The Hidden Target Read Free Page B

accepted as potentially valuable. In which case they’d become, once their natural leaders had been given specialised training, members of the New International—Direct Action United. They would be ready and waiting for their assignments by the time Leitner was established in America.
    Once more he found himself wondering at the cost of all this, at the months of preparation. But no important project came off the drawing board in a week or went into full production within a year. Revolutionary patience, he thought, and smiled. The marriage of opposites. Yet natural complements. Like love and hate. Like destruction and creation...
    He finished clearing the room of all traces of his existence. Goodbye to Essen; and in Rotterdam, farewell to Kurt Leitner. And to Erik? No. He would always keep Erik, his one constant identity.

2
    Erik arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport, his American passport (new to him; well used in appearance) stating he was James Kiley, born in Oakland, California, on 10 October 1952. This made him two years younger than he actually was, but he looked it with his beard and moustache shaved off, his mid-brown hair shorter and more controlled. It was, he had to admit, quite a transformation. American nationality was no problem: his accent was good, his vocabulary excellent; after all, he had spent a year in Berkeley after his return from North Korea. And one thing he could rely on: his future activities in the United States would certainly not be in the San Francisco area, where he might—a long chance, but still an added worry—be recognised.
    As for his real identity—Ramón Olivar, born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1950—that was past history. Like his parents. Father, a Spanish lawyer from Barcelona, with intense Anarcho-Syndicalist opinions that made him a professional exile; mother, a medical student from Sweden, with Marxist-Leninist views that were in constant argument with her husband’s politics, each trying to convert the other. Ludicrous people. But they had taken him to Mexico when they escaped there. Ramón Olivar’s name had last been used at the university in Mexico City (1967-69) and in 1970 for his trip along with forty-nine other socialist-minded students to Lumumba University in Moscow. A new name and passport for the concealed journey to North Korea. For the journey back to Mexico, another passport. Yet another, Dutch this time, for the flight into California once the Mexican police had started questioning the 1970 crop of Lumumba graduates (two of them, idiots, had been caught with dynamite all set and ready to explode). And still another passport when he was ordered to proceed to West Germany.
    The only constant in all these travels had been the cover name Erik, his own invention. Chosen, unconsciously perhaps, because of his mother? Just as, like her, his hair was light, his eyes blue-grey? He certainly did not look Spanish. There his mother had won out over his dark-haired, dark-eyed father. But not in politics. (He was now far to the left of his father, much further to the left than his mother.) He hadn’t seen either of them since 1970. His father had escaped from Mexico and ended—literally—in Chile. His mother was still alive, and suitably in Cuba.
    Other times, other places... All distant, all shut away in tight mental compartments. Now he was James Kiley, a footloose American. He had his history at tongue tip: California born, moved from Oakland with his parents to Illinois; and when they were killed in an automobile crash, became a ward of his well-to-do uncle in Illinois who owned a wire and sheet company—gold and silver, in other words, necessary for jewellery manufacture. No brothers, no sisters, no other relatives, no marriages, no complications... He looked the part he was playing: a young man travelling, with some ambitions to be a roving correspondent, looking for wider horizons than his uncle’s factory in Chicago.
    He passed through Heathrow’s arrival