Assassin's Silence

by Ward Larsen

  Cruz, a full colonel, was not accustomed to disrespect. Never was he simply ignored. On the other hand, from what he’d seen so far, he wasn’t unhappy to let this man go. He went back to his Cuban desk, put a Brazilian cigar between his teeth, and addressed his mobile phone. He bypassed the contact list where his commanding general’s number was listed, as well as that of the Brazilian Minister of Transportation. Instead he navigated to the calendar and began calculating the number of days to his retirement.

  * * *

  The passenger terminal was nearly two miles away, but Jammer Davis had no intention of waiting for a cab at a remote outbuilding in the gathering equatorial heat. He set out along the service road that connected the hangar to the airport proper, a rutted gravel track threatened on either side by an encroaching jungle. Davis pulled out his phone as he walked and initiated a call.

  The phone was a satellite device, and thankfully the connection held on the first try. The signal was received and decrypted in the Washington, D.C. area, although not at L’Enfant Plaza where the National Transportation Safety Board was headquartered, the United States’ recognized body for investigating aeronautical misfortune. Instead, the satellite link reached one of the many antennae on the roof of a large and well-known building in Langley, Virginia.

  “What have you got, Jammer?” Sorensen asked.

  “An investigation that’s going nowhere. I’m not going to find out anything useful about your two pilots—not anytime soon.”

  “You’re sure?”

  This mistake Davis met with silence.

  “All right,” she said. “You can file a report when you get back tomorrow. That was all I needed to know.”

  “No,” Davis said. “You need to know a lot more.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You need to look into this. I did a little research of my own.”

  “What, on a computer? You can do that?”

  Trudging over gravel in the Amazon heat, Davis flashed a grin. He really liked Sorensen, spook or not. Their relationship had sputtered over long distances, and when they did find themselves in a common time zone their interactions ranged from intimacy to combativeness to amusement. But never boredom. So when Anna had called yesterday, for the first time in a month, he’d been glad. Even more so when she’d asked for his help.

  “I didn’t like what I found,” he said. “I need to take a detour on the way home and look into something. If I’m right, you and I need to meet with the director tomorrow.”

  “Stop right there, Major! You are not in the military anymore, which means you don’t give orders. You are a retired Air Force pilot who does a little consulting on the side. And consultants don’t demand meetings with the director of the CIA.”

  “This one does. And here’s why.” It took Davis less than a minute to capsulize his suspicions.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “I wish you’d stop asking me that. Look, Anna, give me one day to get my ducks in a row. In the meantime, you do the same. Find out everything you can about the people involved in this—in particular, who runs the company that bought this airplane.”

  There was silence as Sorensen processed the order. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Oregon. They have lots of ducks out there. If it turns out I’m wrong, I promise to call right away.”

  There was no response.

  “And if I’m right?” Davis prompted.

  “Yeah … I’ll get you that meeting.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The truck clattered roughly over the old gravel road, kicking up a rooster-tail of dust that blossomed into the midday sky. Sam was driving, and Ghazi in the passenger seat—neither man had experience driving such a heavy vehicle, but Ghazi reasoned that the little Indonesian would draw less attention if they were stopped and questioned.

  There was nothing incriminating about the truck, particularly since the tank was empty. Even when they drove in the opposite direction tomorrow, toward the airport, their load would be perfectly harmless. The vehicle was a tanker, a fifty-five-hundred-gallon water-hauler they’d bought from an American subcontractor that worked the oil fields. The Americans had a reputation for discarding serviceable equipment before its time, and while the truck had seen better days, Ghazi was sure it would run for another thirty miles. That was all he needed. One trip to the farm to take on its load, and then a return leg back to the airport. The remainder of their equipment would be transferred using the Toyota, the exception being the heavy bricks which they planned to distribute around the tanker, including the passenger-side floor where his feet now rested.

  Ghazi rolled down his window, the unseasonably warm day taking its grip as the small clutch of buildings came into view.

  “Are you sure the pump is working properly?” Sam asked.

  “I am confident,” Ghazi replied. When they had purchased the truck the main transfer pump was inoperable, but the Americans had made good on their promise—an able mechanic had it working before they left the parking lot. The pump was rated at one thousand gallons per minute, but it was old and leaky, and Ghazi knew that number wouldn’t hold. It didn’t matter—even half such a rate would suffice. “I watched very carefully how he primed it, and which valves he used. I will have no trouble repeating the process.”

  “That’s good, because otherwise we would have to do the transfer by hand. Five thousand gallons—that is a lot of water to move.”

  “Don’t worry, I have a backup pump at the farmhouse if necessary. This contract is important, so I’ve planned for every contingency.”

  Sam looked at him. “What exactly does your company do?”

  Ghazi had long expected the question. “We have a contract with the Ministry of Oil to study cleanup methods should there ever be a major spill. We must perform an important test tomorrow.”

  Sam nodded thoughtfully, and Ghazi sensed a degree of suspicion. He was hardly surprised. For three years the Indonesian had had his boots on the ground in the epicenter of Iraqi oil production, and so he knew the level of concern here for the environment. It struck Ghazi that Sam had never asked more obvious questions. Why had they set up shop in such a remote location? Why did they perform most of their work in the middle of the night? He decided it was to Sam’s credit that he’d never asked. Ghazi reached into his pocket and withdrew Sam’s daily wage. As ever, the Indonesian took it with a smile that absolved any reservations.

  When they arrived at the farmhouse, Ghazi scouted all around: the levees, the waterway, the walking paths. There was no one in sight. Sam opened the barn door and Ghazi backed the tanker truck in—it fit, but only just—and together they shut the big door.

  The next hour was spent hauling lead brick, and lead-lined glass and plywood. Three empty two-thousand-gallon bladders, each folded to the size of a small table, Ghazi secured to the side of the tanker with rope. The remaining equipment, all extracted from the rusted oil drums in which it had been delivered, they loaded into the Toyota’s bed and covered with a tarp. In the end, the little convoy would appear to be just what it was—a pair of industrial vehicles hauling equipment. The only difference from a hundred others that would travel the road to town tomorrow was the nature of their job.

  “Seven tomorrow evening,” Ghazi said firmly. “You must be on time.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” said Sam, his smile giving way to a more circumspect look. “Boss … how long this contract going to last?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “My friend, he tells me they are hiring riggers in Rumaila.”

  “How much do they pay?”

  Sam shrugged noncommittally. “Pretty good, they say.”

  “As good as half again what I’m paying you?”

  The kid looked at him in amazement. “Really? You give me that kind of raise?”

  Ghazi put a hand on his shoulder. “I can depend on you, Sam. Stay with me, and I promise you’ll never need another job in Iraq.”

  Sam’s bro
ad smile returned.

  * * *

  When Slaton woke he was hundreds of miles removed from Wangen, Switzerland. The alarm clock by his bed claimed it was noon. He went to the window of his quaint bed-and-breakfast room and looked out over the streets of Sachsenhausen. A German winter had arrived in full force, three inches of new snow and a sharp wind snapping the black, red, and yellow standards flying from shop fronts down the street. The sky had all but disappeared, curtains of snow and sleet texturing the iron-clad gray above, and his window was edged in a fresh crystalline frame.

  He had traveled through the night to reach the main rail station in Frankfurt, and arrived in Sachsenhausen just as the beer halls were closing and the last revelers weaving home. He took a room in the first place he found whose lights were on, and slept uninterrupted until the noon bells of three downtown churches rang in cumbersome disharmony.

  To complete his restoration he took an omelet and juice in his room, in the company of Die Welt, and later a hot shower down the hall, and by one that afternoon he felt back among the living. In his room Slaton set back to work by taking his first good look at the passport and visa he’d retrieved from the body in Wangen. Slaton knew a good forgery when he saw one, and this passport was excellent. A Lebanese business visa was current, which made two useful points: the men tracking him were soon headed to Lebanon, and they’d been planning it for some time. He studied the slip of paper that had been folded into the passport. On it was an eight-digit character string, letters and numbers, preceded by the capital letters LH. Slaton thought he knew what it was, and there was a simple way to find out.

  He collected his worldly possessions—a ski jacket to go over the stolen clothes on his back, a solid forged passport, and a still sizable wad of cash—and was soon out the door. He stopped at an electronics retailer and purchased a cheap tablet computer, paying cash, and ten minutes later, with his hair dusted in snow, he ducked into a café that advertised free Wi-Fi. At the counter he ordered a tall café Americano, and soon was seated at a table with an open-network connection—there was a time for security and a time for speed. This was definitely the latter.

  With everything up and running, he navigated to the website for Lufthansa Airlines—LH. He typed in the name on the passport and the reference number, and within seconds saw that the man had been booked the previous evening, under his certainly fictitious name, on a direct flight from Munich to Beirut. A second passenger was also listed in the same booking reference—another name that meant nothing to Slaton, but he was sure it was Ben-Meir. It was poor operational security to group multiple operatives on a single reservation. Doing so left a paper trail, albeit in this case an electronic one. It suggested Ben-Meir was getting rushed, probably in response to the trouble Slaton had been giving him.

  In any event, he had made his first mistake.

  From his pocket Slaton retrieved the encryption codes for his financial accounts and logged in to each one. He found that he remained—in his true name, David Slaton—a very wealthy petro-investor. Yet there was one significant change. A single transfer to a bank in Beirut. Slaton saw no name listed for the receiver, only an account number. Even so, he knew where the money had gone. It was the amount that gave it away. Four hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars, the balance due on a transaction that had begun nearly two years earlier.

  Moses.

  Twenty-six Geitawi Boulevard.

  Slaton leaned back and sipped his coffee. What to do about it?

  He felt certain Ben-Meir was on his way to Lebanon. Astrid’s fate also remained heavy in his mind. She’d been a classic recruit—a scorned woman, financially needy, and with access to vital information. All the same, Slaton could never have kept his sanity over the years without clinging to one precept, a very private and firm ethical rule. Noncombatants were never to be targeted. They might be pressured or manipulated, but the killing was reserved for those who had earned it. He now held Ben-Meir in breach of that rule.

  He was sure there were others involved, and they remained a threat: not only to him, but to Christine and his son. For the first time, however, Slaton had a vector, so there was no decision to be made. It was time to take the initiative. It was time to become the hunter.

  He left the café and threaded south between the bars and brasseries of Schweizer Strasse, ducking his head against a sharp wind that scored through leafless trees. At the Südbahnhof tram stop he dropped the powered-up tablet computer in a deep puddle, cursed for the sake of anyone watching, and moments later sent it into a trash bin wrapped in a discarded newspaper. The capabilities of electronic surveillance were advancing every day, and he had no wish to be tracked again.

  The question of where to go next was straightforward. He did not possess, and had no hope of obtaining, a Lebanese entry visa. He did, however, have the acquaintance of a most unprincipled Nicosian fisherman.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Jammer Davis arrived at Portland International Airport that same afternoon. He rented a car at the first counter he came to, Avis, which was probably the most expensive. Sorensen had promised to cover it, and time was of the essence.

  Two hours later he was outside Bend, Oregon, winding through the forests of pine and fir that were endemic to the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, in an indirect way, it was those forests that brought him here. Because winter was at its peak, there were no trucks hauling loads of timber, yet the telltale signs of Oregon’s biggest industry were everywhere. Roadside diners with expansive dirt parking lots, tall garages to shelter heavy equipment, mills sided by wood-pulp mountains that were covered in snow. This was logging country.

  Davis found his destination using the car’s GPS device, although it was hardly necessary. Bend Municipal Airport was very well marked. He could not have arrived by commercial air, the field having no passenger terminal, no parking lot, and not a single scheduled flight. Bend Municipal’s focus was support aviation, and like everything else here it centered on the timber industry.

  Davis found a perimeter road—virtually all airports had them—and within five minutes he saw the building he wanted. Outside were five helicopters tied down for the season, distinctive skeletal frames that were among the most powerful vertical-lift aircraft on earth. They were used for two very distinct missions. The first involved hauling logs out of deep forest, places where roads and trucks were impractical. It was the second mission, however, that brought Davis here, in particular to a company called Pendleton Aviation.

  He parked in front of the largest hangar on the airfield, and as he got out of his car Davis studied the place. The hangar door was cracked open and he saw an aircraft inside, something big and fixed-wing, with propellers and a red number 21 painted on the side. The runway was caked in snow and looked like it hadn’t been plowed all winter. Davis guessed it would stay that way until spring. There was no one in sight, but he did see a light burning in an office attached to the hangar.

  He pushed open the door to find an empty reception desk, then heard a voice from a room behind. He kneed past a small swinging gate, and at the first doorway he saw a man with a phone shouldered to his ear. His heels were crossed on a cabinet, and he was gesticulating toward the rear wall. The desk behind him was piled high with paper and knickknacks, and there was a brass nameplate front and center: RAYMOND STEVENSON, PRESIDENT.

  “Excuse me,” Davis said.

  The man turned around and held up a finger to suggest that Davis should wait. He did, very politely, and in the two minutes it took for the phone to find its cradle he studied the office. Nothing surprised him. There were photographs of aircraft, plastic models of aircraft, and three bookcases full of technical manuals on aircraft.

  “Hi, I’m Ray Stevenson,” the man finally said.

  “Jammer Davis.”

  Davis shook hands with a midsized man, fiftyish, with open-air features and collar-length brown hair that had found its first gray highlights. He watched Stevenson pause to consider the name Jammer—everybody did—before a
sking, “What can I do for you?”

  It was the obvious first question, and Davis had been contemplating his response since leaving Brazil. He could have told a version of the truth—that he was an accident investigator looking into the crash of an MD-10, an aircraft that had recently been modified in the hangar fifty feet away. But that would put the man on the defensive, and Davis didn’t have time for that.

  “I’m here on behalf of an Australian concern. We’re studying the feasibility of modifying a large aircraft.”

  “What kind of mod?”

  Davis told him.

  Stevenson beamed. “Absolutely. What kind of airframe are we talking about?”

  “An MD-10,” Davis said. “I understand you’ve done one before.”

  “Four years ago.”

  Stevenson reached behind his desk for a scale model of an MD-10 painted with Pendleton Aviation’s logo. He handed it over, and Davis held it over his head like a kid with a new toy. He looked near the tail and saw the aircraft registration number hand-painted with pride—CB68H. He studied the underside and saw a modification along the belly where a pair of large doors had been mounted along the longitudinal axis. “Pretty impressive. I’ll bet it does the job.”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Stevenson dug into his file cabinet and pulled out a sheet listing the technical specifications of the modified heavy jet. Davis gave it a cursory look, but he knew he had to get more before heading back to D.C.—he’d already booked a red-eye flight for tonight.

  “It might be helpful to talk to the current owner. Can you tell me who operates her now?”

  Stevenson hesitated, which told Davis he’d heard about the crash. When he did answer, it came in carefully measured words. “We did the modification for DGR Aviation—at the time they had a contract with the U.S. Department of the Interior. But things didn’t work out. After a couple of slow seasons, the jet was put in storage. Maybe a year later it was bought by a leasing company. I’m not sure what came of her after that.”