Mecca Read online

  Mecca

  William Deverell

  Contents

  Praise for William Deverell

  Also by William Deverell

  Dedication

  Part I 1

  2

  Part II 3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part III 9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Part IV 15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Part V 26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Part VI 35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  Part VII 47

  48

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Praise for William Deverell

  Needles

  “Deverell has a narrative style so lean that scenes and characters seem to explode on the page. He makes the evil of his plot breathtaking and his surprises like shattering glass.” — Philadelphia Bulletin

  High Crimes

  “Deverell’s lean mean style gives off sparks. A thriller of the first rank.” — Publishers Weekly

  Mecca

  “Here is another world-class thriller, fresh, bright, and topical.” — Globe and Mail

  The Dance of Shiva

  “The most gripping courtroom drama since Anatomy of a Murder.” — Globe and Mail

  Platinum Blues

  “A fast, credible, and very funny novel.” — The Sunday Times

  Mindfield

  “Deverell has a fine eye for evil and a remarkable sense of place.” — Globe and Mail

  Kill All the Lawyers

  “An indiscreet and entertaining mystery that will add to the author’s reputation as one of Canada’s finest mystery writers.” — The Gazette

  Street Legal: The Betrayal

  “Deverell injects more electricity into his novels than anyone currently writing in Canada — perhaps anywhere . . . The dialogue crackles, the characters live and breathe, and the pacing positively propels.” — London Free Press

  Trial of Passion

  “A ripsnortingly good thriller.” — Regina Leader-Post

  Slander

  “Slander is simply excellent: a story that just yanks you along.” — Globe and Mail

  The Laughing Falcon

  “The Laughing Falcon is, simply, a wonderful book.” — Sara Dowse, Vancouver Sun

  Mind Games

  “Deverell is firing on all cylinders.” — Winnipeg Free Press

  April Fool

  “A master storyteller with a wonderful sense of humour . . . one hell of a ride.” — Quill & Quire

  Whipped

  “[A] smart, funny, and cleverly plotted series.” — Toronto Star

  Kill All the Judges

  “Compelling. . . . For all its seemingly lighthearted humour, this is a work of great depth and complexity.” — Globe and Mail

  Snow Job

  “Fine writing and tongue-in-cheek delivery with acid shots at our political circus, and so close to reality that it seems even funnier.” — Hamilton Spectator

  I’ll See You in My Dreams

  “[Beauchamp is] endearingly complex, fallible, and fascinating.” — Publishers Weekly

  Sing a Worried Song

  “[Deverell] may be the most convincing of all writers of courtroom stories, way up there just beyond the lofty plateau occupied by such classic courtroom dramatists as Scott Turow and John Lescroart.” — Toronto Star

  Stung

  “William Deverell returns with another Arthur Beauchamp legal thriller: Timely! Nail-biting courtroom finish!” — Margaret Atwood

  Also by William Deverell

  Fiction

  Needles

  High Crimes

  Mecca

  The Dance of Shiva

  Platinum Blues

  Mindfield

  Kill All the Lawyers

  Street Legal: The Betrayal

  Trial of Passion

  Slander

  The Laughing Falcon

  Mind Games

  April Fool

  Whipped

  Kill All the Judges

  Snow Job

  I’ll See You in My Dreams

  Sing a Worried Song

  Stung

  Non-Fiction

  A Life on Trial

  Dedication

  For my mother, Amy Grace, who possessed the gift of caring

  Part I

  The Confessional

  A wide variety of names have been coined for the art of obliterating one’s enemy. In one country they put him to death “legally” by an executioner and call it the death penalty; in another, they lie in wait with stiletto blades behind hedges and call it assassination; in another they organize obliteration on a grand scale and call it war. Let us, then, be practical, let us call ourselves murderers as our enemies do, let us take the moral horror out of this great historical tool. If to kill is always a crime, then it is forbidden equally to all; if it is not a crime, then it is permitted equally to all. Murder, both of individuals and masses, is an unavoidable instrument in the achievement of historical ends.

  — Karl Heinzen, Der Mord, 1849

  1

  Monday, September 26, Gran Paradiso, Italy

  Giuseppe Nero’s body was floating free, and he feared his mind was floating free from his body. Sanity was diffuse, uncertain. His hands were encased in thick foam mittens (a precaution, because yesterday Nero had ripped the oxygen mask from his face and had nearly drowned). The mask, the mittens, the electrode patches on his skin: otherwise he was naked in the nothingness of this dense saline solution, hearing the voice.

  “Giuseppe Nero, where is Carlotta Calza?”

  The voice of the old German general, calm, quiet, compelling. A terrible taste of nausea came to Nero’s throat each time he failed to answer, or answered with lies, but he could not vomit. He kept trying to will his brain back to his body.

  Concentrate, or you will hear the voice. “The armed struggle of the urban guerrilla points toward two essential objectives,” Nero intoned.

  The general’s voice cut through: “Giuseppe Nero, where are Carlotta Calza and her daughter?”

  The words came to Nero from a microphone, through the cord that was taped to the air hose, into the zero-buoyancy isolation tank, known locally as The Confessional. The tube carried Dioxygone as well, the truth drug, addicting, pleasure-giving. But when the subject did not tell the truth, nausea.

  “The first objective is the physical liquidation of the chiefs of the armed forces and police.” Concentrate, or you will hear the voice.

  “Nero!”

  “No . . . no.” M
etallic green, the color of sickness, swirled about his eyes, and sickness engorged his throat, and he felt as if someone were moving through the rooms of his body, clicking off switches. Nero’s central nervous system was being torn by conflicting forces, the need for Dioxygone and its pleasure, and the need to fight it. “The accusation of terrorism no longer has the pejorative meaning it used to have.”

  His voice was flat, drained. “It has acquired new clothing . . .”

  “Giuseppe Nero, who is holding Signorina Calza and Giulietta? Is it The Shrike? Is it the Rotkommando?”

  He tried to rotate his body in this black nothingness, biting his lip savagely and drawing blood. Yes, I feel pain; therefore I exist. “In order to function, urban guerrillas must be organized in small groups. The firing group —”

  “He’s just spouting communist shit. This is a waste.”

  * * *

  General Hesselmann turned off the microphone after Hamilton Bakerfield’s outburst. “The communist shit, as you elegantly put it, are passages from his Bible. Marighella’s Mini-manual.”

  Hesselmann knew he must curb the tendency to speak sneeringly to the American, who must have thought he was an overbearing prig. But Hesselmann couldn’t help it — he was not a warm person, was as stiff in his manner as in his bearing, which bore the stamp of old Prussian pride. He was the son and grandson of generals, ascetic, thin, bespectacled, immaculate except for a short thatch of white hair that obeyed no comb or brush.

  Hamilton Bakerfield was Hesselmann’s second in command, a veteran of the CIA who had achieved a reputation as a terrorist expert. He had quit the agency a few years ago, completed his Master’s at the University of Chicago, developing his thesis into the standard text for handling hostage situations. He was a son of the south Chicago slums, a working-class Republican, free enterprise all the way, down with the welfare cheats. At fifty-three, he was large, bony, bald, pink-complected. His face was an angry russet color now.

  “It isn’t working,” he said. “It’s hare-brained.” He glowered at Dr. Laurent Pétras as if the psychiatrist were to blame for their frustration.

  “We must give it time,” said Pétras, looking coldly back at Bakerfield. “You had him for five days. You did nothing but harden the man’s will to resist.”

  Pétras was a spare man of middle years with furry mutton-chop whiskers as bookends for a plain, flat face. The confession gas, Dioxygone, had been developed at his clinic in Brussels. The chemical was humane, he claimed, while Bakerfield’s old-fashioned methods were clearly not: there had been bruises on Giuseppe Nero’s body when the young astrophysics instructor had been placed in the isolation tank. Pétras had achieved some successes with volunteers on Dioxygone, but those volunteers had held no dark secrets.

  “He will survive this, Dr. Pétras?” Hesselmann said. “You are sure?”

  “Of course. Any mental aberration will disappear.” Pétras spoke with confidence. “The matter yesterday, it will not be repeated. We did not have a chance to reduce the Dioxygone in his system.” Late yesterday, after Nero had torn the oxygen mask from his face, and before he had been pulled from the tank, he had passed into a state of frenzied paranoia that lasted for five hours.

  Our methods are humane, thought Hesselmann. We represent a civilization of law, we are better than the enemy, we are just, and we call this business humane. One rationalizes: this is not torture, for the prisoner brings on his own pain with his own lies. He is his own torturer.

  The whole thing was getting Hesselmann in the gut, and his gut was where his various forms of unhappiness gathered, bunching up his soft tissue, creating sores that cut like sharp stones.

  “Perhaps you would take over, Mr. Bakerfield. I propose to take some air.” He spoke English with the accent of an Oxford don.

  Hesselmann put on his greatcoat, took his cane from a coat rack, and walked from the laboratory, straight and stiff, with a gamey-leg limp. He closed the heavy pine door with a flood of relief. The laboratory was a place that Hesselmann despised. There were old memories — human experiments, human guinea pigs.

  Outside, he braced himself against the cold fall wind sweeping up from the Orco River valley. The camp of Group Seven International was located atop a palisade in the Italian Alps, high above the valley which twisted its way toward the plains of the Po River and the factories of Turin. It was an abandoned forestry camp. Access was by a tortuous trail, and only a four-wheel drive would dare the assault up the eastern flanks of the Gran Paradiso range to these secret cliff-top headquarters. A helicopter was better.

  The laboratory building, once a sawmill, had been built of thick, rough-hewn timbers, and its builders, thought Hesselmann, had been mountain men of curious bravery — they had put it at the edge of an escarpment that dropped sheer, almost seven hundred meters of rockface, before it leveled and clothed itself with pine and fir. To the west, only ten kilometers away, was France, the valley was to the south and east, and to the north were the shining permanent snowfields of the Gran Paradiso range. Soon there would be snow at this lower level, too, for September was dying.

  Up the slope from the cliff edge were other log buildings, one of which housed Group Seven headquarters, Hesselmann’s office, and the intelligence centre. A trail led to a barracks and combination canteen and mess hall, then to several cabins that housed senior staff. Beyond was a subalpine meadow, rising by steps to the snows. Hesselmann could see men and women high up on the playing field, chasing a soccer ball. Others were in track suits working their way around an oval. Members of the assault teams, always running, always exercising. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to do, waiting for Giuseppe Nero to break, to give them his list of houses, to open the doors, perhaps, to all of the Rotkommando. We wait, he thought. There is nothing else.

  Hesselmann limped up the stone stairs to his cabin, unlocked the door, and went to his medicine cabinet for his drug, the dreadful syrup which coated the lining of his stomach. He took two spoonfuls of the liquid chalk and bore himself stoically.

  Then, as he had done almost every day for the last three weeks, he took a file from the drawer of his desk and, from the file, a photograph. He searched the cool blue eyes of Karl Wurger, The Shrike, seeking purpose in them, seeking some hint of grace, some insight into the soul of this killer. The eyes of a man just before a kill. Those two pale sapphires were focused on a lunchpail, upon the lens of a miniature camera hidden inside it. Not hidden well, it had turned out.

  The photograph had been taken by a Group Seven agent, one of the best, recruited by Hesselmann from his old staff at military intelligence in Bonn. One second after the shutter had softly clicked, Wurger had taken from his jacket pocket what witnesses described as a small pistol — a Landmann-Preetz, doubtless, Wurger’s favorite assassination tool — and had shot the agent in the face and heart, killing him instantly. Wurger and his three companions had then run from the restaurant, a workingman’s place in Zurich, and they had separated, disappearing into the old city. The agent had had no back-up. That had been a mistake.

  Hesselmann studied the profiles of the men sitting at The Shrike’s left and right. Giuseppe Nero was one: until then known only as an associate professor, Turin University, an astrophysicist. The other was Ferrante of Rome, also a captain of the Red Brigades. Of the fourth, his back to the camera, Hesselmann wasn’t sure. Perhaps one of the Palestinians. Perhaps their new man, Cuyfer, the Dutch-American. But the meaning was clear. This meeting in Zurich was proof that the Red Brigades had joined Wurger’s growing army, the Rotkommando, the Red Commando.

  And just as surely the kidnapping of Carlotta Calza and her daughter was the inspiration of Wurger, master of the large gesture. Signorina Calza, the grand lady of the Italian cinema, a Jew, was a friend of the rich and influential, had been outspoken about terrorism, and had become a target.

  Now, five months from its inception, Group Seven International had its firs
t lead into the inner workings of the Red Commando. Haupt General Heinrich Hesselmann’s new supranational police organization would now begin to pay for itself, to return the investments of the seven allied powers which had given him the men and the women and the money.

  Group Seven was the general’s own invention. He had stepped down as chief of NATO intelligence to run it, selecting as personnel the best from the anti-terrorist police and commando units from West Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, the United States, and Canada.

  As a young lieutenant in the Abwehr, before Hitler dismantled it, Hesselmann had been the wunderkind of German intelligence during the Second World War, adjutant to Colonel Count von Stauffenberg, the leading figure of the plot against the Führer of July 1944. Von Stauffenberg’s bomb had failed to destroy the German dictator in the Gästebaracke at Rastenburg, and he along with two hundred other officers had been strangled with piano wire while the cameras rolled. Hitler had watched those movies with glee, and had sworn to the world he would execute Hesselmann, too, but the young officer escaped to Switzerland, and was taken from there to London, where he worked with Allied command.