Assassin's Silence

by Ward Larsen

  MISIRI, commonly pronounced “misery” in these halls, had in recent years succumbed to the fact that it suffered a crippling technological deficit in relation to its Western enemies. In light of this, the ministry had taken to divesting certain clandestine functions across the Islamic Republic. Limousines for the country’s elite were dispatched through a shadow taxi network in Tehran; signal intercepts from the southern border were logged and studied in an abandoned library in Isfahan; and the photographs that appeared in each day’s Tehran Times could be found, one day prior to publication, on the computer of an ersatz wedding photography business in Vanak, a concern registered in the name of an old man who walked with a cane, did not own a camera, and who by one reliable account was quite blind.

  As cyber defenses went, it was a marginally effective countermeasure. A few undertakings were undoubtedly hidden, but those exposed were easily laid bare. In the case of the forger-dentist, the NSA was able to unearth and analyze a raft of counterfeit identity documents, and deemed them to be of unusually high quality. At that point things faltered. Given that Ahvaz was near the Al-Faw Peninsula—where Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait were divided by no more than ten miles—agency analysts laid even odds that they’d stumbled on nothing more than a criminal smuggling operation, and with bigger digital fish to fry, they had washed their hands of the matter by forwarding their findings to the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, or OTA, eventually ending in Sorensen’s in-box.

  She asked, “Is there any word whether this scheme is government run?”

  “Still nothing on that, but we got one hit right away.” Kelly slid a printed message in front of her.

  “Malta?” she remarked.

  “Seems there was a running gun battle in the streets of Mdina three days ago. One guy ended up dead. He wasn’t carrying any ID when they found him, but the locals did some good detective work and tracked him to the hotel where he’d stayed the night before. Using the name he checked in under, they cross-checked arrivals at the airport and found him in a video standing in the immigration line. The Maltese tied him to a passport, but they hit a stop there and uploaded the data looking for help. We ran the passport and it matched one from our dentist office in Ahvaz.” Kelly was clearly excited.

  “Okay, so we found one. But a running gun battle? That screams to me this whole thing is drug-related, which in turn suggests our dentist’s office is a private operation after all and not MISIRI.”

  “I thought that too—until we got the second hit.” He dropped another message in front of her. “This came in thirty minutes ago.”

  Sorensen began to read. “A second death? And now we’re in Zurich?”

  “Actually, two morts this time. A banker was killed in his office, and a second man outside the building. It happened just off Bahnhofstrasse, so the Swiss police are taking it pretty seriously. The second man was on our list. He was actually carrying a passport from the Ahvaz operation.”

  “Okay, two in two days. But these are pretty far apart. What makes you think they’re related?”

  “Two things. First, the NSA alert said that from this list of false identities they uncovered, seven were bundled.”

  “Bundled?”

  “They were paid for from the same account, all at once, and then delivered to an address in Haifa.”

  “Haifa? Now we’re in Israel?”

  “Yep. I’ve already looked up the address. It was a private postal box—sure to be a dead end.”

  “Okay,” Sorensen allowed, eyeing her star pupil critically. “What’s the second thing?”

  Kelly set two photographs on her desk. “Like I said, the police in Zurich are pulling out all the stops. They just put out this picture from a CCTV capture.”

  He tapped the photograph near Sorensen’s left hand, a grainy color image, and one she suspected had limited possibilities for enhancement. Her eyes went to the second photo.

  “That one’s from Malta,” he said. “He ran past the entrance of a souvenir shop that was wired for video.”

  The second image was black-and-white, a profile, and had even worse resolution. Still, she saw the resemblance. “Are you trying to tell me that—”

  “You see it, don’t you? It’s the same guy, Anna!”

  Her eyes narrowed as she looked hard at the photos. “Responsible for two killings in two days? A thousand miles apart?”

  “Eight hundred and fifty-six,” said a now-smiling Kelly. He was a cocky bastard—one of the things Sorensen liked about him.

  “All right, Sherlock, what do you propose?”

  “We push this up the chain, get the Southern Europe and Iran desks involved. People are getting killed and there has to be a reason.”

  “No. This is way too thin.”

  “It’s the same guy,” he implored, tapping the desk between the photographs.

  “Even if you’re right, so what? We don’t blow resources without a demonstrated threat to national security. You’re not giving me anything I can sell upstairs.”

  With that, Kelly’s boyish face collapsed—he looked like the kid who’d been benched from the big ball game.

  “All right,” she said. “See if you can get valid identities on the victims. And take the other passport names from your Group of Seven and run them by our in-house data miners. Maybe they’ll all turn up dead and we can close the book on it.”

  Kelly straightened on his half-victory. “I’m on it.”

  When he left the room, Sorensen began folding her work clothes, but the pictures were still on her desk—right where Kelly had left them. He would go far, she thought.

  Farther than I ever will.

  Sorensen had been with the Company for twelve roller-coaster years. She’d had big successes, but her last posting to the Far East hadn’t gone well. She’d been placed under a desk queen who felt threatened by a fresh sharpshooter from Langley, and office politics being what they were, the woman had done her damnedest to shunt Sorensen to the organizational curb. So she’d called in favors and gotten reassigned to Langley’s newly formed DC&A, Data Collections and Analysis Office, arriving professionally bruised but ready for a fresh start.

  She felt like her career was at a crossroads. Stay in for the duration and fight the good fight, or leave and … and what? That was always the problem. There wasn’t much of an aftermarket for depleted intelligence operatives.

  Sorensen stared at the pictures, and like Jack Kelly found herself wondering if the deaths, including the banker in Zurich, could be related.

  No, she thought as she slipped on her Nikes. Nobody leaves a trail of bodies like that.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Not all the world’s silence is of the same character. A calm ocean differs from a windless prairie. A vacant office is not the same as a child’s bedroom. Manifestation aside, there is but one certainty: silence is never so elusive as when it is sought.

  These were Ghazi’s thoughts as he regarded the four walls around him. The original owner had been trying to sell the tiny farmhouse and barn, situated on a decidedly infertile twenty acres outside Basrah, since the end of the first Gulf War. According to legend, the place had been attacked on at least three occasions during that conflict by pairs of A-10 Warthogs whose crazed pilots must have thought the barn an ideal place for Saddam Hussein to conceal Scud missile launchers. True or not, the rumors were well ingrained in local lore, and did little to enhance the property’s resale value. So when Hakim Ghazi made a reasonable offer, six weeks earlier, the owner had little stomach for bargaining.

  In a troubling case of buyer’s remorse, Ghazi had noted a repair to the roof of the barn, a refrigerator-sized patch that indeed could have been the result of a bomb falling through. Of course, the patch was likely something less dramatic. A worker stepping through during a routine repair, or a rotted section of wood giving way in a storm. Still, Ghazi had gone over the floor of the place more than once looking for unnatural impressions or recently turned plots of earth, anything to suggest an unexpended
American bomb waiting to detonate. He never found anything, and in the end, as a man of science, Ghazi reasoned that even if there was a bomb buried under the barn’s floor, nothing would likely happen. Chemical stability was a matter of science, and science was gloriously dependable—on this point he was an expert.

  Ghazi’s precious silence was broken by the sound of a truck pulling up outside the farmhouse. He checked his watch: it was just after four o’clock in the morning. He tensed slightly, then heard the familiar grinding of gears as Sam backed into place. Ghazi went outside and walked to the barn in the predawn darkness. His lone employee was there, standing next to the Toyota pickup, a smiling Indonesian man barely five feet tall, and who weighed little more than the children Ghazi recruited to aid his experiments. Sam’s given name was Supermanputra Alatos Minungkabau, but on arriving in Iraq to work the oil fields three years ago he had sensibly simplified things.

  “How many?” Ghazi asked.

  “Five drums,” replied the little Indonesian. “There is also another two-thousand-gallon water bladder, a pile of gray metal bricks, and the two heaviest sheets of drywall I have ever lifted. I thought the truck would buckle on its way here.”

  Ghazi heaved a tired sigh at the thought of transferring another load. “I went to school for a very long time with one aim in mind, Sam. I wanted to never do work like this again.”

  “And I traveled thousands of miles to do this work every day,” said the tireless young man.

  Ghazi could not deny it—he was a good worker. He’d hired Sam from Tamooz Street in Al-Basrah, a quiet corner where undocumented workers who’d overstayed their visas congregated each morning. Sam knew how to drive a truck, showed up when and where Ghazi asked him to, and disappeared with equal dependability. He had never once inquired what the supplies were for, nor why he was asked to collect them in the middle of the night from a small barge in the marshes. The only time he’d ever stopped smiling was on the day, one week ago, when Ghazi had inadvertently shorted him twenty dollars.

  That was easily fixed.

  “Come,” said Ghazi. “We must finish before dawn.”

  Together they lifted planks to the tailgate of the truck, and by a combination of pushing, prying, and gravity, they rolled the rust-red drums into a corner and lined them in a neat row. Thankfully, the equipment inside the drums tonight was not particularly heavy. The rest of the load was more challenging, and when they were done thirty minutes later, sweating in the cool night air, the two stood to regard their work.

  Sam asked, “How many more loads will there be?”

  “This is the last they will send,” replied Ghazi breathlessly. He had never been told who they were, although it seemed obvious enough. He’d gone along on the first trip, Sam steering the dilapidated Toyota to a rendezvous deep in the Haziweh marshes. As with every meeting since, they had materialized at roughly two in the morning, a boat full of muscular Shiites dressed unconvincingly as marsh Arabs. All around them on the flat boat were crates and oil drums and lead brick. The Shiites helped transfer the load, but none said a word, and on that first night he and Sam had stood in silence watching the empty barge motor back east toward Iran.

  Ghazi never made the trip again, insisting he was too busy here, and letting Sam think it was because he abhorred manual labor. In truth it was the Shiites who worried him—the few he’d known were so unpredictable. Indeed, that first night had caused him to wonder about the greater plan. Iran was undeniably involved, something that hadn’t been made clear during his recruitment. There was no way to tell if that involvement led all the way to Tehran, or if it was perhaps sourced elsewhere. A well-connected individual? An ambitious sect? A mullah acting out some holy mandate based on his private discussions with Allah? In the Islamic Republic such things were rarely evident, and Ghazi supposed he would never know. He simply relented to the idea that if everything went to plan, it would be a success for all involved.

  Sam performed clean-up duty, putting the planks back in the Toyota’s bed and backing it into the barn. That done, he came for his due. “Same time tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I’ll need you the next day—we have a different chore. Come around noon.” Ghazi handed over the day’s wage, plus a little extra. “Go have a good time tonight.”

  “Yes, mister, I will be happy to do that!” Smiling as ever, Sam stepped outside, and pushed the barn door neatly closed.

  Ghazi heard his steps recede, and when they disappeared completely he went to one of the drums and lifted the lid. The cover detached easily, and inside he found hoses, clamps, and a pair of industrial pumps. He pulled everything out, piece by piece, and began checking every component. Nothing could be left to chance. It felt good to be nearing an end after so many months of planning. Yet it was also discomforting. When the final call came he and Sam would have one last job: load everything they’d acquired over the last weeks for delivery to the airport, then cover their tracks as best they could. It was this last thought that gave Ghazi a pang of remorse.

  It was too bad about Sam—he’d truly come to like the little Indonesian. For that reason, he hoped in earnest one of the others would take the task of putting a bullet in the back of his head.

  * * *

  Slaton split accommodations with Astrid: she took the bed in the master bedroom just after midnight, he opted for the couch in the main living area. There was a second bedroom with two sets of bunk beds, but Slaton preferred keeping a line of sight to all the chalet’s access points and having his back to a solid outer wall.

  He stirred at seven the next morning according to the clock on the microwave. Astrid was in the kitchen, and with columns of morning light leaning on the windows, he ignored the smell of fresh coffee and went straight to the computer. He called up the accounts, and as the connection ran its course a merciful Astrid delivered a freshly brewed cup, which he took appreciatively and black.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  After stepping through all seven financial files, he sipped from the mug and said, “Everything is still in place, they haven’t taken a dime. But they have been busy.”

  “In what way?”

  He tapped the portfolio on the screen. “Someone has been executing trades.”

  “What kind of trades?”

  Slaton scanned multiple pages before answering. “They’re selling investments Walter made and buying others. Energy mostly. Oil futures, refineries and drilling, petroleum multinationals—mostly in Nigeria and Venezuela. They’re also buying gold.”

  “Gold?”

  “What’s called vaulted gold, physical bars and coins stored in secure facilities. So far they’re splitting that between two institutions, one in the U.S. and another in Dubai. But it’s all still in my name.”

  “This becomes more strange every time we look. These people kill Walter and take control of the accounts, only to put them in your real name. Now they alter the investment mix but still take nothing? It makes no sense.”

  “Oh, it does. We’re just not seeing it yet. We have to be patient.”

  Astrid looked at him with consternation, probably wondering how anyone could watch idly while strangers manipulated their ten-digit portfolio.

  One account changed as they watched, twenty thousand shares of Siemens sold, and a follow-on order placed for fifty gold kilobars. He was sure that if they watched all morning it would be more of the same.

  But what’s the endgame?

  Slaton concentrated on a single account and went back through its history, carefully scanning the trades Krueger had made. Buys and sells, bonds and equities. Until yesterday, all the transactions appeared straightforward, the conduct of a more or less reputable Swiss money manager. He went back to the previous year’s transactions and saw more of the same, and the year before that.

  His eyes grew tired, and Astrid brought more coffee. He went back another year to view Grossman’s dealings, paying particular attention to the months just before he had died. The records would have been a t
reasure trove to a good investigator. There was constant activity, flows of money and counterflows of illicit arms. A handful of transactions Slaton recognized, movements of arms and money that he, under the alias Natan Mendelsohn, had brokered on Israel’s behalf. Uzis to the police force of the moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the lesser of evils, from Israel’s point of view, when compared to Hamas. Explosives sent to Jundallah, the Sunni wrench in Iran’s Shiite machine. There were any number of uses for a man like Grossman, and Mossad had taken full advantage, Slaton acting as conduit.

  The second pot of coffee Astrid simply brought to the desk. Slaton trudged onward, studying wire transfers, shipping documents, and accounts receivable. It was on the third page of the sixth file that he hit a dead stop. The dollar amount of the transaction was insubstantial, at least by Grossman’s standards. In mid-July, nearly two years prior, and roughly a month before Benjamin Grossman had succumbed to cancer, Slaton saw a lone transaction: $50,000 U.S. as 10% payment.

  This much was easily extrapolated: half a million U.S. dollars was to be paid for … something. Yet that wasn’t what anchored his eyes to the screen. It was the address where the money had been sent. An address he had seen in another of Krueger’s files—the last warehouse that had been curiously empty. Now, in the payment notation, Slaton had a name to go with the Beirut address.

  He committed both to memory, which wasn’t hard to do.

  The address was 26 Geitawi Boulevard.

  The name was Moses.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Umberto was standing in a corner of the operations building, near the converted closet he referred to as his office. Across the room Captain Petrecca was filing his flight plan on the telephone. Umberto marveled at the man’s confidence—even talking on the phone he exuded authority. Umberto had grown up near the airport, and he remembered as a child standing for countless hours near the runway—there had been no fences back then—to marvel at the big Douglas and Lockheed aircraft rumbling skyward to points across the globe. If things had been different, he might have been an airplane captain. Umberto, however, was nothing if not pragmatic, and he knew he’d long ago passed the point in life when truth overtook dreams.