The Assignment

by Dan Gordon

Overview

The Assignment by Dan Gordon

Carlos the Jackal is a terrorist without rules, without a conscience, without a heart. And no intelligence agency in the free world has been able to stop him. CIA agent Jack Shaw has seen what Carlos is capable of. Now he wants Naval Lt. Commander Annibal Ramirez to help him. Ramirez has a nice wife, two kids, a house in the suburbs...and Carlos' face. All Shaw has to do is train Ramirez to act like Carlos and kill him.

Ramirez is Carlos' exact double, Shaw's pawn in a chilling game to trap the terrorist. And stripped of his morals, family ties, and his soul, Ramirez becomes his mirror image--a ruthless psychopath on a collision course with pure evil--where only one man will survive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466881877
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/23/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	279
File size:	297 KB

About the Author

Dan Gordon is the author of The Assignment.

Read an Excerpt

The Assignment

A Novel

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By Dan Gordon

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1997 Allegro Film Productions V, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8187-7

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CHAPTER 1

The question is, of course, Is this story truth, masquerading as fiction, or a complete lie dressed up with falsies and shoulder pads, tummy-suckers, and makeup so deft that the casual observer might easily confuse virtue with deceit? Was this Lady Liberty in her gown, hand outstretched to welcome the huddled masses or a transvestite hooker hailing a cab on Eighth Avenue? The question assumes importance only if you are really in the market for freedom or perversion. If you have but a passing interest in either or both, you may just as well sit back and enjoy the show. The particulars would be of importance only to investigative reporters looking to land a best-seller's talk show tour or Congressional oversight committees looking to torpedo their rivals or their betters, their masters' enemies, or their masters themselves.

Truth after all, from the bureaucrat's point of view, is in the records. And there are no records of this. You will not find them in Langley nor in Washington, not in Tel Aviv nor in Jerusalem. You certainly will not find them in the French jail cell where Carlos sits. As a matter of fact, if I were you, he's the last one I would ask about what led to his own demise. To this day, he doesn't know the whole story.

No one does but me, and I'm making it up. Well, making it up is perhaps too severe. I'm stitching it from bits and pieces, snippets of interrogations, files whisked away from basement shredders, and a story told to me by an Israeli before he was blown up in a private plane somewhere above Oaxaca, Mexico. He was handsome, the way Israelis tend to be, with a sort of Semitic, early Jean Paul Belmondo look about him. He claimed to know the story. He claimed to know Annibal and Jack and Amos, and from the things he said, I suspect he was telling the truth, at least about Jack and Amos, both of whom I knew as well. As for Annibal Ramirez, I never met him and never will. But this is the story as it was told to me and as I pieced it together and ... what is the current word ... intuited it ... channeled it up with at least as much accuracy as Hillary's coffee klatches with the Mahatma. So then, that having been said, this is the story of how we got Carlos ... the Jackal.

In the wake of the disaster that occurred that day, statements were taken from every possible source, from bystanders and those whose connection with the attack lay only in their proximity to the bomb blast that took place in Paris, September 15, 1974, the day the modern age of terrorism was born.

We know for instance that the attacker, Illich Ramirez Sanchez, also known as Carlos, or Carlos the Jackal, or simply, the Jackal, was staying in a small hotel not far from the Boulevard St. Germain Du Près.

He was on the third floor looking out on a small square at the White Horse Cafe where chairs were being set next to the tiny round tables. The sidewalks were swept by white-aproned waiters just setting up with no reason to believe they were about to be blown to bits. Husbands kissed wives goodbye. Mothers sent schoolchildren on their way with little briefcases strapped across their backs, their tiny arms fitting through the leather straps that soon would be blown off by the man who watched them from the third floor of his hotel above the square. A heavyset woman who worked as the concierge in the block of apartments opposite the hotel remembered shouting at two little boys who were quite literally having a pissing contest on the cobbled stones that led to the entrance of her building where she watched the world from her perch, through the wooden slot in her door. She remembers shouting at them.

She remembers shouting, "What do you think you're doing? You ought to be ashamed, behaving like that. You're little beasts, both of you!" And she remembers at that moment looking up across the square at the windows of the hotel as if in search of another who would bear witness to the bestiality of little boys and saw the outline of a man whom we now know was Carlos.

We know from the girl he was making love to that morning that at the moment the concierge spied his outline from across the square, Carlos stood naked in front of the shutters that were open just enough to make him visible to the heavyset woman who judged the world from the safety of the slot in her concierge's door. According to the girl, whose name was Collette, Carlos had been attracted to the window, not by what was going on outside, not by the little boys peeing or the concierge who railed against them, nor the almost too quaint impressionistic view of waiters sweeping in white aprons, but by the spider.

According to Collette, they spent the morning making love. It was a regular tour, she said, of carnal delights. Carlos knew as if by magic every spot that tingled, rose, disappeared, hardened, became moist, quivered, shivered, and produced in her, breathless sighs, her little gasps, her operatic crescendos, that seemed almost Wagnerian to the envious sales representative from Lyons who occupied the room next door. According to Collette, after she had hit high "C" and lay there next to Carlos, their bodies glistening in postcoital dewy Nirvana, Carlos saw the spider. He rose. He lit a cigarette. He grabbed fruit that was in a bowl next to the bed, tiny bite-sized soft, black plums.

He put two into his mouth at once till his cheeks bulged out and he seemed not to chew so much as suck the flesh. He spit the pits daintily, discreetly into his palm and secreted them into the ashtray with the kind of elegant delicacy with which a well-bred consumptive, let us say, might hide his soiled hanky. Then he crossed the room to the shuttered window and stood next to the spider's web. He took a thirsty drag, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs, glancing out at the street and alternately at the spider who tiptoed down the trembling web toward her prey.

"What are you doing?" Collette remembers asking him. She asked it not because she was in fact interested in what he was doing. She asked it because she wanted him to come back to bed. But she knew better than to tell Carlos what she wanted, or in fact that she wanted anything. Her function was not to sound any note Carlos had not played. Whatever music she had in her would be determined, she knew, only by the way Carlos expertly fingered her stops. And so instead of suggesting that he come back to bed, she asked what he was doing.

He didn't answer. He simply stood there naked at the shuttered window, glowing briefly in the dark as the cigarette's ember reddened and then died out. Carlos took the smoke deep into his lungs and then let it play out between his lips like incense on a Buddha, as he watched the spider dance down on spindly legs that wrapped around her still-living prey.

The spider's legs expertly picked at the living meal, tucked here, bound there, like a weaver at the loom until she lowered down her bottom much as Collette had straddled Carlos that morning, though the spider's intent was not pleasure but death, or perhaps that was what held Carlos there as well, watching with the very real identification he must have felt in the pleasure it was possible to take while inflicting death.

The spider straddled her juicy fly like a lover and killed him, then turned him over and over, enveloping him in silky bonds and probably licked her spider chops in anticipation of the feast, until Carlos sucked another drag on his cigarette, breathed smoke in silver wisps onto the spider's shimmering web as if to seduce her. The end of the cigarette glowed bright and he touched it ever so slowly to the spider's body.

Collette said later she could hear it sizzle, and then Carlos' whispered words, "You lose," he said.

He looked out through the shutters at the clock across the square. Then he checked it against his watch. Then he turned his back on the spider and the shuttered window, the clock across the square and the concierge who decried the bestiality of all schoolboys who peed upon her paving stones and looked at Collette.

She recalls that this look was not like the others. It did not appraise or caress her. It did not attempt to seduce her or give some access into what he called his poet's soul. It made no attempt at influence. There was nothing hypnotic about it.

In fact, it seemed not to be looking at her at all, but rather through her, through the wall behind her and out into the street below. It was as if she was not the object of his look, but an obstacle hiding that which really held his interest.

"I have things to do," he said in a voice she had not heard before. It was dead calm and almost far away and yet behind it there was the threat of very real violence.

For her part Collette had envisioned a day full of little delights, coffee, bread and jam, perhaps in the little cafe below them in the square or perhaps tucked in some romantic corner of Montmartre and then a walk. It would be a literary jaunt past haunts of long-dead writers, past garrets where dreamy-eyed, dark-haired, pale-skinned boys wrote of tragic loves, of dying heroines, of paving stones pulled up to barricade the Paris streets as if somehow their roadblocks could halt evil. Then of course, there would be lunch. A bistro, a ragout, the little seafood place, Le Pesce with the good, cheap bouillabaisse and flirtatious little rosé from the south of France.

And then they would make love.

And then in the evening, dinner.

And after dinner they would make love.

And then there would be tomorrow. There were so many things Carlos knew how to do, parts of her body she had never known existed, or if she had been aware of them, had not imagined the use to which a lover like Carlos could put them. She allowed her thoughts to drift languorously across his naked body.

She played the movie of their lovemaking in reverse slow motion, tasting once again each new delight and then he said, "I have things to do," and looked not at her but through her and through the wall behind her, out into the street.

She blinked and said, "What do you mean?" Her eyes narrowed, not bothering to conceal the hurt. He had only just this morning, let alone last night, lied his sweet lies to her about the newfound treasures in her body, the passion he had never known with anyone else but just with her. He had painted pictures, shared visions, stretched out before her like an Oriental merchant all his silken wares, his dainty watercolors, his bold-stroked pornographies. She catalogued them all and nursed them in her secret heart, anticipated some new pleasures of the flesh, and relived others. Yet now he was saying, "I have things to do," and it was clear that she herself was not on that list.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean," he said, "get out." Then he turned from her as if she had already left, as if in fact she had never been there at all with him, as if he'd never held her, as if she had not lived or having lived, had died forgotten.

She had known his type before, those who thought of women as disposable lovers, as tissue plucked up from the box, used and crumpled, tossed away. He was one of them, exactly like the others. Un phallo. It was a term whose derivation was the word phallus.

"You're a pig," she said. "You know that? How can you be like that? How can you?

Carlos turned to her and looked not through her now but at her in a way that made her wish he was still looking through the wall and at the street below. She had never seen such a look on any living creature.

He crossed toward her slowly, padding across the floor like a jungle cat closing in for the opened-mouth leap that precedes the fangs clamping down upon the throat. There was the tiniest smile playing at the corner of his mouth, a private joke perhaps, a punchline known only to Carlos, or an old melody plucked from the air, at once familiar yet unnamed. Like an urge for something ... something.

He ran his hand down across her cheek. It was a kindly gesture, a loving one, a sexy touch, the back of his knuckles, the backs of his fingers brushing down along her face, tracing the outline of her perfect bone structure, down across the soft flesh and light, downy hair behind her ears, his hand playing gently down along her jaw and then turning, palm toward her throat, his fingers gripping suddenly, pressing in against her windpipe. Death was in his eyes.

He spoke barely above a whisper. The breathing was rasp-like in her ears. She felt herself go far away, dangling toward unconsciousness as his hand gripped tighter and her eyes bugged out, the blood pumping in her temples, heart pounding wildly like a bird trapped in a bamboo box, beating its head against the walls of her skull in desperate, futile attempts at escape.

He brought his face so close down to hers that for an instant, she thought he was going to kiss her.

He held her there, fixed in his brown-eyed death-look that held her more firmly than even the hand around her throat. It was a look that precluded any argument, any pleas for mercy, any possible reprieve from his decree. It gave but one choice and one choice only. Obedience or death.

So she chose to obey.

In that, she was no different from any of the scores of Carlos' girls who were faced with the same choice, some of whom obeyed and yet still received death as their reward, their compensation for having bent their minds and souls and bodies to his will, until death itself was the form of their obedience.

She tried to speak, but he was choking the words off before she uttered a one. So she nodded with her eyes, her frightened, trapped animal eyes that said, you have me now and there is nothing I can do.

He loosened his grip about her throat and brushed the side of his hand against her cheek like a nobleman giving leave to a peasant, assuring him that he may rise. She got up quickly, her eyes darting about the room, looking for her undergarments, deciding she didn't need them, that the possibility of life beyond his grasp outweighed any claims she had to modesty. She pulled her skirt on and then the top, found one shoe and left the other and hurried with her shoulders hunched over in anticipation of a violence that never came.

She did not look back, and when she was safe in the square down below, she did not look up at the window where the concierge had seen him. She walked in spite of the leering eyes and knowing smiles of the waiters who watched her scramble her way out of the hotel across the square. Whatever they thought or did not think was of no concern. The only thing that mattered was to get away from Carlos.

He stood in front of the mirror. It was cracked and in it he saw his own fractured reflection staring back at him from opposite sides of the broken glass. There were two Carloses there in front of him. Not that one was good and one evil, not that one was yin and the other yang, simply two faces cut down the middle by a jagged scar.

He looked at them both quizzically, as if an impartial observer of what he had become, or what he always was, as if he neither judged nor had played any part in the making of the images there before him. The look he gave his own reflection was thoroughly detached, cold and uncaring. It was a butcher's look.

He pulled a pair of rubber surgical gloves from a delicate-looking makeup kit, as if he were a physician about to excise tumors, a healer about to part the flesh with his scalpel. He snapped the gloves into place and then from another leather kit, removed a scalp.

He took scissors and spirit gum and cut the false hair expertly into a little rodentlike moustache. Then, bit by bit, he expertly affixed it above his upper lip, then added strand upon strand until the moustache was exactly that of John Lennon in Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It drooped in a friendly way, it hid the sneer and the secret smile. It hid the cruelty beneath its teddy bear fur.

From a larger bag, he pulled what at first resembled nothing so much as a wheaten terrier. It was in fact a brown wig of moderately longish hair. It was exactly what one might have seen on any number of graduate students in the Paris of that time, a shaggy cut that spoke of love not war, of stoney gazes, not drunken diatribes. And more important still, was what it left out. There was no hint of danger nor any threat of violence. It was shaggy and playful and downright cuddly.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Assignment by Dan Gordon. Copyright © 1997 Allegro Film Productions V, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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