sons all killed and none have been avenged.”

Sheikh Amr explained the background of his exile to Dubai. He made sure that de Villiers understood in depth the deadly seriousness with which his people viewed his failure, as their sheikh, to follow the edicts of the
thaa’r
.

“I have visited Dubai on and off for a quarter of a century and I realize that Westerners, indeed Muslims from outside Dhofar, know very little about my country. The same is true in reverse of many of my fellow
jebalis
. They do not, for instance, share the historic hatred of the Muslim Arab for the Israeli, simply because Israel means nothing to them, does not touch upon their lives.” The sheikh paused to wipe beads of sweat from his forehead.

“I must tell you that I have not yet seen the passage of fifty years. Some seven months ago I was in good health. Then came the first pains. Within weeks the doctors told me I had a malignant growth in my belly. They gave me a year at the most and I began to think afresh about my life. Bakhait, my eldest surviving son,
is
my life. He has the gentleness of his mother and my own instinct for business. I want above all for him and his brother to enjoy the success back at home that would soon have
been theirs but for our exile; an exile that I have, by my own actions, brought upon them. I have given them everything—unlimited money, the best of educations, both Western and Koranic—yet what will this avail them where it matters most, in the land of their ancestors?”

He sighed and made as though to lay his hand on de Villiers’s arm. But, remembering perhaps the nature of his profession, interrupted the gesture.

“You are now the key to my sons’ future.” He paused. “Their passport back to Dhofar.”

The previous August, when his sons returned for their summer holiday, the sheikh had told them of his new resolve. The
thaa’r
must go ahead. Neither son was committed to the absolutism of
jebali
traditions; both had been corrupted by their year in England and by their father’s own liberalism. Nevertheless when Amr demanded that Bakhait give his pledge to avenge the murder of his brothers, a pledge of honor to be repeated on his father’s grave, Bakhait did not hesitate. Devoted to his father and desperately grieved at the news of his sickness, he gave his word as Bakhait bin Amr al Jarboati that he would follow his father’s wishes to fulfill the
thaa’r
and then return to Dhofar and, if God willed it, to his rightful place at the head of the Bait Jarboatis.

Dhofaris often passed through Dubai and called on family and friends living there. An increasing number flew to the United Kingdom for training in military, engineering, social services and other skills. Amr knew from them that, in the last year, his country had undergone enormous changes. The revolution was over, the new half-Dhofari sultan had granted Dhofaris everything that his father had withheld from them.

Business opportunities were almost unlimited, and political power, at a level previously undreamed of, was now attainable. Young Dhofaris could now contemplate
becoming ministers of Oman. But not Bakhait. Should he return to Dhofar—and there was no government ruling to stop him—he would forever need to watch over his shoulder, awaiting the bullet that would surely come.

For three hours de Villiers was left alone with European magazines, chilled
loomee
juice and a plate laden with the best Sohar dates. Amr bin Issa, riven by deep stomach pains, had retired to his room. When he returned he appeared to be impatient for an answer from de Villiers.

“Listen well,” he said, “for I am asking you to find and execute four men. The method of their killing must leave no suspicion in the minds of even their dearest friends.” If the sheikh expected surprise to show on de Villiers’s face he wasted his time, for he remained expressionless as usual.

“Further,” said the sheikh, leaning forward, “you must remind each man when you identify him of his personal responsibility for the death of my son. You will film everything, the warnings and the executions, and for each audiovisual film that you hand to me or, after my death, to my son Bakhait, you will be paid the sum of one million American dollars by check from my account at the Bank of Dubai. When all four films have been satisfactorily received, we will pay you off with a final payment of a like amount.” He paused. “Do you have any questions?”