Mecca
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.