The Jerusalem File Read online

  Annotation

  FOUR SAVAGE MEN.

  LEONARD FOXX — American millionaire, kidnapped in a bloody shootout.

  JACKSON ROBEY — AXE's man in Tel Aviv, found dead in an alley, knifed in the back.

  AL SHAITAN — leader of a ruthless terror gang, missing along with a billion dollars in untraceable cash.

  NICK CARTER — Killmaster, on a lethal mission to rescue the world's ten most important men.

  It was to be Nick Carter's most brutal assignment — and it could only end with Killmaster victorious… or dead!

  * * *

  Nick CarterPrologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty One

  * * *

  Nick Carter

  Killmaster

  The Jerusalem File

  Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Services of the United States of America

  When ye encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads until ye have made a great slaughter among them; and bind them in bonds, and either give them free dismission afterwards or exact a ransom…

  The Koran

  Prologue

  The air conditioners were working at top speed in the gilded ballroom of the Eden Hotel, but the room was crowded with the two hundred members of a singles party and the smoke and the flesh and the desperation made it feel as hot as the jungle it was.

  The big double doors at the end of the room led out to the back, to the rocky path that descended toward the beach, toward the cool fresh air, toward the quiet place where the blue-black ocean met the sandy shore without the help of Sonny, Your Weekend Host.

  As the evening wore on, some of the party-goers drifted out The ones who got lucky went arm in arm, the man spreading his jacket on the sand for the girl. The unlucky ones went out alone. To think about why they were so unlucky; to think of money spent and vacation time gone, or to catch some fresh air before trying again. And some just went out to look at the stars before going home to apartments in the States, to cities that don't have stars anymore.

  Nobody noticed the tall man in the Cardin jacket who was walking toward the far end of the beach. He was walking quickly, carrying a flashlight, walking with a dog away from the expensive Bahama hotel down to where the beach was darkest and quietest He looked once at the singles in passing. A look that might have been interpreted as one of annoyance. But nobody noticed.

  Nobody noticed the helicopter, either. Not until it was so low you thought it was coming straight at you, and if it didn't land fast it was going to go through the big glass doors and land in the middle of the glittering ballroom.

  Three hooded men lumped out of the 'copter. They were carrying guns. The man in the Cardin jacket looked up, like everyone else, in quiet amazement. He said, "What the hell! And then they grabbed him, and quickly, roughly, pushed him toward the craft The people on the beach stood immobile, still as the beach palms, wondering if what they were seeing was a dream, and then a small man from Brooklyn yelled, "Stop them!" Something snapped in the quiet crowd, the crowd of hustled big-city losers, and some of them started running toward the dream to fight for perhaps the first time in their lives. And the hooded men smiled and lifted submachine guns and covered the beach with bullets and screams, and under the ratatatat of the guns, the small pop-hiss of a phosphorous grenade, and then the fire-the quick-spreading fire that ate up the dresses bought for die occasion and the little matching sweaters and the rented tuxedos and the small man from Brooklyn and the teacher from Bayonne…

  Fourteen dead, twenty-two wounded.

  And the man with the dog was taken on the 'copter.

  One

  I was lying naked in the sun. I hadn't moved a muscle in over an hour. I was beginning to like it. I was starting to think about never moving a muscle again. I wondered, if you lay in the desert sun long enough could the heat bake you into a statue? Or a monument? Maybe I could become a monument. Here Lies Nick Carter. I bet I'd make a hot tourist attraction. Families would visit me on four-day weekends and the kiddies would stand around making faces — like they do with Buckingham Palace guards — trying to get me to move a muscle. Only I wouldn't. Maybe I could make the Guinness Book of Records: "The record for not moving a muscle is forty-eight years and twelve minutes as set by Nick Carter in Tucson, Arizona."

  I squinted up at the long horizon, at the vaguely blue mountains that ring the desert, and took a deep breath of air so clean it was going to think my lungs were a slum.

  I eyed my leg. It was beginning to look like part of me again. At least it was turning the same deep brown as the rest of my body, looking less like a vacuum cleaner hose and more like an actual human leg.

  Talking about not moving a muscle, six weeks ago that was a sensitive subject Six weeks ago the cast was still on my leg and Dr. Shilhaus was making clucking sounds and discussing my recovery in "if's" instead of "when's." The bullet that bastard Jennings got lucky with had splintered a bone, and the shards had cut into muscles or nerves or whatever it is that makes a leg do its stuff, and not moving again was something we didn't make jokes about.

  I looked back at the view. At the wide world of sand and sage and sun, and off in the distance, a single rider on a bronze mare. I closed my eyes and drifted away.

  Whack!

  She slapped me with a rolled up paper and woke me up out of X-rated dreams. She said, "Carter, you're hopeless. I leave you for an hour and you fink out."

  I opened an eye. Millie. Beautiful. Even in that dopey white nurse's uniform. Big bunch of luscious streaky-blonde hair, gold and platinum and yellow-roses hair, and big brown eyes and a burnished tan and a soft full mouth and then moving down and reading from left to right, two of the world's finer breasts, rich and high and round and then — oh dammit, I moved a muscle.

  I groaned and rolled over. "Come on," she said. "Back to work." Work meant physical therapy for my leg. Millie was a physical therapist. For my leg. Anything else was unofficial.

  I picked up a towel and wrapped it around me. I was lying on a canvas mat on a massage table on a private balcony off a private bedroom in a sprawling, Spanish mission-style mansion about thirty-five miles southwest of Tucson. Aunt Tillie's Retreat Or as it's less lovingly called, A.T.R. AXE Therapy and Rehabilitation. Nursing home for veterans of cold wars.

  I was there courtesy of Harold ("Happy") Jennings, ex-bootlegger, ex-con, expatriate, owner of a tiny inn on the Caicos Islands, just across from Haiti. Happy's inn turned out to be a clearing house for a freelance group called Blood And Vengeance. Its avowed goal was to exact both blood from and vengeance on a selected group of American scientists. The movement was bankrolled by a rich South American ex-Nazi who was making it all worth Happy's while. Blood And Vengeance was a thing of the past, but I'd paid for the victory with a two-week coma and a shattered leg. In return for which, AXE provided me with two months of sun and restorative exercise and Millie Barnes.

  Millie Barnes grabbed my left leg and fitted it up with a metal weight. "And stretch," she said, "and flex… and bend… and stretch, two-three — hey! That's pretty good. I bet you'll be walking without crutches next week." I looked at her doubtfully. She shrugged. "I didn't say running."

  I smiled. "That's okay, too. I've just decided I'm in no big hurry. I've been lying here thinking that life is short, and too much time is wasted in runnin
g."

  She raised her eyebrows. "That doesn't sound like a Killmaster line."

  I shrugged. "So maybe it doesn't. Maybe I'm considering quitting AXE. Lying around. Doing whatever real people do." I squinted up at her. "What do real people do?"

  "Lie around wishing they were Nick Carter."

  "Like hell."

  "Keep moving your leg."

  "Who do you wish you were?"

  She gave me an open girlish smile. "When I'm with you, I'm happy to be Millie Barnes."

  "And when I'm gone?"

  "Ah! When you're gone, I shall lock myself in this very room with my memories and my tears and my books of verse." She pursed her lips. "Is that the answer you wanted to hear?"

  "I wanted to know what you want out of life."

  She was standing to my left, near the balcony rail, arms folded, the sun making yellow stars in her hair. She shrugged. "I haven't thought about wanting things in years."

  "…Said Grandma Barnes on her ninetieth birthday. Come on, baby. That's not a thought for a young woman.

  She widened her eyes. I'm twenty-eight."

  "That old, huh?"

  "Keep stretching your leg."

  I stretched my leg. She reached out and pushed it up even higher, in a wobbly wrong-end salute to the sun. She took her hands away and I held it up there, a whole lot higher than I'd thought I could. "Next time, push that high yourself." I flexed and bent and pushed that high.

  "Millie… If I were to quit…"

  "Nonsense, Nick! What you're going through is typical twelfth-week thinking."

  "I'll bite. What's that?"

  She sighed. "It's simple. First month you guys spend here, you're all in a blazing hurry to get out Second month you concentrate on working hard. Third month — I don't know — your metabolism changes. You get used to all this lying around. You turn philosophical, start quoting Omar Khayyam. Get misty-eyed when you watch The Waltons." She shook her head. "Typical twelfth-week thinking,"

  "So what happens next?"

  She smiled. "You'll see. Just keep flexing that leg. You'll need it."

  The phone rang in my room. Millie went to answer it. I watched the muscles rippling in my leg. It was all coming back. She was probably right. Next week I could throw the crutches away. I'd been keeping the rest of my body in shape with barbells and ropes and a long daily swim, and I still weighed a flat hard 165. The only thing I'd added in my stay at Aunt Tillie's was a fine, ridiculous pirate's mustache. Millie said it made me look Really Evil. I thought I looked like Omar Sharif. Millie said that was the same thing.

  She came back out to the balcony door. "Can I trust you to go on working this time? There's a new admission…"

  I looked at her and grumbled. "A fine romance. First you leave me for lunch, and now another man. Who is this fellow?"

  "Someone named Dunn."

  "Dunn from Berlin?"

  "The very same."

  "Hmm. All things considered, I'm more jealous of lunch."

  "Uch!" she said, and came over and kissed me. She meant it to be light. A little joke kiss. Somehow, it turned into something else. Finally she sighed and pulled away.

  I said, "Hand me that paper before you go. I think it's time I exercised my brain again too."

  She threw me the paper and sashayed off. I folded it back to the front page.

  Leonard Foxx had been kidnapped.

  Or to put that in the words of the Tucson Sun:

  Billionaire hotel czar Leonard Foxx was kidnapped from his Grand Bahama retreat amid a barrage of bullets and grenades.

  Carlton Varn, treasurer of Foxx's holding company, received a ransom note early this morning demanding $100 million. The note was signed Al Shaitan, an Arab word meaning "The Devil."

  This is the first terrorist act of the group, thought to be a splinter of Black September, the Palestinian commando force responsible for the slayings at the Munich Olympics and the massacres at Rome and Athens airports.

  When asked how he planned to raise the money, Varn said the company would have to dump stocks and sell off holdings, "at considerable loss. But," he added, "this isn't the time to think about money. After all, a man's life is at stake."

  Yasir Arafat, chief spokesman for the P.L.O. (the Palestinian liberation Organization, steering committee for all fedayeen forces) offered his usual "No comment."

  There was some kind of wild irony in that. Foxx had gone off to the Bahamas in the first place to keep his freedom and his fortune intact. The feds were getting ready to throw the book at him. The leather-bound, gold-engraved Special Edition; the one that lists only the million-dollar crimes — stock fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, tax fraud. But Foxx had escaped. To the safe legal harbor of the Grand Bahamas.

  Now for Irony Number Two: Even if Varn paid off the ransom, Foxx's best hope of staying alive was if federal agents kidnapped him back. It was a definitive case of the old idea that the devil you know is better than the devil — or Al Shaitan — you don't.

  Washington would get on the case, all right. Not for love of Leonard Foxx. Not even just for the principle involved We'd be on it for the simple self-defensive reason mat a hundred million bucks of American money had to be kept out of terrorist hands.

  I started to wonder if AXE was involved. And who at AXE. And what the plan was. I looked out over the sun-baked view and felt a sudden yen for icy sidewalks and cool thinking and the cold hard fact of a gun in my hand.

  Millie was right.

  The twelfth week was over.

  Two

  Leonard Foxx was dead.

  Dead, but he wasn't murdered by Al Shaitan. He simply died. Or as a friend of mine says, "his heart attacked him." After spending two weeks in a terrorist camp, after landing safely at Lucaya's airport, after waving hello to the TV cameras, after paying a hundred million dollars to live — Leonard Foxx died. Three hours home and pfft!

  If there's such a thing as Fate, you've got to admit it has a dark sense of humor.

  Jehns looked at his cards. "I'm in for a dime.'"

  Campbell drew one and bit his Up. Ferrelli said "Stick." I pitched a dime and raised a nickle. A fine looking bunch of gamblers we made. Gathered around a hospital bed. Jehns with his legs attached to the ceiling in that benevolent torture that's known as traction, Campbell with a bandage over one eye and Ferrelli with his fat black four-month beard, sitting in a wheelchair, recovering from all the things that happen when a gang of bullets get you in the gut As for me, I'd walked a mile in the morning and compared with the others, I was feeling healthy.

  I turned to Jehns. Our Man In Damascus. Or at least he was till a week ago. He was fairly new to AXE, but he knew the Middle East. "So what do you think they'll do with the money?"

  "Match you that nickle." He tossed a nickle onto the bed. "Hell, I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine." He looked up from his cards. "What's your guess?"

  I shrugged. "I don't know. But I doubt they'll use it to stock up on canned goods, so I guess we just bought ourselves a big bunch of terror. But what kind of terror?"

  Campbell considered playing a dime. "Maybe they'll buy some more SAM-7 missiles. Hit a few planes coming in to land. Hey — when is hunting season on 747s?"

  Ferrelli said "Any month with a four in it"

  "Funny," I said. "Are we playing cards?"

  Campbell decided to pitch the dime. Knowing Campbell, he had a good hand. "Worst part is," he turned to Ferrelli, "whatever kind of terror they decide to buy, they'll be buying it with good old American money."

  "Correction. With Leonard Foxx's money." Ferrelli grinned and stroked his beard. "The Leonard Foxx Memorial Terror."

  Campbell nodded. "And I don't suppose Foxx is losing much sleep."

  "Are you kidding?" Ferrelli folded his cards. "Where Foxx is now, they don't have sleep. The fire and brimstone keep you awake. Man, I hear that was one bad soul."

  Jehns looked at Ferrelli Jehns had a British officer's face. Desert tan, sun-bleached blond hair; a perfect
foil for the ice blue eyes. Jehns smiled. "I think I detect the green sound of jealousy."

  I gave him a frown. "Now who could be jealous of the late Leonard Foxx? I mean, who'd want a couple of billion dollars, a castle in Spain, a villa in Greece, a private plane, a hundred-foot yacht and a couple of world-famous movie star girlfriends? Hell! Ferrelli has better values than that don't you Ferrelli?"

  Ferrelli nodded. "Sure. Stuff like that can ruin your soul."

  "Right," I said. The best things in life are the sun and the moon and Oreo cookies."

  "And my health," Ferrelli said. "I got my health."

  "You won't if you don't get back to bed." Millie was standing in the doorway. She walked over to the window and opened it wide. "My God," she said, "who were you electing? This looks like the original smoke-filled room." She turned to me. "Dr. Shilhaus wants to see you in fifteen minutes, Nick." She cleared her throat. "He also wants to see Ferrelli in bed and Campbell in the gym."

  "And Jehns?" said Ferrelli. "What would he like to see Jehns in?"

  "In drag," suggested Campbell.

  "In debt," said Ferrelli.

  "Insane," said Campbell.

  "In…"

  "Out!" said Millie.

  They went.

  Millie sat down in a black plastic chair. "That's quite some story about Leonard Foxx. I couldn't believe it when I heard the news. What a wild ending."

  I shook my head. "It's far from an ending, baby doll. It may be the end of Leonard Foxx, but it's just the beginning of something else. Of whatever kind of capers they're planning with the money."

  Millie sighed. "I know what kind of capers I'd plan. Come on, ask me, fellas — mink capers."

  Jehns turned and gave her an ice-blue look. "Would you really?" He was suddenly dead earnest. His forehead furrowed into deep lines. "What I mean is — are those things important to you?"

  She paused for an instant and her eyes changed. As though she'd read something between the lines. "No," she said slowly. "No, they're not, Ted. Not at all." She switched tones abruptly. "So you think Al Shaitan will spend the money on terror."