Reprisal (6 page)

“This is very frustrating!”

“Listen, I’m going to be the one who does whatever job you want done, so you got to talk with me sooner or later. That’s how
it works. I do the job, Dartley gets the credit.”

“All right, Mr. Savage, I will explain my problem to you. First, however, I wish to register my protest at how this is being
handled, and I insist that Mr. Dartley be made aware of this displeasure.”

Richard Dartley shrugged and left the Frenchman wondering if he even fully understood what had been said. They walked by the
edge of the channel for a while in the October sunshine. Small sailboats were tacking this way and that in the channel, while
bigger boats left their masts bare and ran on their engines. Fishermen sitting on rocks watched their lines placed at the
outflow of dirty water from pipes. Both Dartley and Laforque scanned the faces of people sitting on benches, standing next
to parked cars, walking on the embankment.

Laforque stroked his bony jaw and began to talk in a disillusioned way, like someone who knows he must live with some disappointment.

“Mr. Savage, you probably love your American homeland as I do mine. Some of the things I feel called upon to do for love of
my country you may judge improper—perhaps only because your country has not the same needs as France. France has no fuel.
Winters are cold and most of the people depend on industry. We found that we were becoming hostages of some of the same countries
who had once
been our colonies. And those people had not forgotten us from those times—or I should say that they had not forgotten the
wrongs we did them and had completely forgotten the benefits we brought them. France was hit much harder than America by the
OPEC oil embargo. Our answer was to build nuclear reactors all over the country so that we would be less dependent on oil
for electric power. And that led to unexpected developments.”

He walked along with Dartley for a while, and both of them watched two pretty blondes in bikinis expertly handle a small sailboat.

Dartley said, “I don’t think we’re going to get a chance to rescue them.”

“More likely they could rescue us,” Laforque said dryly, then went on. “France found herself in a new position with nuclear
technology. Countries which had been refusing her oil at bargain prices were practically willing to give it away for nothing
if France would build a nuclear reactor for them or one of their allies. When Ahmed Hasan overthrew Mubarak in Egypt, the
Iranians committed enormous oil supplies to us at low cost if we built Hasan several reactors and supplied fuel. They guaranteed
us that they would use nuclear power only for peaceful purposes.”

“Like the Iraqis and Pakistanis,” Dartley said sarcastically.

Laforque shrugged. “The Israelis and South Africans seem to have gotten nuclear weapons from someone also. I wonder who. Certainly
not France. Anyway, the Arabs can see no justifiable reason why they too shouldn’t have nuclear weapons.”

“Perhaps because they would be only too willing to use them if they had them.”

“That’s what the Israelis say.” Laforque grinned. “The Western nations blame France and say we will cause the end of the world
by giving nuclear capability to desert sheiks. Typical imperialist racism.”

“Not even the Russians are dumb enough to give nuclear equipment to that part of the world,” Dartley pointed out

“Ah, yes, they are, Mr. Savage. They sell off any outdated equipment they can get them to take. However, the Arabs don’t want
that stuff. They have the money to buy the newest and best, which happens to be French these days.”

“What do you want me to do?” Dartley asked.

“Mr. Savage, we want Richard Dartley to save France’s good name by going into Egypt to discover if Ahmed Hasan is really making
an atom bomb with French technology.”

“And if he is?”

“To stop him by any means necessary.”

This amused Dartley. He was not naive enough to believe that he was being asked to do something which French intelligence
operatives could not achieve themselves. If Hasan was making a bomb, French intelligence already knew of it. And if they wanted
to stop Hasan, they could do so more easily than a lone American in a hostile country could.

Dartley had no doubt that Jacques Laforque was a member of one of the branches of French intelligence. His background was
perfect, along with the fact that gendarmes were not ordinary cops in the American sense of the word. The Gendarmerie
Nationale was a highly militarized force, run along army lines and with military spirit and discipline. They were enough to
make FBI agents seem like hippies.

Dartley also wondered if Laforque had seen through his guise of claiming to be Paul Savage. Or did Laforque not really care
whether he had Dartley or Savage, so long as he had an American agent doing France’s dirty work in Egypt? Why? Dartley knew
it would be a waste of time for him to ask questions. Laforque would already have answers prepared for them—answers which
would only let him know what Laforque wanted him to know. In all likelihood, Laforque had been told very little himself. In
every country’s intelligence services, information was rationed carefully, on a “need to know” basis.

“Go in,” Dartley mused. “Find out if he’s making a bomb. If he is, stop him. By any means necessary. Keep France’s name out
of it. Any complications?”

“Israel.”

“I see. So neither France nor Israel can find out if Egypt is making a bomb. Yet you believe that I can. Amazing.”

“French intelligence has reached its own conclusions,” Laforque said loftily. “We will use your findings as confirmation of
ours. As for the Israelis, France has no wish to collaborate with them against our Arab friends.”

Dartley grinned. “In case those Arab friends of yours find out? That’s right, I mustn’t forget: You need oil. Sure, I’ll go.
You know my fee? A million. In U.S. dollars.”

Laforque did not bat an eye. “Where can we deposit it?”

Dartley wrote for him an account number and the name of a bank in Panama.

Charles Stuart Woodgate was Richard Dartley’s uncle and lived on a fifty-acre farm near Frederick, north of Washington, D.C.
Charley had taken a bad leg wound at Monte Cassino in the slow climb up the Italian peninsula against the Germans. Since then
his career had been a mystery to some and a marvel to others. A few knew he was a gunsmith and had a large collection of rare
and unusual weapons. Very few were aware that he made special guns to order, with no questions asked, for those who knew exactly
what they wanted and could afford the heavy expense involved. Certain of his guns could be taken apart and fitted into aluminum
crutches or specially designed bicycles. Silencers were another of his specialties. Ammunition, too. With new advances in
surgical techniques, increasing numbers of people were surviving assassination attempts. Bullets that exploded on impact or
those with poisoned tips were beyond the reach of the most advanced physicians. Charley supplied them all.

Charley had more or less taken his nephew in after the youth’s father had been murdered. Now Dartley still didn’t have a place
of his own. As a base, he used a studio apartment over what had once been a horse barn on his uncle’s farm. It was when he
stayed there between missions that he put in long hours of target shooting and practicing combat with various weapons. Charley
very often had something new to show
him, and Dartley was more than happy to break in new weapons by firing the thousands of rounds from them necessary before
they could be judged fully accurate and trustworthy.

This was how Richard Dartley was these days—cold, efficient, merciless, one of the very top hitmen in the world. But Richard
Dartley hadn’t been born that way. In fact, he hadn’t even been born Richard Dartley.

Charley Woodgate often looked at him now and wondered. He wondered if it mightn’t have been better if he had never helped
the youth. But he knew for sure that the damage had already been done by the time he arrived on the scene. Without Charley’s
help, there would not have been a Richard Dartley. There would just have been someone else with another name, but equally
deadly, equally driven. So Charley told himself.

Dartley was born Richard John Woodgate, son of Richard Woodgate and Martha Dartley Woodgate, in 1945 in Washington, D.C. Even
that was not true. His mother told him when he was twelve that he had been adopted. Just that, nothing more. If he had known
earlier, he could have grown up with the knowledge. Since she had waited that long to tell him, Richard only wished she had
held off even longer.

It wasn’t until much later—when he was twenty-two—that he found out who he really was. If that was who he really was anymore.
Through illegal access to court records on adoption, he discovered that he was the son of teenage parents, both the offspring
of
prominent Washington attorneys. His birth name had been Paul Savage.

He was raised by his adoptive parents in a big old house with a veranda in Chevy Chase, Maryland, went to Bethesda-Chevy Chase
High School, went to Episcopal church and didn’t particularly excel at anything. Richard knew that his adoptive father worked
for the government—“something in the State Department,” he wasn’t sure what. When an ex-CIA agent, disillusioned with America,
named names, the family was astonished to find the head of the household high on the list.

Woodgate was in Buenos Aires at the time and may never have known he had been exposed. As he got into a car on September 11,
1976, outside the American embassy, he was hit in the forehead by a Kalashnikov AK-47 bullet. The family had thought he was
in Florida. The
New York Times
referred to him as “an American security advisor,” and the vice president of the United States, in an oration at his funeral,
called him a “courageous warrior.”

The man who was to become Richard Dartley realized, in a sudden rush, that he knew nothing about anything—he had not known
his adoptive father as a real person, he decided.

When all this took place, his head was already messed up by what he had done in Vietnam; and what it had done to him. He did
his share of butchering there, but also lost some good buddies to the Cong. The thing that really broke him was falling for
an almond-eyed beauty, really going for her in a big way. It was only when she tried to kill him that he realized she was
Cong. He had asked her to marry
him! He killed her by crushing her skull with the heel of his boot.

His father’s murder was the thing that made him get his act together. In the months after his father’s death, he moved to
one room above a store on K Street in Georgetown, ran for hours every day along the C&O Canal, quit smoking and drinking,
went on a special diet… He became fit again, sinew and muscle, tough in mind as well as body. And he was ready then to face
a couple of facts—he was thirty years old and he didn’t have a job.

Charley Woodgate gave him advice. Go in his father’s footsteps. Join the CIA. But the CIA didn’t want anyone with his confidential
Army record, which besides the death of the Viet girl, included a fragging and other stuff he tried never to think about anymore.
The CIA wanted to train nice kids to be killers; they had no program to train crazies to be nice CIA men. So that was out.

It turned out that so too were other government jobs. He was only an ant on an ant heap, but word traveled. He leveled with
his Uncle Charley. By this time he knew that Charley was cast in the same mold as his adoptive father, who was, of course,
Charley’s brother. The man who was to become Richard Dartley did not share their genes, but he felt he sure shared their way
of looking at things.

Charley scratched his head when Richard asked him to find a job as an assassin. Charley said, “You better change your name.
Make a fresh start. Born again, you might say.”

Richard John Woodgate became Richard Dartley, after his mother’s maiden name. It wasn’t untraceable,
it wasn’t clever—but it was as far as he had been willing to go at that time. His sense of identity was shaky enough already.
Totally dumping everything and assuming a one hundred percent, strange new identity made him panic deep down inside. He needed
something to cling to.

His next trouble was that a paid assassin is not born overnight. No one wants to hire someone unless they hear he has done
a clean job for someone else they know. It was a word-of-mouth business. A man might want someone dead and be willing to pay
well for it, but his greatest fear had to be that the assassin he hired would turn out to be an amateur or a psycho, and in
either case bungle the job and perhaps reveal the money man’s identity. This was the kind of position where they took “experienced
only.”

Dartley would have gotten nowhere had it not been through Charley Woodgate. A man who made weapons to order occasionally was
asked if he knew a skilled, professional shooter. Even so, it took a year before Dartley drew a pro job.

By 1980 Richard Dartley was known to the select few as one of the two or three best hitmen in the world. Once he had accepted
an assignment, he had always gotten his man. Besides this, he had managed to keep his identity unknown. In 1981 he first asked
for a fee of a million dollars. Now he rarely worked for less.

He had been careful all the way—and moral too, in his own peculiar way. He had never assassinated anyone who hadn’t deserved
it. That was his most important rule. Dartley could honestly say that, to
the present time, he had never deliberately harmed an innocent person in his life.

For Dartley to take him out, the target had to be real scum. Dishonest was not enough. The man had to be certified garbage
in the worst way before Dartley would agree to touch him.

Although Dartley admitted he had become hardened and maybe cold-bloodedly vicious and calculating because of the work he did,
he never lost sight of that one thing—each of the cockroaches he took out had to have lost the right to go on living.

Dartley sat at a table in the farmhouse with Charley Woodgate and Herbert Malleson. Malleson was doing the talking. He had
neat columns of lists before him and was adding to them. Occasionally he pulled a photocopy from a large manila envelope and
tossed it to the others to illustrate or back up what he said. His arch mannerisms and Oxford accent had earned him in America
the nickname “the Viscount.”