The Assignment

By Dan Gordon

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466881877

Dan Gordon

Dan Gordon was head writer of the hit TV series Highway to Heaven; his screenwriting credits include The Hurricane, Murder in the First, Wyatt Earp, and The Celestine Prophecy. He is the author of the stage adaptations of Terms of Endearment and Rain Man; cofounder of the Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking in Sedona, Arizona; and has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University School of the Arts, USC School of Cinematic Arts, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, and Tel Aviv University.

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Teaser

St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by Dan Gordon

Copyright

For Linda Gray

Who teaches and inspires me

Who leaves me breathless with her beauty

And who does always what love would do

Acknowledgments

The author would like to express his gratitude first to Dr. Sabi Shabtai, who provided the original story and expertise necessary to lend an air of reality to this work. No one could ask for a better collaborator or friend. To Jerry Zeitman, who, as always, fights my battles as if they were his own and has graciously accepted the role of bad cop now that I have developed a universal love for mankind. To my sons Zaki, Yoni, and Adam, who have always been true and accurate sounding boards and who, as they mature, have become partners, collaborators, and above all, loving friends. To Lenore Lewis, whose expertise, discretion and friendship I value more than words can say. To Christian Duguay, who directed the motion picture The Assignment and pushed me constantly into the darkest corners of my own imagination and then illuminated them with the blazing light of his own talent. To Aidan Quinn, Ben Kingsley and Donald Sutherland, who took words and created life and showed me with their courage, honesty, and artistry who these characters really were. To David Saunders and Tom Berry, whose only concern expressed to me was, how do we make this better. And to N., who died tragically and far too soon and served two countries better perhaps than they deserved. And to the soldiers of the night, who stand watch while we sleep.

CHAPTER ONE

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,