The Perfect Kill Read Free

them. And there was never anyone better at it than the man we knew best as Hajj Radwan, roughly the “Delightful One,” a nickname not without a little irony.
    I spent my best years on the bastard’s trail, and although I never laid eyes on him, we were the most intimate of enemies. His rules, as I understand them, follow. So does his life, because he lived the rules. So does mine, because for so long I lived in a world of hisinvention.

THE ASSASSIN’S CATECHISM
    Assassination is an act of war and must be approached as such.
    Assassination is a quick release from intolerable fate, an act of sunny optimism that one man’s end will alter the flow of events in society’s favor.
    Assassination is a state of mind, a checkmate. Your opponent may still have pieces on the board, but with his king gone, he’s lost the game.
    Assassination is an efficient and merciful act. Rather than killing everyone in the room, the assassin shoots the one person he needs to.
    Assassination is the highest form of triage, its ultimate ratio being to save society rather than destroy it.
    Assassination is a conservative force, the paring down of war to its absolute minimum. One murder in excess is mere murder.
    Assassination is a fantastically leveraged act, a David and Goliath contest where cunning and surprise overcome bruteforce.

LAW
#1
THE BASTARD HAS TO DESERVE IT
    The victim must be a dire threat to your existence, in effect giving you license to murder him. The act can never be about revenge, personal grievance, ownership, or status.
    So the assassin—the genuine assassin, not the murderous lunatic—is, as it were, that particularly sensitive cell of the social body which reacts first and most quickly to preserve the social body.
    â€”EDWARD HYAMS
    B eirut, September 1986: Of the five of us who decided to assassinate Hajj Radwan that morning, I’m the sole survivor. The ambassador died of leukemia a few years ago. My boss died in his sleep. His deputy blew his brains out in the parking lot of a northern Virginia hospital. Chuck, my friend, died on Pan Am 103, which was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988. (The operative who would take over my cases also went down on Pan Am 103.)
    Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying Hajj Radwan was the author of their deaths. It’s just that when it comes to longevity he didn’t fare toobadly. As a point of fact, Hajj Radwan’s passage through political murder lasted a very long and bloody quarter century, a lot longer than even his friends had predicted.
    The idea of assassinating Hajj Radwan came up casually, almost as a conversation filler. The ambassador had called us up to his office in the embassy to talk about something I now can’t remember. I also can’t remember how it was we came around to talking about Hajj Radwan.
    The Department of Justice had issued a sealed arrest warrant on him for the 1985 hijacking of an American airliner to Beirut and the murder of a passenger, a Navy diver. But there was nothing in the small print about how it wanted the warrant executed. And of course, there was nothing about taking a shortcut like murder.
    The conversation started out as one of those what-ifs. What if we did manage to run Hajj Radwan to ground? What if we did find someone to do something about it?
    Chuck shot me a conspiratorial smile. There was no doubt in his mind what he’d do. An Army Ranger detailed to the CIA, he badly wanted in on the action, never leaving the office without his assault rifle and a satchel of hand grenades.
    My boss, a Vietnam vet and former rodeo rider, didn’t waste any time throwing cold water on the party, thinly noting that we didn’t even know where to start looking for Hajj Radwan, let alone have a way to grab him.
    The deputy, who looked at Lebanon as a madhouse best treated with black humor, said something about knocking on Hajj Radwan’s door with a 155mm artillery