Free Retribution by Ian Barclay Page B

phone in the Stag and Hounds, he went down the road to a public call box.
    * * *
    Naim had been handed an envelope by his contact in London. It was filled with newspaper clippings about the financier and
     bloodstock-owner Morton Schiff. Because of his hostile takeovers of major companies, there was plenty written about him, but
     mostly business articles of little value to Naim. There were a number of pictures of him, though none of good quality. Photographs
     taken at race meetings in both Europe and America showed him and his wife with trophies. He had gray hair and bushy black
     eyebrows, was in his late fifties, was tall, had an aggressive thrust to his chin. Naim learned things about his personal
     life from gossip columns and articles in magazines.
    All Schiff’s cars were maroon Rolls-Royces. He was always accompanied by two armed bodyguards, having been the object of a
     failed kidnapping attempt in Italy and a failed assassination attempt by a deranged accountant in Chicago. He loved horses
     but had never ridden one. He bred them, bought and sold them, and raced them in six countries. His castle in County Waterford
     was a fortress with walls of stone six feet thick. He slept only four or five hours a night, and when in Ireland he could
     be counted on appearing at his trainer’s each day for the dawn gallop. Naim found some pictures of the trainer, J. J. Fitzpatrick,
     who had a hooked nose and a tweed cap.
    The fishing boat set them down on a granite jetty in a deserted cove. They had to walk a mile through drizzle to a farmhouse,
     where they slept for most of theday. They had a BMW and an Audi at their disposal, three Armalite automatic rifles, .38 ammo for their Spanish pistols, smoke
     grenades, plastic explosives, electronic time-delay detonating devices, and hand-held transmitter-receivers.
    “I say the hell with what they want,” Hasan said. “We should kill him and a lot of others before the big race. They might
     even catch it live on television. We couldn’t get wider coverage than that.”
    It was tempting. Naim thought it over. “We’re depending on the Provos to supply that boat to take us from here to France.
     There’s a good chance they won’t cooperate if we break our agreement with them. Then we’ll be stuck here, on an island, with
     all ports and airfields watched. We can’t risk it.”
    “They’d still have to help us escape,” Hasan argued. “If we get caught, there’s always the chance we’ll say the Provos helped
     us get here. We’d certainly be tempted to reveal their role if we got caught because they let us down. They can’t take a chance
     on that. They have to help us to France.”
    Naim laughed. “You assume they’re all rational. You know even better than I do all the crazy things that have happened in
     the PLO. Why do you think the IRA is any saner? We both have a lot of loose cannons and quick tempers. I say don’t cross these
     IRA people if we don’t have to. Let’s hit Schiff at dawn at his trainer’s gallop. If we don’t get a chance then, at least
     we tried. So we can say we had to do it at the big race.”
    They left the farmhouse long before first light nextday, Naim and Hasan in the BMW, Ali behind in the Audi. Although Schiff was not far from them and might be taking the Same
     road, they decided against an ambush when there was a much easier way. They would just walk up to him and shoot him.
    J. J. Fitzpatrick’s place was in County Kildare, less than two hours away. It was located somewhere outside Athy, a small
     country town. The streets were empty and the stores still closed at this early hour. They stopped a slow-moving truck loaded
     with hay bales and the driver gave them directions. He said to look for a big gateway with stone lions on each side. They
     turned in at the gateway, passing over the parallel steel bars that prevented horses and cattle from going in or out. Trees
     lined a long gravel drive, branches meeting overhead. The