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Europe. He was more accustomed to living ín sandbagged
     bunkers than in hotels, and to eating out of cans with a combat knifethan to using cutlery and a tablecloth. But he was used to obeying orders and he learned. Abu Jeddah spoke to him personally
     over the phone at the Syrian embassy in Rome when asking him to report to Naim Shabaan. Hasan was twenty-eight and a battle-hardened
     veteran, but he was not a leader and he knew it. Naim was four years younger than him and untried in combat. Yet, after his
     talk with Abu Jeddah and after meeting Naim, Hasan recognized him as leader willingly enough.

CHAPTER

4
    “Even if what they say about Maggie Thatcher is untrue,” Herbert Malleson argued, “even if she’s not about to announce her
     intention to sign the concordance, the terrorists will see this as a good time to strike. Their movements in Holland must
     be pretty restricted by now. If I was them, I’d have hightailed out of there long ago. My bet is that they have. They may
     already be in England. Certainly the customs and immigration people will be on the watch for them. But Great Britain is no
     longer an island fortress. It’s almost impossible to closely monitor movement in from the Common Market countries without
     causing all sorts of delays and raising a major political flap. That’s the last thing they want to do. They seem intent on
     keeping everything under wraps and making an early arrest of the key terrorists.”
    “The international airlines don’t share their optimism,” Charley Woodgate observed.
    “I don’t either,” Malleson answered. “I think Richard should leave tomorrow for London and waft there for developments.”
    Dartley nodded. “That makes sense. Even if they do hit again in Holland, I’ll be closer to them in London than here.”
    “They’ll strike in Britain,” Malleson said adamantly.
    “You leaving for someplace tomorrow?” Sylvia Marton asked Dartley.
    “Why do you ask?”
    “You usually give me a call just about then.”
    “I’m heading for London,” Dartley admitted. Sylvia had long known what he did for a living. He had not been able to fool her.
     In order to bind her to silence, Dartley had included her as a driver on a few jobs. He later learned she was a crack shot.
     “It seems I’m becoming predictable.”
    “I find all men predictable,” Sylvia said, lighting a cigarette and taking a sip of champagne.
    Dartley knew she did not believe him when he said he no longer missed cigarettes and alcohol. Sylvia liked to search a man
     for his weak points. She would empty both the cigarette pack and the bottle in an amused taunt of his health regimen.
    He replied, “All you’re really saying is that we all have a similar reaction to you—most of us, anyway.”
    “How boring.”
    “You didn’t seem so bored when you sent me that postcard from Rio while you were there with that banker.”
    “That was supposed to make you jealous,” she said.
    Dartley and she both realized that if they ever tried living together, they would be at each other’s throats before long.
     They saw one other continually for years now, but always irregularly. Dartley was alarmed when he realized he had developed
     a pattern in seeing her. Try as he might to break them, patterns and habits kept being re-formed in his daily activities.
     He was always the last one to notice them. This was why, on his operations, Dartley followed guerrilla training procedures
     of deliberately making random changes in even the simplest activities. Some little predictable habit of his that he may have
     missed, his enemy wouldn’t.
    Sylvia was a blue-eyed blonde, a naturalized American citizen from Yugoslavia. She had been in a number of second-rate films
     in her early twenties. She’d won no Oscars or rave reviews, but the movies had been kind to her bank account even if the critics
     hadn’t been kind to her. She still got occasional small roles. She didn’t need them except as an ego