The Fifth Horseman by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre Read Free Book Online

capital. Her beauty, the way she invariably stood out in a crowd, was, she knew, a risk. To deliver her letter to the White House, she had worn the blond wig and an old polo coat which she had left in the second locker she had opened at National Airport.
    She moved casually to the exit, spotting at the door the dark-coated driver of the limousine service she had used regularly since she arrived in New York.
    “Nice trip, ma’am?”
    “Lovely, thank you.”
    Laila settled into the car’s comfortable upholstery. As they pulled away, she took out her compact and, pretending to adjust her makeup, scrutinized the traffic behind them in the mirror. They were not, as far as she could tell, being followed. She sank back into the seat and lit a cigarette. The car and the driver were a reflection of one of Carlos’s golden rules: a smart terrorist always travels first class. The best way to slip undetected about the world, the Venezuelan master terrorist maintained, was in that upper-middle-class spectrum which lay just below the level of the ostentatious rich, at the very heart of the society he meant to destroy.
    The cover he had invented for Laila’s two visits to the United States was ideally designed to accomplish just that. She was on a buying trip for La Rive Gauche, a boutique for wealthy Lebanese on Beirut’s Hamra Street, an institution which had survived, as such places inevitably do, all the convulsions of the Lebanese civil war.
    The shop’s elegant proprietor, the widow of a famous Druze chieftain, was a passionate supporter of the cause, an engaging woman who saw no contradiction in selling Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent and Courreges dresses by day and preaching violent revolution by night. Getting a fake Lebanese passport had been simple. Procuring stolen Lebanese passports for Palestinian terrorists was as easy in Beirut as buying postage stamps. Nor did she have the slightest difficulty in getting one of the 200,000 U.S.
    visas issued annually in the Middle East. The overworked consul who had given her her visa hadn’t even bothered to make a phone call to check on her assumed identity; the Rive Gauche letter supporting her application had been enough for him.
* * *
    And so, as Linda Nahar, a Lebanese Christian, she had haunted the showrooms of Bill Blass, Calvin Klein and Oscar de la Renta on her two trips to New York, the first in August, the second beginning in November. She had quickly become one of the newest ornaments of a certain New York world, weekending on Long Island, lunching at the Caravelle, disco dancing in the garish splendor of Studio 54.
    The driver braked to a stop in front of the Hampshire House on Central Park South. She dismissed the car, picked up three messages at the reception desk and two minutes later stepped into the charming disorder of the suite she rented by the month on the thirty-second floor. It was littered with the impedimenta of her assumed calling: fashion brochures, copies of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Women’s Wear Daily. Indeed, her photograph in Women’s Wear at Diana Vreeland’s Pageant of Chinese Dress for the Met had caused Laila a moment of anguish. Fortunately for her, Women’s Wear was not a journal scrutinized with any intensity by the CIA’s Office of Palestinian Affairs.
    She tossed her coat on a chair and mixed herself a drink. Moodily, she stepped to the window onto Central Park that constituted one of the sitting-room walls. Looking at the park in its pristine mantle of new snow, at the skaters gliding over the shell to her right, at all those proud fagades crawling with blinking pinholes of light, Laila shuddered unavoidably.
    She took a long swallow of her whiskey and thought of Carlos. He was right.
    Never think of the consequences of your mission, he warned, only of the unexpected problems that could prevent you from carrying it out. She drained her glass with two thirsty gulps and walked to her bathroom to draw a bath.
    Before stepping into the