Hone The Paris Trap

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31549-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Joseph Hone's The Paris Trap, first published in 1977, saw him step aside from his sequence of 'Peter Marlow' novels to offer a different kind of political thriller. Jim Hackett and Harry Tyson first met in Paris, in days of hope - Hackett a promising actor, Tyson a budding writer. Twenty years later, their dreams soured, they are reunited in Paris for a substantive project: Hackett, now a movie actor, has been cast in a major film derived from a spy novel authored by Tyson, who now works for British intelligence. But the plot of the film, concerning a Palestinian terrorist cell, is about to be overtaken in the dramatic stakes by real events. 'A fine example of a vastly popular genre - the thinking man's thriller.' Irish Times 'Through a distorting filter of betrayals, private and public, Joseph Hone conducts us to a final scene so dire that Hamlet by comparison leaves the stage tidy.' Guardian

Joseph Hone, born 1937, is a novelist, journalist and broadcaster. Faber Finds publishes his four Peter Marlow spy thrillers - The Private Sector, The Sixth Directorate, The Valley of the Fox and The Flowers of the Forest, plus the stand-alone thriller The Paris Trap and the autobiographical Children of the Country. Finds' editions of the four Marlow thrillers as well as The Paris Trap each feature a new preface about Hone and his work by the contemporary spy novelist and non-fiction author Jeremy Duns. As a writer of spy thrillers, Joseph Hone has been compared favourably with the likes of Eric Ambler, Len Deighton and John le Carre. His most recent book, Wicked Little Joe, is a memoir published by Lilliput Press.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hone, Joseph

Leseproben

1

Nothing should ever really surprise us. The warnings were all there in the past, ignored or disbelieved, and so all the more devastating when they at last take effect – as a marriage will suddenly explode for the lack of something years before, some mild ghost not laid in bed then, which rises up one fine day and takes a brutal shape from the years of waiting.

It started last summer in the departure lounge of Riyadh airport where I had to wait three hours for a delayed flight back to London. I’d been in and out of Saudi Arabia for more than two months, moving around – Amman, Beirut, Cairo, the Palestinian refugee camps – and I was very tired and dirty and bored with it all that afternoon.

The world out there, that August, was splitting open at the seams; real cold beer weather and I longed for one. But there was no ease of that sort in Riyadh airport. There was nothing there in that razed, burnt landscape – except the end of a difficult job and the need to get back to London as soon as possible. There were only the English Sunday newspapers, the text of a world I’d almost forgotten, that had come in on an earlier flight from London.

I sat over endless sour little coffees in a corner of the departure lounge reading through them. A sweeper, in a white smock like a nurse, propelled the same little collection of cigarette butts and papers to and fro across the shiny floor every fifteen minutes or so. Three junior oil executives in shirt sleeves, quickly tiring of the Sunday Telegraph, fidgeted with expensive gas lighters and dreamed of Uxbridge, across the aisle from me. One of them eventually fell asleep, his head twisted grotesquely back over the headrest, as if his neck had been broken. The air shimmered over the concrete apron outside the window, dancing in spirals right away to the flat horizon. The lounge seemed to tilt and slide in the throbbing heat like a boat.

The coffee must have kept me awake, kept me involved in the long saga of Lord Goodwell’s violent demise which crowded out all the Sunday papers that weekend. The Times had the most comprehensive report: the whole ten-day story reconstituted, blow by blow, spread over four centre pages – from the moment the Group had taken the man from his estate in Leicestershire until they’d shot him in the back of the neck in a basement room off the Holloway Road the following Wednesday.

The ransom money had been fudged to begin with – marked notes or some such. The carrier bag with a fresh £100,000 in it had somehow never been picked up. Finally the terrorists spotted a police marksman on a nearby roof, had tired of the whole business, shot the man and escaped. The authorities appeared to have mishandled everything from start to finish. It was an appalling story.

I held no brief for Lord Goodwell. He was old, a little foolish, very rich – a castle, five thousand acres, a title – he’d once even been given a seat in the cabinet for a few months: Minister of Housing of all things. I don’t believe much in that sort of inheritance. It seems excessive nowadays.

But they’d taken him during the summer fête held in his castle grounds, and that annoyed me somehow – grabbing him with old nylons over their faces just after he’d left the clay pigeon shoot, on his way through the laurels down to the park by the river where he was to have taken part in the annual cricket match: The Castle versus The Village. He was a great sportsman, Lord Goodwell. And I felt they should have chosen another moment to take him out of the world. It was like shooting a man with his trousers down, having a crap in a war. Why take someone happy in the middle of life, between the merry-go-round and the coconut shy? You could wait until dark when the music stopped.

Of course, the Group were Continental – French and German for the most part, with an English woman amongst them – thought to be their leader – with a doctorate from the London School of Economics who had disappeared more than four years before. Pigeon clays and cricket bats could only have appeared to them as the cruellest emblems of privilege.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of it all, something moved viciously inside me that afternoon in Riyadh. It was more than objective distaste. Some sharp personal animosity rose in me against them, as though I’d been involved in the whole business myself, as one of Goodwell’s family or with the police. And at the time I identified the reasons for this surge of acid hatred: it was a vision of English summer parkland, green with laurel and chestnut, which they had desecrated, and which, that afternoon in the shaking desert, I suddenly longed for.

I had wanted a cold beer and instead the article had conjured up for me another more permanent sweetness: cool water, willow. After months in an Empty Quarter a man may see a mirage of home in the desert as easily as one of minarets – and the long fields of Leicestershire rose up for me as an oasis that afternoon out of the empty sands that ran away forever beyond the airport.

Half the lead blue dome of sky above the airport had turned to gold when my flight eventually came in, the big blue and white VC 10 dropping down against the sunset: a longed-for visitor in the evening, at last a happy release. We had wanted it so much – that big blue bird, a life-line home. We had prayed for it – until half an hour before, when the police had arrived everywhere in the airport and the military had surrounded the perimeter.

The engines roared halfway down the strip as the thrust was reversed. And then the aircraft taxied to a remote corner of the field and stayed there, permanently stalled, half a mile away, a huge tin bomb with a fuse ticking that no one dared approach. In an hour it was dark and the long line of cabin lights came on along the fuselage and twinkled in the night, as if some happy ship-board party had just got under way in some small liner moored beyond the dunes.

One of the junior oil executives said to me, ‘At least it’ll be cooler for them now. That air-conditioning – it doesn’t work with the engines stopped.’

‘What about tomorrow?’ his friend asked.

‘Let’s hope they keep some champagne for tomorrow – if they get that far.’

There were no more passenger flights in or out of Riyadh that night or the following day. So I stayed to watch events with a colleague of mine who had come out from London with a large British security team to do what they could for the sixty-two passengers and crew of the plane – which was nothing.

The VC 10 had been hijacked by an Arab cadre once affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. ‘The Movement of August 12’ they called themselves, which signified little to me then, though I thought how much the date would have meant on Lord Goodwell’s sporting calendar, had he been alive: the sweet smell of chamois leather and warm gun-oil and the rumour of heather and grouse on some Scottish moor.

The night passed without incident while the terrorists’ demands were considered. By morning the expected answers had arrived. The Israelis would not release any of the Palestinian guerrilla prisoners they held. The Saudis refused to pay a cent of the million-dollar ransom demanded. The British however – since the plane and most of its passengers were theirs – were willing to pay, but anxious to stall as long as possible, which they did, in case matters might be resolved otherwise, which they couldn’t be.

The terrorists gave the authorities until one o’clock that afternoon to settle their account. Failing that they’d drop a body from the plane – every hour, on the hour.

The morning went, one o’clock came, nothing happened and two corpses later the money was handed over. The bodies had fallen limply out of the back of the plane like excreta – a man, then a woman – her skirt billowing up around the carcase as it fell. Oh yes, the terrorists believed in Women’s Lib all right.

The other passengers were released then. The jet was refuelled. The engines roared briefly as the huge aircraft moved about in a tight circle to face the end of the distant runway. Then it stopped. A minute later two of the three terrorists, just in their underpants from the heat inside the cabin, jumped from the rear exit. One of them must have twisted his leg badly when he hit the ground, for he stayed where he’d fallen. The other started to run frantically away. But the blast got him before he’d gone five yards, bowling him straight over like a toddler running too fast for the first time down the garden path.

There were several small explosions first, which tore hunks of metal from the top of the fuselage. And then, quite silently, like a conjuring trick, the whole huge plane rose mysteriously in the air, until we heard over the half mile a great reverberating thunder as the fuel tanks exploded all along each wing. The tail-plane snapped seconds afterwards: an engine spun viciously away along the concrete like a flaming tar barrel. Debris burst into the sky, the little shrapnel of ash trays and lavatory pans, arms and legs and light fittings. One wing broke off as the aircraft lurched sideways and by then we could see nothing of the fuselage or the nose cone, wreathed in flame brighter than the afternoon, that rose upwards into a fierce spout of dirty black smoke.

There had been some sort of disagreement among the terrorists just before take-off. One of them had gone berserk, it was thought, scattering grenades like seeds down the aisle. No one ever found out exactly what had happened, for none of them, crew nor terrorists, lived to tell the tale.

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