Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

The committee moved on to other matters. However, when the time came, Macpherson would trace the subsequent trouble with Bletchley back to that day.

With time on his hands de Villiers walked along the creek to the boat-building yard by Al Maktoum Bridge. He sat on a bale of cotton and watched the abra ferry crews below.

Dubai, he knew, had, long before the days of oil production, achieved an initial layer of wealth from a highly efficient pearling fleet. It was an operation that was cost-effective because of the evil treatment of the divers by their nakhoudas (skippers). The pearling dhows spent the diving season out on a glass-calm sea at the hottest time of the year. Daily diving rations consisted of a little water, a few dates and some rice, since underfed divers were able to stay underwater for longer.

There were seldom lemons to halt scurvy-too costly-and no spare fresh water to wash off the salt, so sores erupted and deep ulcers suppurated. For some the end came from blood poisoning, while many died from the agonizing sting of red jellyfish, the whip of stingrays or a sudden shark attack.

Japanese cultured pearls ruined the market in the 1950s and deprived the divers of their thankless livelihood. The Maktoum boat-builders then turned their hands to motorized dhows, many fast enough to outrun pirate sloops and Indian Coast Guard patrol launches. These boats became the basis of Dubai’s great wealth through the reexport of gold, mainly to India.

De Villiers returned to his hotel to change his shirt, for even in winter Dubai can be uncomfortably hot. He took a battered Mercedes cab to the Djera side of the creek and was quickly caught up in a honking line of jammed Toyotas. It was January 12, 1977, the day of his appointment.

He knew nothing of the client but presumed he was local and wealthy. Eight weeks earlier he had arrived in Dubai only to be told that the man was ill. The meeting was postponed and de Villiers was well compensated for his wasted time. He had worked for Arabs before, both in North Africa and the Gulf. Two years previously he had drowned an Egyptian fundamentalist leader at Zamalek in Cairo, and Meier had lethally rigged the stereo gear of one Saudi prince at the behest of another. De Villiers wondered if this time the target might be an Israeli. If so he would have to wage war with his principles. He respected the Israelis and might well turn down a contract to kill one. He had in the past rejected work for supporters of Pol Pot and Colombian drug kings. He had murdered many innocents for money from dubious sources but he saw no reason why he should not indulge his personal foibles from time to time.

Thanks to the carefully nurtured reputation of the Clinic, de Villiers had no shortage of jobs and could afford to be selective. Often he would split the Clinic in two, and sometimes the three of them were simultaneously at work on separate contracts. Meier and Davies operated well on their own, but it was as a threesome that the Clinic was most devastatingly effective. Even the most carefully protected target was doomed once his or her details, and the up-front payment from the client, had entered the Clinic’s ledger via one of de Villiers’s three international booking agents, the largest of which was Tadnams of Earls Court, London.

Of the many contract killers for hire in Europe and the Americas, de Villiers had an unrivaled reputation for successful, “no foul play suspected” results. In the increasingly competitive market of the mid-seventies, this specialization began to pay off. There were too many killers chasing too few jobs, and it reached the point where in Birmingham, England, one amateur advertised, with the thinnest veneer of subtlety, in the local yellow pages. In 1976, in Chicago, over a quarter of the contract killings recorded by the police involved the deaths of contract killers taken out by one another. For all but a few specialists-the “scum de la scum,” to use Davies’s term-it had become a buyers’ market with operators accepting fees of less than half pre-1976 rates.

There was no lessening in demand. Far from it-rather a flood of amateur killers, mostly unemployed and often unemployable by reason of their emotional state, Vietnam veterans, washed up by the U.S. withdrawal the previous year. Many were charging $500 for a straight killing which, after allowing for their expenses and the agent’s percentage, often worked out at a profit of around $100. Such low prices soon stimulated increased activity at the bottom end of the market. Frustrated citizens were now finding the local contract agency a financially viable method of ridding themselves of noisy neighbors or irritating mothers-in-law.

The cab driver, a locally employed Palestinian, turned to de Villiers. “Abu Daoud is free,” he said, his eyes aglow with pride.

They were inching through a crowd of chanting, laughing Arabs-all Palestinians, de Villiers presumed-who brandished old rifles or camel sticks and had all but paralyzed the traffic. The cause of the rejoicing was the abject surrender that morning of the French government to terrorist coercion. Over the weekend the Paris police had arrested Abu Daoud, the notorious founder of Black September, who stood accused of organizing the Munich Olympics terror attack of 1976, which killed eleven Israeli athletes. Now, after a hastily convened court hearing, the French deported him to Algiers-a free man and the cause of great joy among all Palestinians.

Perhaps the client would turn out to be a Palestinian. But no, there were plenty of ex-PLO killers about. More likely, de Villiers felt, a Gulf oil sheikh with a personal grudge. There was every likelihood that de Villiers would be met by a mere representative of the client. Or even the representative of a representative. That was why he never sent Meier or Davies to meet a client. You needed to be razor-sharp on these occasions. He remembered the time he had rendezvoused with a Dutch representative who had actually tried to redirect him, boomeranglike, toward his own boss, the real client. Instinct, rather than any identifiable slip on the part of the Dutchman, had alerted de Villiers, who decided to have Tadnams send him a photograph of their original client, the Dutchman’s employer. Embarrassment was avoided and the outcome had been a double fee for the removal of the originally intended target and the disloyal representative.

De Villiers paid off his joyful cabbie in a deserted side street and walked for five minutes through the shuttered gold market. The hotel was plush and discreet. Following the written instructions received via Tadnams, de Villiers nodded politely at the reception desk, avoiding eye contact with its occupant, and crossed to the hairdresser’s salon at the far end of the entrance hall. No hair was being cut, no beards trimmed. Like everyone else, around noon the barber was hors de combat.

The salon’s inner door was labeled “Staff Only” and hung with a planner chart of bookings. De Villiers closed this door behind him. He was now inside a walnut-paneled elevator that responded to only two buttons, an up and a down. Ascending to an indeterminate level, he emerged into a corridor hung with Persian and Baluchi rugs, where he was met by a girl of eleven or so with a shy smile. He followed her down the passageway admiring the intricate sewing of her patterned jellaba. Her neck, ears and wrists jangled with beaten silver ornaments of South Arabian style, probably Yemeni.

The girl entered a long and richly furnished drawing room. The subtle scent of burnt leban (frankincense) was pleasing and in keeping with the general air of Arab high living that the room exuded. An elaborate brass lamp stood in each of the four corners, their bulbs hidden within giant crystal geodes, so that each cabbagelike rock gave forth an orange luminescence that glimmered back from the tapestries and the tasseled cushions.