Assassin's Silence

by Ward Larsen

  Slaton met her eyes and nodded politely as he took a seat, and through the station-side window he checked the platforms again. No police in sight. That would change in another ten minutes. The train began moving, and the panorama in the window altered from well-lit tidiness to snow-encrusted steel girders and walls of graffiti. Discarded on the seat next to him was a route map for the rail line, and he picked it up and studied the connecting options ahead—Zug, Luzern, Zurich. From any of those stations he could disappear easily into the grid of efficiency that was Swiss Rail.

  The papers he’d taken from the body in the Peugeot weighed heavily in his pocket, but Slaton decided to wait for a more private setting to examine them. He checked the printed ticket in his hand, and saw on the bottom the time of his purchase: 6:32 p.m. This prompted a calculation, followed by a decision, neither of which was a surprise. It was something he’d been wanting to do for precisely seventy-eight hours.

  The woman four feet away was still talking on her phone. In a low, resonating tone that might be characterized as a bedroom voice, she was negotiating the disposition of a last will and testament. So she was a lawyer. He reached into the pocket of his ski jacket, thankful he’d had the presence of mind to retrieve Astrid’s phone when he bolted from the Peugeot. He had already discarded the idea of dialing the last incoming number to talk to Zan Ben-Meir—in spite of being recently purchased, the number had to be considered compromised, and consequently the handset traceable if he powered it up. But it still had utility.

  With the woman distracted by her call, Slaton palmed the phone as he removed it from his pocket and placed it facedown on the hard plastic edge of his seat. Under the guise of shifting his weight, he leaned until he heard the telltale crack.

  Then he waited.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Slaton made his move ten minutes outside Wädenswil.

  “Lovely evening,” he said in American-accented English.

  The lawyer, having ended her call, gave a polite nod. “Yes, isn’t it.”

  “Does this train carry through to Zurich?”

  “No, there is construction. You will have to switch in Thalwil.”

  “I see, thank you. I have a flight back to the States tomorrow.”

  “You are in Switzerland on holiday?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid not. I have relatives here, and my uncle summoned me for a meeting to discuss financial matters. In truth, it wasn’t much fun—I’m going through a messy divorce and my ex has her eyes on the family business. In the last week my uncle has fired every one of my attorneys and accountants. Very stressful—the kind of thing I usually try to avoid. If nothing else, it was wonderful to see his estate in the winter. I typically come in the summer months.” Slaton dispensed his most engaging smile before letting his eyes drift to the window.

  “Estate you say?” queried the lawyer. “What is his name?”

  Slaton turned back. “Hoffman—Walter Hoffman.”

  The lawyer blinked. “Hoffman,” she repeated, “the pharmaceutical magnate?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. My name is James—James Hoffman.”

  They shook hands across the aisle.

  “You are not involved in the family business?”

  “Me? Good Lord, no—I’d have run it under years ago. I’m a language professor at a small college.”

  They chatted for another five minutes—three more than he’d planned—by which point she made known that she was an estate lawyer herself, resided in a lovely suburb of Baden, and by the way, had recently suffered her own divorce.

  With her business card in hand and the outskirts of Wädenswil in the window, Slaton pulled the broken prepaid phone from his pocket, and said, “It’s a shame I wasn’t able to say good-bye to Uncle Walter. These damned expendable phones are so poorly built.”

  Esther Straumann, senior associate of the firm Fischer, Lenz & Frey, smiled with all that was good and kind, and said, “Here, Mr. Hoffman, please use mine.”

  * * *

  Stein watched the garbage man through the kitchen window. The man was retreating to his truck empty-handed because the cans were in the garage.

  His phone vibrated, and he checked the number on the screen but didn’t recognize it. After a pause he answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Uncle Walter. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. Is everything going as planned?”

  Stein grinned. “Things are good here, no sign of trouble.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “And you? Are you getting any closer to discovering—” Stein was cut short by a squeal. He looked over his shoulder to see Davy toddle into the kitchen with Christine right behind.

  She scooped him up, admonishing, “Will you never stay where I put you?” She then locked eyes with Stein, a questioning look that asked, Who are you talking to?

  Stein gave an easy wave, then broke from her visual grip and strolled to the far side of the room. When Christine disappeared, he asked, “Are you making any progress?”

  “Progress? Probably not the right word. Let’s say there have been developments. How is Christine holding up?”

  “She’s good.”

  “No issues having you as a houseguest?”

  “She’s doing what she has to do.”

  “Yeah, she’s good at that. Did you find out anything about our mutual friend?”

  “Ben-Meir? I made a few calls. Apparently Mossad did let him go a couple of years ago after a botched mission—something to do with an arms dealer in Switzerland.”

  “Grossman?” Slaton asked. “Was that the name?”

  “Might have been. And I heard Ben-Meir went out recruiting last summer. He was offering a big payday for a few committed individuals. No word on what they were planning. Have you had any more run-ins with him?”

  “Yes, but things dropped my way.”

  Stein chuckled. “You make it sound like a tennis match.”

  “Look, I shouldn’t talk long, I’ve borrowed this phone from a lovely lady.”

  These words came in a more deliberate voice than the rest, and Stein grinned knowingly.

  Slaton said, “I’m not sure when I’ll be able to call again. Use the old number if you need to get in touch.”

  “The message board?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay,” Stein said, checking to make sure he was still alone. “But tell me one thing. What’s the plan when you’re done? Will you be coming home?”

  An extended pause. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead. We’ll talk soon.”

  The call ended, and a reflective Stein stared out the kitchen window.

  Far across an ocean, a gracious traveler returned a phone to his seatmate and bid her a pleasant evening, adding a promise to call if he needed legal help, or perhaps even to arrange a more casual engagement during his next visit to Switzerland. The two exchanged broad smiles and a lingering handshake before Slaton stepped off the train.

  He made his way to the ticket counter and immediately purchased a northbound billet on the Deutsch Bahn, a route that would take him deep into the heart of Germany. His actual point of disembarkation would be a decision for later. With thirty minutes to wait, he went to the restroom and splashed water from the basin on his face, and used a clutch of paper towels to wipe it dry. All alone in the room, he backed up to a wall and squeezed his eyes shut, his head hard against the cold tiles.

  Esther Straumann and Yaniv Stein were nowhere in his thoughts. Even Christine and poor Astrid had been relegated. There was only one person in Slaton’s mind, and even if the visual image remained as much a blank as ever, he now had a sound. A tiny shriek.

  For the first time ever, he had heard the voice of his son.

  THIRTY FOUR

  The crash of Perseus Flight 10 generated little interest.

  Had the disaster involved a passenger aircraft with hundreds of fatalities, front page coverage and a lead run on television news networks would have been a given. Had the
flight crew at least had the good form to crash on land, offering a spectacular fireball and smoking wreckage, amateur video might have gone viral. As it was, in an increasingly visual world, grieving families and talking-head speculators were insufficient—no tragedy was newsworthy until presented in a properly pixelated format.

  So with only a trickle of debris scooped from one of the Atlantic’s deepest basins, and a few banal comments from a tight-lipped and decidedly unphotogenic Ministry of Transportation spokesman, the crash found no more than a single paragraph in the next day’s newspapers. Subsequent developments—of these there were few—could be mined only from websites and blogs devoted exclusively to aviation safety. Even conspiracy theorists Tweeted a collective yawn.

  Jurisdiction over air accidents is governed by the Chicago Convention; the location of the event, residence of the aircraft operator, and airspace governance all play a part in who assumes control of a crash site. In the case of CB68H—a derelict cargo jet with opaque registration, lost over international waters—it became more a matter of push than pull. Nobody wanted the chore, and in the end it was Brazil that drew the short straw by virtue of geographic proximity, the fact that its Coast Guard and air traffic controllers were already involved, and a persistent rumor that a mysterious registration application for the downed jet existed somewhere in the Brazilian Ministry of Transportation.

  The Aeronautical Accidents Investigation and Prevention Center, formally a unit of the Brazilian Air Force, is the lead organization for aviation accidents in Brazil. Headquartered in Brasília, the agency has a reputation for issuing results in a less than meteoric fashion, often taking years to determine causes, and even longer to file safety recommendations. Its well-meaning investigators are regularly hamstrung by bureaucratic roadblocks, judicial interference, and laughable funding with which to undertake their far-reaching mandate. That being the case, Brazil routinely welcomes help from abroad.

  The inquiry into the loss of Perseus Flight 10 came centered in Belém, the nearest large city to the crash site. Situated at the mouth of the Amazon, it is the second largest city in northern Brazil, renowned for river cruises, mango trees, and the pleasingly contemporary Val de Cães International Airport. It was here, in a little used hangar on the west side of the airfield, that a beleaguered Colonel Roberto Cruz sat behind a very clean desk.

  Cruz, a career Air Force officer, was not a happy man. Only three months from retirement, he had been issued the most awkward of assignments—overseeing an investigation whose final report would arrive years in trail of his first pension check.

  Cruz had situated his desk centrally in the main hangar, hoping to keep the best possible grasp on things. Space was not yet an issue—the entire accumulation of wreckage so far took up a slab of concrete no larger than a double bed—and so his investigative team was scattered widely about the place. There were three officers from his “Go Team,” and a half-dozen others representing interested parties, ranging from a lawyer for the air traffic controllers’ union to a General Electric engine man. As soon as the crash registered, less than twenty-four hours ago, everyone had rushed to Belém on a moment’s notice, only to find that there was little to do. Search and rescue was the important thing at this stage, but the weather wasn’t cooperating, and since the technical analyses of accidents typically took years, the people around Cruz were merely settling in, diddling on mobile phones and reading magazines.

  Cruz’ mind wandered as well. He ignored the weather reports on his desk, instead reflecting on how his hardwood desk could have been made in Cuba and his cigar sourced from Brazil. That was how his day was going—indeed, how the end of his career was going. Vacillating between the pointless and the absurd. He picked up his smartphone, intending to mark his retirement date on the calendar with a happy emoticon, when the metal door at the far end of the hangar burst open.

  The door slammed back against the wall—if Cruz hadn’t known better, he might have thought it was breached by a battering ram—and the colonel stared slack-jawed, as did everyone else, at what walked in. A massive figure with broad shoulders and thick limbs, a face cut from a block of granite. His thick-booted stride echoed across the nearly empty hangar. The man’s hair was cut short, military fashion, and when he locked eyes on Cruz there was no doubt where he was heading.

  One word percolated in the colonel’s mind: American.

  He’d been told they were sending someone. Indeed, having worked with the United States’ NTSB on other crashes, Cruz was expecting a good-sized team. Brazil’s vexing neighbors to the north rarely saw value in economy. Perhaps, he thought, this is the advance man. Whoever he was, he came to a stop in front of Cruz’ desk like a bull in search of a red cape.

  “My name’s Davis, NTSB. Are you Cruz?”

  The colonel stood. At five foot eleven he was not a small man, yet Cruz found himself looking up at a brute who was a head taller.

  “Yes, I am Colonel Roberto Cruz.” The colonel shook a hand the size of a dinner plate. “I was told your office was sending a liaison.”

  “Liaison? Okay, you can call me that. What have you got?”

  Cruz was familiar with American directness, and while he thought it crass, colonels did not become colonels without knowing when to address business. He briefed the NTSB man on the details that had so far been established by his nascent inquiry, covered easily in the sixty seconds it took them to walk to the far side of the hangar where the wreckage lay.

  “This is what we have recovered,” said Cruz, pointing to his little pile.

  There were fifteen passenger seat cushions, some loose insulation, two empty suitcases, a piece of plastic trim, and a deflated Mae West–style life jacket. A yellow life raft sat deflated, crumpled and dispirited. Separated to one side was a smaller collection consisting of a fishing float, two plastic bags, a painter’s respirator, and a half-dozen empty water bottles—two of these encrusted in barnacles.

  “The oceans aren’t as clean as they used to be,” Cruz remarked. “But of course we retain everything found until we are certain it has no relevance.”

  “Everything?” Davis repeated. “This is all you have?”

  “There was also a body.”

  “One of the pilots?”

  “No, he was positively identified as a local man who worked at the airfield. According to a witness, he had gone along on the flight as an observer. The remains are being held at a hospital nearby, and we already have a preliminary report from the medical examiner.”

  The American said nothing. He only stared at the little clump of debris with his hands on his hips.

  Colonel Cruz rolled his shoulders back, which better put on display his rank insignia and a chest full of medals. “Our investigation is ongoing. Much more physical evidence will be recovered, of course, once the weather improves and the primary wreckage field is located.”

  Cruz watched his guest put a toe to one of the hard-shell suitcases. “Is this how you found it?” the American asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean both latches are undone on this suitcase.” Davis leaned down and lifted the top half open. “And it’s empty.”

  “Yes…” replied a hesitant Cruz. “I’m sure it was forced open on impact and the contents scattered to the sea.”

  “The sea,” the American repeated. He bent down and examined the life jacket. “Was the mort wearing this?”

  “The who?” Cruz asked, the slang defeating his schoolhouse English.

  “The dead guy—was he wearing this?”

  “No.”

  “The CO2 cartridge has been activated. Why would anybody do that before they strapped it on?”

  “I couldn’t say.” Sensing things slipping, Cruz offered, “We also have photographs taken by the search crews.” He led to a nearby table and pointed to a few reports, including the preliminary autopsy, and a short stack of aerial photos. There wasn’t enough yet to bother with a filing system.

  The American flipped thr
ough it all, spending considerable time on the medical examiner’s report. In the end, he held up a single photograph—an empty stretch of ocean marred by a free-form, rainbow-colored sheen. “This is a fuel slick,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “Did you recover any?” Davis asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “The fuel in this picture—did somebody collect a sample for analysis?”

  In a proud moment, Colonel Cruz fished through the short stack of papers on the table. “Yes, here it is. The Coast Guard retrieved a sample and we performed an analysis in our laboratory.” He handed over the report.

  The American looked it over, and his square features seemed to bend. “Engine oil?”

  “Yes, already identified as the brand and grade used in these engines. The General Electric man confirmed it.” Cruz pointed to a disinterested, fair-skinned man across the hangar who was thoroughly engrossed in an issue of The Economist.

  The big American dropped the paper and photos onto the evidence table. “The MD-10 Dash-30 has a usable jet fuel capacity of thirty-six thousand gallons, contained in large and relatively thin-skinned tanks. It holds twenty-four gallons of high-grade engine oil tightly encased in the most dense parts of the accessory drive box.”

  Cruz stared blankly at the man.

  “Does it not strike you as odd that all you found out there was engine oil?”

  “Our investigation is in its early days … the search continues.”

  “Early days,” the American repeated. It was an annoying mannerism, yet trivial compared to what came next. Davis turned and walked away. “Happy hunting,” he called over his shoulder.

  “But … where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “What? You were sent here to help us!”

  On his exit there was no mistaking it—the boorish American opened the door with a good swift kick.