Blunt - Les Treize Derniers Jours by
Jean-Jacques Pelletier
(Excerpt: Blunt: 1986, p. 5-15)
Beaumont, September 6, 11:42 pm
From now on, his name would be Horace Blunt. That was his only chance to avoid dying. For a while anyway.
Because in the end they would find him again. It was inevitable.
With the means they had at their disposal...
In the beginning, he would not leave the cottage. In a few months, when the events in Venice had faded from memory, surveillance would be relaxed. Especially in Canada. Then he could go to Montreal.
It was one of the last places they would expect to find him - too obvious. A professional like him would never make a mistake like that.
Of course, it would not be completely without risk. But he had no choice. If he wanted to get into his cover...Since he had made the decision to disappear, his life had acquired a strange simplicity. A single objective absorbed all his efforts: to escape from those hunting him. The rest was only strategy. Like a game of go.
The legend that he had established for himself was the beginning of a territory, but only a beginning: like the handicap stones that you give a beginning player, to be placed on the goban before the game begins.
It would be up to him to make use of that advantage, to develop the outline of a cover that the legend provided him with. Each of his movements, each of his decisions would be directed toward consolidating the fictional biography of which the legend provided the framework. That would be the territory inside which he would try to survive...
As long as he contained his life within the limits of his cover, and did not act rashly, he could hope for a few years reprieve. Maybe more. With luck...On the beach, the fire was dying out. The women next door had invited him. A kind of party they organized, every year, at the end of the season: the Party to End All Parties... He had left his go game to join the group gathered around the fire.
This improvised gathering was the first stone he put down to develop his territory. Some of the participants in the festivities were, in fact, from the city. At the right moment, they could be beachheads. Starting with them, he would be able to establish new zones of influence, build new relationships to give more substance to his cover.
But all that was for later. For the moment, he had to immerse himself in his legend. Until it became part of him. Until it formed the network of his innermost reflexes.
Nicolas Strain was no longer. His life had been abolished. He had to banish from his memory the tiniest trace of that name.
In the weeks to come, he had to become, down to the tiniest recesses of his being, Horace Blunt.Venice, September 1, 10:48
The body looked like a cadaver in a movie.
Every detail: the blood, the disjointed angles of the limbs, the harsh light of the streetlight accentuating the stiff hand on the cement - the whole classic tableau. Except that the scenery was not "made in Hollywood." The body was lying on the pavement in a narrow little street in Venice.
A few instants before feeling his skull explode, Guennadi Vorotnikov had stepped out of La Fenice with a big smile on his face. His chief had invited him to one of the best restaurants in the city to announce his promotion. His work was very appreciated in high places. He would be one of the younger KGB officers to achieve the rank of colonel...Vorotnikov's blood slowly flowed onto the pavement. In his head, seventeen seconds ago, the face by his fiancée, Larissa, had disintegrated, at the moment when the first explosive bullet shattered his parietal bone.
Beside him, the contents of a small leather briefcase were scattered. A big book with a blue cover had remained partly inside, as if it had hesitated at the last moment about taking advantage of that accidentally offered freedom. The title, in embossed gold letters, was clearly visible: Oxford Russian-English Dictionary.Washington, September 1, 5:04 pm
Steve Michael, the CIA director, stood two metres ten tall. He carried his late forties with cultivated ease after years in the Agency's various gyms. Normally he did not pace back and forth in his office the way he is doing now.
"No answer. At any of the numbers."
He did not need to say more: The other two men in the room understood immediately. Nicolas Strain had disappeared. There had been no news of him since the day before.
Irving Klamm, ruddy complexion with eyes that seemed to be sucked in by thick lenses of his glasses, was the head of the "Silent Junk" project.
The other man, John Tate, held the position of advisor to the President on national security.
"He should already be on the plane," he said.
"Maybe he was delayed," suggested Klamm.
"Unlikely," replied Michael. "Or else the 'comrades' decided to take matters into their own hands..."
He hesitated for a moment before remarking, with a hostile look in the direction of the doctor:
"...or else the treatment didn't hold."
"Impossible," replied the physician.
He had expressed his opinion in a dispassionate tone of voice. A clinical tone. The eyes of the other two stared at him. The doctor felt obliged to defend himself.
"Maybe he was actually delayed," he said. "A stuck elevator, a traffic jam..."
"And what if it was the treatment that failed?" insisted Michael. "There is nothing that would permit us to exclude that hypothesis."
"Impossible, I tell you."
Klamm had personally supervised the "treatment" that Nicolas Strain had received. Strain had been pre-conditioned, using hypnosis and drugs, to forget all events related to his mission.
When he had talked to the agent by telephone, in Venice, he had used the words that were supposed to trigger the posthypnotic order to return. Strain had responded with the correct code. He should have taken the train to Rome and, from there, come back to Washington on the first available flight. He should have...
Obviously, something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong. And it was likely that that something was Nicolas Strain himself. Klamm could talk about traffic jams and broken elevators all he wanted, no one was fooled.
Every hour that passed increased the risk of a leak. It was crucial he be found as quickly as possible. And disposed of. Safely.Venice, September 1, 10:51
When he came out of the restaurant, a man had come up to him in the street to ask him for a light. Guennadi Vorotnikov had stopped immediately. He had smiled at the stranger and reached into his pocket.
The three shots that the man with the cigarette had time to fire scattered that smile over the wall and surrounding sidewalk.
The murderer would have certainly continued with his task, but he was no longer in any condition to do so. With the third shot, the pistol had exploded, tearing apart the upper part of his body.
Behind the window of an apartment on the top floor, on the other side of the street, Lazarus Lubbock gave a barely perceptible nod of approval. Everything had gone according to planned. The third bullet was a mini-bomb. Guennadi Vorotnikov had been reduced to silence once and for all. As for his murderer, a hit man recruited in Milan from the local mafia, he died without ever suspecting the real motives for the elimination.
The special team from S department was already arriving on the scene. That department, inside the KGB, was responsible for "vigorous and delicate" operations: discreet elimination of known dissidents, "accidental" neutralization of exiled renegades, persuasion of political opponents... It also took care of "clean-up," when it was necessary to cover the tracks of an operation.
In this case, their work boiled down to two tasks: supervise the recovery of the two bodies and ensure that the police investigation confirms in every respect the official version of events - those that Lubbock himself had prepared. The local authorities would not create any problems. Arrangements had already been made. That was the good thing about Italy: everybody had a price.
Lubbock continued surveying the scene while absent-mindedly massaging the blood-red scar he had on the back of one hand. A slight smile curled up the left corner of his upper lip. He had just done a favour for the most powerful man in the government. And the most careful.
One does not refuse to do favours for such a man. Not if one is thinking of one's career.
Or simply one's life.
In exchange for this favour, Lubbock would be promoted to head of the K Line. His task would be to coordinate the terrorist groups controlled by Moscow across the planet. For years he had been scheming to get that job. He would finally be in a position to carry out his vengeance.
But, for the moment, he had to concentrate on the second part of the contract: take care of Nicolas Strain.Washington, September 1, 5:39 pm
"One of our best agents!" barked the head of the CIA, barely containing his bitterness.
His eyes were drilling into Klamm's.
"That's the last time I'll let you tinker with one of my men," he continued. "In the future, you will get your guinea pigs from the other services."
"I can assure you that my tinkering, as you call it, is not the issue here. I suspect instead your... 'comrades'."
"You really don't think they're stupid enough to come and play in our sandbox!"
The national security advisor, John Tate, was on the telephone. He had followed the altercation between the two others without interrupting.
"We've just received confirmation from Venice," he announced, hanging up the phone. "Their interpreter has been neutralized."
"I tell you," Klamm continues, "they decided to take care of Strain themselves."
Tate brushed a speck of dust off the lapel of his grey pin-stripped suit.
"What do you think?" he said, shooting a look towards Michael.
"He may be right," admits the other man reluctantly. "It's true that they have never approved of our way of dealing the problem..."
"Couldn't you ask them?" interjects Klamm.
"So they'd know we've lost him?" said Michael ironically.
"But..."
"If we issued an alert about him, they would find out within hours."
"You mean that you can't tell your own people to be on the lookout for someone without the KGB learning about it?" said Klamm incredulously.
"I mean that we can't search for anyone without all the interested agencies learning about it. Searching means asking questions, talking to people, circulating memos... Even the Canadians would notice after a while!"
"Without doing an actual search for him, we could put him on the regular watch lists," suggested Tate. "Disguise it as a routine check..."
"We can always try," Michael conceded.
His tone of voice, however, betrayed his lack of enthusiasm.Venice, September 2, 9:53 pm
The man smashed into the asphalt.
His face absorbed most of the impact, but he felt nothing. No more than the young woman who had preceded him a few seconds earlier. The two bodies had followed an almost identical trajectory and lay still in the position where they fell.
They were dead before they reached the ground.
Luigi closed the cargo hold door again and rejoined his comrades in the front of the aircraft.
This execution was necessary to demonstrate the seriousness of their demands. The authorities would hesitate now before undertaking a rescue operation: there were still 122 hostages on board the KLM Boeing 747. They would be forced to negotiate.
All the members of the group were dedicated militants, convinced of the justice of their cause. They had been training for this operation for almost a year.
As a security precaution, they had learned the location and time of the action just a few hours before. Only Luigi knew the overall plan it was part of. He was their only contact with the chief.
Luigi had explained to the leader of the group the crucial importance of their act. It was why Luigi had carefully checked the identity of the hostage before killing him. His passport had confirmed that he was indeed the American who he was supposed to pick: Nicolas Strain.More than 700 metres from the location of the hostage-taking, Lazarus Lubbock was observing with binoculars the aircraft that had been sitting stationary for two hours in the centre of the runway. Everything had gone according to plan.
He took a small box out of his pocket, and put it beside him on the car seat. With the tip of a knife, he then scratched the surface of the scar on his left hand, until the blood beaded through the epidermis. It was important not to forget.
Then, with a calm gesture, he opened the small box and pressed the button inside.
The whole front end of the airplane was blown apart by a powerful explosion. The sky, which had begun to grow dark, was lit up with cruel light.
Lubbock stowed the remote control in the glove compartment of the car and took out a black notebook from the inside pocket of his coat. The pages were covered with words grouped in series, like a grocery list. He made a cross beside the last word at the bottom of the page: "Strain."
Executing this part of the contract had been more difficult. The target had not followed the planned itinerary. Fortunately, a second assault team was waiting at Marco Polo Airport. In case the American changed his plans at the last minute. After all, it was the quickest way to leave Venice...
After having been informed that Strain had telephoned the airport, all he needed to do was check which flight he was scheduled to leave on and initiate "Operation Survival."
It would have been much simpler to proceed directly, as with Vorotnikov, but the elimination had to appear completely accidental. It was essential that no link could be made, or even suspected, with the Soviet secret services. Hence the idea of the terrorist attack: the Americans would never believe that they would blow up a whole plane just to eliminate their interpreter.
A few hours later, the media announced the deaths of 117 of the 122 hostages. The only ones who had survived were those locked in the rear hold. As for the terrorists, who had signed their messages: "The survival rats," they had all perished in the explosion. Their true identities were still not known.Washington, September 2, 8:39 pm
In the conference room where Tate and Michael were reviewing the situation, they were in panic mode. Since early morning, the news flashes, often contradictory, had come in quick succession.
They had thought they had found Strain in Marco Polo Airport. He had reserved a seat in his name on the flight to Washington, with a stopover in London.
Michael had then taken out the cognac to celebrate the event.
"I should have known!" he repeated. "I should have known!"
While consistently effective, Strain had a reputation for frequently taking liberties with the orders he had been given whenever he considered it possible for him to do so without compromising his mission. This temporary disappearance was no doubt one of his many "improvisations": he had wanted to take a vacation day before coming in.
The only one who did not entirely share this optimism was Klamm.
"Usually, the reply is immediate," he said. "In all my experience, I have never encountered this kind of... resistance."
"You never met an agent like Strain," said Michael ironically.
Now that Strain was on the way back, he was secretly satisfied to see that one of his men had been able to some extent resist the supposedly perfect conditioning of the good doctor.
"I tell you again, something must have happened," insisted Klamm. "As soon as he's back, I will do a full examination."
"You'll do nothing more than what was planned," replied Michael tersely. "I don't want you to destroy him to satisfy your morbid curiosity."Towards the end of the afternoon, the local CIA station in Venice informed them of the hostage-taking. A few hours later came the message that Strain had been executed by the terrorists.
The death of an agent was never an occasion for celebration. However, the news brought a certain amount of relief to the participants in the meeting. It was finally over. A considerable weight had been lifted off their shoulders. The President would stop phoning every two hours for updates on the situation.
They would go their separate ways, leaving Michael with the task of repatriating the body.Late in the evening, they were called together again. Nicolas Strain was not death.
The body found on the runway bore a certain resemblance to the American agent, but the checks carried out by the CIA's local experts had quickly revealed the error: not only were the fingerprints different, but the individual was considerably shorter than Strain, he weighed several kilos less and he had dark brown eyes - not black.
The passport photo had been altered to correspond more to the individual's features.
The Italian authorities were trying to establish the actual identity of the victim, which could easily take several days, given the state of their administrative procedures.
It was back to square one.© 1996 Éditions Alire & Jean-Jacques Pelletier
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