The Fanatics of Al Asad Read online

  "Man, I just don't like this scene," he muttered almost to himself. "Jus' don't like it at all!"

  Neither did I. But it had to be done. There was no other way to get to them.

  "Let's go," I said again, curtly. Duane shrugged and started for the service entrance beside the garage.

  The service entrance led into the basement. There was a short corridor between the outer door and the inner door, and at the inner doorway there was a half-desk manned by a neatly dressed security attendant. He was wearing a crisply pressed uniform with a badge pinned to his chest, but he carried no weapon on his belt. He looked up questioningly at us.

  " 'sterminators," said Duane.

  The security attendant was black. He looked Duane over with hard eyes. Then he looked at me.

  "You ain't the regular exterminators," he said suspiciously. "How come?"

  Duane shrugged. "Man, I don't know nothin'. We just get a name 'n address, we go there. You dig?"

  In a rough voice, I snapped at Duane, "Let's get the shit out of here. I ain't gonna fight to get into no buildin' where they don't want me. The boss can argue it out with them. We got other places to do this morning."

  The guard's suspicions were partially allayed.

  "What apartment?"

  Duane gave his client's apartment number and name.

  "Ten-H," he said. The guard checked the name on his master list.

  Grudgingly, he gave in. "I guess it's okay," he said.

  "But, I better ring them first to let them know you're on the way up."

  He was reaching for the phone when I shoved Tamar's automatic pistol under his nose. He stared at the round, menacing barrel of the .32 Beretta that was just inches from his face.

  "Don't touch it," I said, coldly. The guard looked up at me, pure hostility shining out of his eyes. Slowly, he took his hand away from the interphone.

  Duane let out a sound.

  "Take him out to the van," I told Duane. "Tie him up and leave him in the back."

  The guard's face was a study in hatred.

  "You're gonna cost me my job," he said, making it a statement of fact, but not asking for pity. The man had pride.

  I shook my head. "No," I said. Still keeping the gun on him, I took out and showed him the special ID card I'd been carrying since I started on the mission. He read it carefully. He looked up at me.

  "That real?"

  "It's real."

  "Then you can put the gun away," he said. "I won't cause you no trouble."

  I knew that if I had Duane take him out to the van and tie him up, I'd be playing it safe. But something in the man's face told me that I'd be crippling him as a person if I did that.

  I returned the pistol to my hip pocket. The guard had gotten to his feet.

  "Sit down," I said. "I'll take a chance on you."

  Mistrustfully, his eyes examined my face. "You're not gonna have me tied up?"

  "Do I have to?"

  Slowly, he shook his head. "No. Ain't no need to do that. Just one question. This have anythin' to do with what I been readin' in the papers 'bout the President?"

  I knew he meant the assassination, not the kidnapping. For the past two and a half days, news of the kidnapping of the Speaker of the House had been kept from the press. No one knew how much longer it would be before the story broke wide open. In the meantime, the Presidential Press Secretary had been telling reporters that, because of stringent security precautions, the new President was at Camp David and would not make public or private appearances until events had settled down. As far as the public was concerned, no one knew about Al Asad's kidnapping of the man who was now Chief Executive Officer of the United States.

  "That's right," I said.

  The guard sat down in his chair. "You just tell me what I can do to help," he said, his eyes cold. "I was in Nam with an infantry outfit."

  "Just do your regular job," I told him. "And thanks."

  He shrugged it off. Duane and I left him sitting there as we headed down the corridor toward the service elevator.

  * * *

  Friday. 8:51 a.m. Upper East Side. Manhattan.

  The apartment dweller in Manhattan is a strange breed. He's more security conscious than anyone else in the world when it comes to protecting his abode. Two locks on his door are normal, three locks are more usual. Electronic alarms sell very well.

  The New York apartment dweller has every right in the world to be fearful. Break-ins are a normal way of life for him. He lives in daily fear of it happening to him personally. Every day, the newspapers print gory tales of apartments being broken into. Robbery, murder and rape are the results. Every New Yorker has friends whose apartments have been burglarized. Some several times. His insurance rates are high — if he can get insurance — because, in practically no case has there been a recovery of what was stolen.

  The average New York City apartment is locked, bolted and barred. First by a standard combination door lock and handle latch. Then there's the dead-bolt lock with its separate key. Between the dead-bolt lock and the door lock, you'll find a Fox police lock which traps a solid steel bar between the door and a metal plate recessed into the floor so that no one can smash down the door without using an axe or burn his way in with an acetylene torch.

  On the outside of the door, locks are often surrounded by a steel cover plate to prevent them from being ripped out of the door by an extractor tool. The bolts that hold the plate to the door have unslotted heads.

  A New Yorker's home is not only his castle, it's his fortress I Once he's inside, no one can get at him, with all the bolts and bars and chain locks he's put on his door.

  If you want to get in, trickery is the only way. He'll never open his door without first checking through the peephole to see who it is. Even then, he won't let you in. He'll open the door only to the width the chain guard allows, something like three inches.

  And he won't even open the door that much to someone he doesn't know.

  There's just one exception to the rule.

  New Yorkers not only fight a constant defensive battle against burglars — they fight a never-ending war against another enemy as well.

  Cockroaches.

  There's not a town house, tenement or apartment house — no matter how new — that doesn't have roaches. Roaches outnumber New Yorkers by thousands to one! They breed in the kitchens and basements of restaurants, diners and coffee shops that swarm all over the city. They breed in the garbage, in the cellars and in the very walls of the buildings themselves.

  Tear down an old structure to put up a new one, and the roaches escape to the buildings on each side. Put up a building and in no time the roaches are back again.

  There is an atavistic hatred and instinctive loathing for roaches that goes back in man's original pre-history, for the cockroach is the only land creature that's remained unchanged over the millions of years since life was formed on this planet. A female roach lays hundreds of eggs each time she drops them. In just a matter of days, each newly hatched female roach can drop hundreds of eggs of her own!

  Give them half a chance and they'll swarm you under. That's why the exterminator is the one man that every New Yorker is happy to see.

  He's the one man they'll open their doors to without question. He's the one man who has automatic entry into every apartment in the city.

  No one ever questions his credentials. His uniform and his cylindrical spray pump container open doors for him everywhere. That's why the "special equipment" I'd asked Hawk to provide me with was an exterminator's spray pump.

  Only this pump didn't contain insecticide.

  The liquid in it was a pressurized gas, developed by AXE lab technicians, that acted instantaneously. One whiff — no matter how slight — was enough to knock out anyone for at least twenty-four to thirty-six hours!

  The exterminator's uniform was my pass to get into the apartment now occupied by the fanatics of Al Asad. Once I got in, the gas in the spray pump would be the most effective we
apon I could use against so many opponents! For my own protection, there was a miniature mask that barely fitted over my nostrils.

  * * *

  By now, the elevator approached the twelfth floor. Duane was sweating. I watched him carefully out of the corner of my eye and came to a decision.

  At this moment, he was worse than useless to me. I knew I wouldn't be able to depend on him in the slightest. What I had suspected before, now became a certainty in my mind. Duane was a junkie!

  He was hooked on the habit! In spite of his protests about not dealing in heroin, I could see by his nervous gestures and twitches, and by the perspiration breaking out on his face, that he needed a fix — and he needed one right now, badly.

  The doors slid open. Duane started to move. I caught him by the arm, stepping past him into the corridor.

  "Stay on," I said, pressing Tamar's gun into his hand. "Take this back to the girl in the car. And then, get the hell away from here!"

  The last glimpse I had of him was of a face paralyzed by fear. The elevator doors slid together, cutting him off from me.

  I set off down the corridor, the heavy canister slung over my left shoulder.

  Chapter Twelve

  I knew they were watching me through the peephole. They probably had a man stationed there watching the corridor to see who got off the elevators. After what almost happened on East 56th Street, I was sure that they'd be more alert than ever before, and here in the apartment building they wouldn't be able to set guards in the hallway without attracting attention.

  I came up to the door and rang the bell. They made me wait a minute before opening it, pretending that someone had to come from the other room to answer the bell. All the time, I knew I was being carefully scrutinized.

  The door opened a few inches, to the limit of the brass chain.

  "Who is it?"

  "Exterminator," I said gruffly.

  "One minute, please."

  The door swung shut. I heard muffled voices and then the door swung partially open.

  A swarthy-faced young man in his late twenties stood blocking my view. He was dressed in a loose white shirt and dark grey trousers that didn't fit him too well. His black moustache disappeared into a three day growth of heavy black stubble.

  "We did not call for an exterminator," he said with a strong accent. His eyes probed mine suspiciously.

  I shrugged. "All I know is that you're on my list for this morning. Maybe somebody made a mistake."

  Pulling out a slip of paper from the breast pocket of my coveralls, I pretended to look at it. "That's what it says here," I told him, stuffing the paper back into my pocket. "Twelve-H. Friday morning."

  I started to turn away. "If you people don't want the place exterminated, it's no skin off my nose."

  He was in a quandary. He knew that turning away an exterminator would be strange behavior. He didn't want to call attention to apartment 12-H.

  "Come in," he said, finally making up his mind. He held the door wide. I walked in.

  "Where's the kitchen?" I asked.

  He gestured.

  I went out of the foyer into the living room. Two men sat sprawled in armchairs. One smoked a cigarette. He stared with animosity at me through the heavy fumes. I caught the distinctive smell of Gauloise tobacco. The pungent, almost acrid aroma made me recall the cafes of Algeria and Morocco. The men in the cafes look at strangers with the same kind of suspicion and hostility that he was showing now. Everyone not a friend was an enemy.

  Two men were standing by the picture windows that covered the far end of the living room wall. The drapes were almost completely drawn. One of the men stood in front of the narrow gap, peering down at the street twelve floors below with a pair of high-powered Navy binoculars. The other man turned and stared at me as I crossed to the kitchen.

  There was a feeling of tension in the room. As if all four of them were keyed to the breaking point. As if they were just waiting for something to trigger them into violence. As if they were anxious to release their frustrations by killing. There was death in the air in that room.

  In the kitchen, three men sat at the table over the remains of breakfast. Dirty dishes were piled on top of one another. They looked up at me as I came into the room, their eyes filled with the same suspicion and the same hostility that the others had shown.

  The man who'd opened the door for me was right on my heels.

  "It's the exterminator," he said, almost apologetically.

  One of the men at the table growled in Arabic. "You are stupid, Mashir. He could be any one. You take too many chances."

  One of the men came in from the living room. He came up to me, not stopping until he was a foot away. I caught the strong smell of body odor. Not only hadn't he shaved, he hadn't bathed in days. Without smiling, he stared into my face and snarled in Arabic, "Your mother is a dung-eating fornicator of wild donkeys! Your father was a diseased jackal! And you, yourself, are a foul-breathed sodomite and pederast!"

  I didn't let a flicker of expression show on my face. I smiled at him.

  "You got to speak English to me, Charlie," I said. "What's the trouble? You got roaches in the other rooms, too?"

  He let loose another flow of vile, Arabic insults, still staring angrily into my eyes. If he had said these words to anyone who knew Arabic, they'd have tried to kill him right then and there. I just shrugged my shoulders and turned to the man who'd let me in.

  "What's he saying?" I asked. "I can't do my job if I don't know what the complaint is."

  "He speaks no Arabic, Sulieman," Mashir said. "If he did, he would have tried to slit your throat."

  Sulieman shrugged. "It makes no difference. You shouldn't have let him in."

  They were speaking in Arabic. The two at the table were following every word. I stood there looking at one, then the other, as if I were completely befuddled.

  "I could not turn him away," Mashir protested. "It would have aroused comment."

  "We cannot let him go," Sulieman said.

  "Of course not," Mashir agreed. "To see so many foreigners in one apartment would certainly cause him to talk."

  One of the men at the table spoke up.

  "Kill him," he said. "Get him out of the way."

  "Later," said Mashir. "When we kill our prisoner."

  The words hit me like a trip hammer blow: when we kill our prisoner! They had no intention of releasing the President! They'd already made up their minds that our government's answer would be a refusal to comply with their demands. They were waiting only until the twelve o'clock deadline before assasinating him!

  They spoke freely, fully convinced that I didn't understand a word they were saying. I turned my back on all four of them, squatting down as if to look under the sink. I opened the cabinet door. Quickly, I slid the miniature gas mask over my nostrils, pressing the rubber edges to my nose and upper lip. The adhesive compound stuck tightly to my skin, forming an airtight seal.

  Not bothering to rise, I twisted the nozzle of the spray pump so that it faced in their general direction and pulled the trigger lever.

  There was the faintest hissing, a sound I could hardly hear. And then, almost instantaneously, as the pressurized gas jetted out into the room, out of the corner of my eye I saw the two men at the table slump forward, their heads striking hard on the breakfast plates in front of them.

  Mashir and Sulieman tumbled to the floor a second later, as limp as puppets whose strings have been carelessly dropped.

  I stood up.

  From the other room, someone called out, "What happened? What is that noise? Sulieman? Mashir?"

  "Come quickly!" I shouted in Arabic.

  I heard footsteps approaching at a run.

  I met him at the door with a squirt of gas in the face. He was one of the men who'd been at the window. The one who'd stared at me. The gas hit him full on. He rolled up his eyes, staggered and fell prone. His feet stuck out into the other room.

  Someone let out a shout of warning. I hear
d a bedroom door being flung open with a crash, and footsteps, muffled by carpeting, came running down the corridor.

  "Careful!" A voice shouted the warning in Arabic. "He has some kind of weapon!"

  More footsteps came running down the corridor. There was an excited babble of unintelligible ranting and shouting going on in the living room. I wished I could see what was happening. I still didn't know how many of the Al Asad terrorists were left.

  One voice rose hysterically above the others. "Do not leave the prisoner alone! If he comes after him, kill the man! Do you understand? Kill the prisoner!"

  That was it! I couldn't wait any longer. With the cannister banging at my hip, the slender tube of the long nozzle held ahead of me and with my finger holding down the release lever to spray gas fumes ahead of me, I ran out into the living room.

  One of them had time to get off a shot at me. It missed. I spun around in time to catch a man leaping at me, a knife in his hand. The gas hit him in mid-stride. He landed in a crumpled, unconscious heap at my feet.

  I'd have liked to lock down the trigger and roll the tank out into the middle of the room, but there was no latching device on the mechanism. I had to hold it down by hand.

  Crouched on the floor behind an armchair, I waited. Mentally, I counted. Four in the kitchen left three out there. Two of the three were down. Where was the last man — the one who'd fired at me?

  And how many were in the bedroom with their captive?

  Time was running out. I had to get to the guards in the bedroom while they were still in a state of confusion, before they could get themselves organized.

  I took the gamble. Rising to my feet with the spray nozzle in one hand ready to let loose another blast, I stepped into the middle of the living room floor.

  Nothing happened.

  I looked around, counting bodies. One lay by the kitchen entrance. The second man was still curled on the floor where he'd landed as he'd tried to attack me with his knife. The third man — where was he?

  I finally saw him. On the far side of the room, almost hidden by the floor length window drapes, his body lay inertly atop a Kalishnikov automatic rifle. He'd had only time to fire one shot at me before the gas had hit him.