(2013) Collateral Damage Read Online Free Page B

had told him.
    Despite the warm water she found herself shuddering. Good heavens,
I'm frightened of him. It came to her as a genuine surprise. Then she thought: why
not? There was something about Mister Stephen Dove sometimes, something most women
sensed and some men, which said he could be an extremely violent man. She gave another
little shiver and stepped out of the shower. As she reached for a towel she thought:
perhaps that was what attracted me to him in the first place.

 
 
    5. Rush-Hour

 
    There is little more capricious than a terrorist's bomb. But
as a method of assassination it can be more certain than a bullet; even a trained
man can go badly wrong with a gun. The British Zionist Edward Sieff survived a shot
in the face from pointblank range because he possessed a particularly healthy buttress
of teeth which brought the bullet to rest only a centimetre away from vital blood
vessels. Yet, if a bomb is surer, it is also a sight less discriminating. The assassin
who decides on a bomb must not care who else he kills as long as he gets his man.
    Hans Koller did not care. He had long ago decided that the struggle
justified, if necessary, innocent casualties. He had reached this conclusion early
on in his career as a terrorist and rarely thought of it again.
    The man he had been ordered to murder was a Jordanian of Palestinian
extraction (his parents had fled to Jordan when Palestine became Israel in 1948)
who lived in Cadogan Gardens, just off Sloane Street. The son of a wealthy merchant,
he published and edited from London an Arabic magazine of political comment which
enjoyed considerable prestige in the Middle East where the printed word is still
respected. This magazine admirably reflected the publisher's own liberal education
for it was critical of all extremists, whether landgrabbing Zionists, homicidal
revolutionaries or oil-fired despots propagating their own visionary brands of Islam,
PanArab Marxism and other New Orders.
    It was an editorial policy which had earned him much praise in
the West and the undying hatred of many of his regular Arab readers. On the Palestinian
question, for example, most of his enemies took the line that there could be no
conditional support. One was either for or against them. And in his own country even fellow moderates secretly bitched because
they envied him for his success with the kind of foreigners whose approbation they
themselves so desperately sought. Some of these enemies were violent people as accustomed
to turning to their guns as other men summon their lawyers. Yet he did not fear
for his life. As he often told his friends, he had completely succumbed to the enormous
assurance of the city in which he lived. He had come to the conclusion that an unspoken
conspiracy existed to make London the most civilized, outwardly non-violent capital
in the world. He constantly saw clues to this conspiracy in small things. Hyde Park
Corner, for instance, the race-track of the city around which cars sped six abreast.
Their drivers could steer across your bows with just the same amount of malice as
their French or Italian counterparts, but it was all oddly muted. Acts of considerable
motorized aggression were committed in a tight-lipped, unklaxoned silence. In Cairo
or Beirut a man might sound his horn at the merest suggestion of another car. Here
the silent traffic all seemed part of this odd covenant of restraint.
    The city's ostentatiously unarmed policemen, transformed into
giants by their quaint Victorian headgear, were part of the same plot. He knew,
of course, because as a newspaperman he made it his business to know, that things
were not always as they seemed: that some of those same policemen, especially those
guarding certain embassies and airline offices, carried the newly issued American
revolver under their tunics. But the important thing was that the facade was still
more or less intact: rude behaviour was not expected and therefore, compared with
other capitals, was