The Perfect Kill Read Free Page A

round traveling at five hundred miles per hour.
    The ambassador didn’t let him finish. “Gentlemen,” he said, looking over the top of his reading glasses, “I have a call to make.”
    But as we started to file silently out the door, the ambassador called after us: “Find the man, and then we’ll decide how much force will be needed.”
    My boss: “Sir, you know he’ll never be taken alive.”
    â€œKeep me posted,” the ambassador said as he picked up the phone.
    Out in the hall, Chuck stopped me while the others walked ahead. “I didn’t hear a no.”
    I knew he was talking about assassinating Hajj Radwan. It’s something we’d been batting around for the last couple of months, with roughly the seriousness of adolescent boys threatening to join the French Foreign Legion. But Chuck was right. The ambassador had left the barn door wide open. Okay, it wasn’t exactly a
Murder in the Cathedral
moment—Henry II shouting at his knights, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”—but it was enough to look into the possibilities.
    Chuck was a huge man, about six-foot-four, and had the manners of a surly bear. Like me, he took Hajj Radwan deadly serious. For the last couple of months, he’d been telling me how he was convinced that Hajj Radwan knew who he was and intended to kill him. After Chuck died on Pan Am 103, a couple of security people went to his apartment to clean it out. They found wires leading from the door to the overhead air-conditioning vents in the vestibule. The wires were attached to Claymore mines tilted toward the front door. Hajj Radwan’s little surprise? Fortunately, Chuck had disarmed them before he left Beirut.
    I turned away to keep walking, but Chuck stopped me again. “I’m in if you are.”
    I laughed.
Fat chance we’d ever succeed,
I thought.
But what the hell?
I shook Chuck’s hand to cement the deal.
    As whimsical as it sounds, it was pretty much from that point forward I started to look at Hajj Radwan through the prism of assassination. I knew even then it was a stunted way of looking at anyone. But wasn’t it the way Hajj Radwan looked at us?
    â€”
    C huck had every reason in the world to be paranoid about Hajj Radwan. Like I said, the assassin had truly mastered that eternal intimate dance between politics and murder, never missing or wasting abullet. Hajj Radwan was the real-life Jackal (as in the Frederick Forsyth novel
The Day of the Jackal
). And it was the rare person who was beyond his reach. What I’m trying to say is that if one day Hajj Radwan decided to kill Chuck a crate of Claymores couldn’t have stopped him.
    It took a while, but all too soon we came to recognize Hajj Radwan as a tactician on par with history’s best. By turning the common automobile, a ton of explosives, and a suicide bomber into a guided missile, he’d beaten the Israelis on the field of battle and did it virtually cost-free. He’d driven the West out of Lebanon the same way. The fact that he’d been able to inflict the largest single-day loss of life on the Marines since World War II forced us to adjust the way we fight war.
    And, in a troubling twist, Hajj Radwan, like Caesar in Gaul, had taught himself to narrowly channel violence to more efficiently obtain well-defined and valid military objectives. Combining the meticulous application of surprise, speed, and precision, he threw his enemies into disarray and retreat. When offered the occasion, he preferred to limit violence to a single man. He intuitively grasped that the unexpected apparition of precise and efficient violence touches a raw nerve in man. It’s some primeval fear that trumps all other violence.
    When Hajj Radwan hijacked the TWA airliner to Beirut in 1985—the same hijacking that earned him a sealed arrest warrant—he murdered only one passenger, the Navy diver. He ignored the other