Assassin's Silence

by Ward Larsen

Davis found Sorensen alone in a small conference room near the Operations Center. The look he got upon entering was not an endearing one.

  “Look,” he began, “I’m sorry.”

  “You made me look like a fool in front of the director! Coltrane thinks—”

  “Stop right there, Anna! He’s impressed with your work, but you sidestepped me. I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  After the two exchanged a long stare, it was Sorensen who relented. “All right, we don’t have time for this. I should have kept you up to speed.”

  “Yeah, well … I screwed up too.”

  “How?”

  He told her about the respirator he’d seen in the wreckage. “I should have looked into it. I just talked again to the guy running the show in Brazil. They found empty paint buckets in a pile of trash, and a number of airport workers saw the jet getting repainted. It’s no longer dark blue on top. It’s an off-white now, like half the airplanes in the world—apparently light colored jets save money because they require less cooling on the ground. This is definitely going to make our search harder.”

  “But at least we’ll be looking for the right color airplane.”

  “Assuming they haven’t painted it again.”

  She frowned, but refrained from calling him a pessimist. “All right, I’ll order the changes to our search parameters.”

  “You can forget about the registration number too.”

  “Registration number?”

  “It used to be CB68H, but there was a small bucket of black paint in the same trash pile. I’m guessing they altered the tail number. It could be anything now.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  Slaton departed Geitawi Hospital and walked westward at a brisk pace, sweat gripping the back of his shirt. As he strode past mosques and churches, townhomes and tenements, Dr. Moses Nassoor dominated his thoughts. Physicist? Father? Terrorist? Perhaps a bit of all three. He was not a patently evil man, nor a virtuous one. Nassoor was part of the other 98 percent, the greater herd whose lives were so casually shredded by the Hezbollahs and Mossads of the world.

  Slaton covered two miles before reaching an establishment that would provide everything he needed. He walked into the Beirut Four Seasons Hotel, a predictably lavish property fronting the city’s main yacht basin. At the lobby entrance he paused at a pedestal and scanned the schedule of events taking place in the interior conference rooms: a meeting of Lebanese school headmasters, a free lunch-and-lecture sales pitch on how to invest in real estate in Lebanon, and, in perhaps the most damning compass of where the country was headed, a conference for representatives of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Wealth Management—Middle East Division. Slaton pressed ahead to search for an opening.

  He found her sitting near Ballroom One: unnaturally blond hair and legs crossed stylishly, a shoe dangling off one heel. Her name tag said VANESSA. She was gatekeeping behind a table with the Morgan Stanley logo, arrayed on which were stacks of brochures, complimentary pens, and a small tablet computer. Above all that—an uncommonly engaging smile. Vanessa was thirty, well-coiffed, and impeccably dressed, trying hard to look attractive and for the most part succeeding.

  If there was a discontinuity in Slaton’s approach, it was that he wasn’t wearing a business suit. Outside mission requirements, he rarely reflected upon matters of grooming or style. Christine had occasionally fought the good fight, suggesting he try a coordinated tie or a splash of cologne, and perhaps there was a part of him that wondered what if? If so, it was a very small part, and one he easily ignored. James Bond could have his tuxedos. Bona fide assassins were nothing if not pragmatic, dressing in every situation for utility. When their appearance became incompatible with an op, they fell back on their second most reliable attribute. They lied convincingly.

  He said in French, “I hope you can rescue me.”

  “Certainly, monsieur,” replied Vanessa through chemically whitened teeth. “What is the problem?”

  “I’ve just arrived for the meeting. My flight was terribly late and the imbeciles have lost my luggage. I have no registration information—it was all on my computer. And to make the day complete, my mobile has gone dead.”

  The woman smiled sympathetically, and began referencing a printout of names in front of her, one that Slaton was already reading inverted—a silly parlor trick that came in surprisingly useful.

  “The name is Winterbourne,” he said.

  “Of course.” She placed a check next to the name. “You were actually scheduled to attend tomorrow’s presentation.”

  “Was I? My assistant arranged everything. I’m lost without my phone.”

  “Aren’t we all? There is space available if you’d rather attend today’s seminar. The topic is most useful.” She held up a brochure titled, Loss Harvesting as a Tax Strategy.

  Slaton demurred, even if he was quietly struck by the chutzpah of a sales pitch promoting the tax advantages of losing money. “I’ll wait for my scheduled session,” he said.

  The woman nodded deferentially, which, along with the three printed asterisks next to Winterbourne’s name, suggested he’d chosen an associate whose clients held substantial portfolios. She handed over the usual canvas welcome bag and an identity lanyard in the name of Thomas Winterbourne. He looked inside the bag and saw pamphlets and prospectuses, along with a handful of notepads and pens emblazoned with the company logo. He smiled like the true Winterbourne would when he arrived tomorrow to instigate a brief period of confusion—no concern to Slaton, who would be long gone.

  “Thank you,” he said. He began to turn, but then stalled as if finding an afterthought. “Actually, there is one more thing you could help me with. I should check my e-mail from the office. One of my assistants has been organizing a very large account.”

  The woman named Vanessa smiled, and turned a small tablet computer to face him. “We’re all on the same team, aren’t we?”

  “More than you could imagine.”

  She was conveniently distracted by a phone call, and in a pageantry of discretion Slaton pulled the tablet toward the end of the table. Within a minute he was looking at the online message board he had years earlier shared with Stein. It remained active, and he saw one new message: Quiet here except C has figured it out. She knows you are still out there.

  As he stood leaning over the keyboard, the seminar broke, and the double doors behind him were breached by a flood of chattering, phone-checking Morgan Stanley reps who overwhelmed the atrium. Slaton tuned it all out. Of course she figured it out. Not only was Christine smart, but she knew him better than anyone. He inserted this new variable into his near-term planning, and decided it changed little. He had tracked Ben-Meir, the last identified threat, to Lebanon, so in the coming hours his wife and son were as safe as he could make them. But further ahead? A week or a month from now? He simply couldn’t address that question—not until he finished what he’d come to do.

  Ben-Meir was half a day in front of him. Unfortunately, Slaton had no idea where he was heading. North was the only tenuous clue, this based on the observations of one marginal witness. But it made sense. Slaton’s fingers hovered over the keypad as he considered checking his financial accounts. He decided against it, concerned that merely accessing the accounts might highlight his position to Ben-Meir and his associates, or even police investigators in one of the countries where he’d recently left a body.

  Vanessa ended her call. It was time to move.

  Before returning the computer to its owner, Slaton cleared the record of his work, then momentarily accessed a common Web-based e-mail platform, followed by a stop at Morgan Stanley’s public website. It was an elementary cleanup that could easily be defeated, but if Vanessa ventured a casual look she would see nothing surprising.

  “Thank you for your help,” he said, placing the tablet back in front of her.

  Vanessa smiled in a way that might or might not have been part of her job.

  Slaton wished her a good day, and at the
front entrance the bellman hailed him a cab.

  “Dbaiyeh,” he told the driver, “the convention center.” As the cab pulled away from the Beirut Four Seasons, Slaton immersed himself in a brief internal debate. The Dbaiyeh convention center. Why had that address slipped out so naturally? It was north, and a logical destination for a Westerner originating at a high-end hotel and carrying a trinket bag from an investment bankers’ conference. Yet that wasn’t the real reason.

  Slaton ignored the driver as the cobalt calm of Saint George Bay rolled past on his left. Two facts lay heavy in his mind: stolen radiological material, and bets made in his name involving oil. Disparate occurrences that shared no obvious common ground, yet whose union was a certainty. He had uncovered a terrorist threat of unknown manifestation. The only option, of course, was to stop it. Slaton didn’t bother to rationalize his efforts as anything noble or righteous. These people had killed Krueger and Astrid. They had tried to kill him, and were undeniably a threat to his family.

  That alone was enough.

  Yet there Slaton hit a stop. Ben-Meir’s trail was quickly going cold, and an attack involving radiological material could be imminent. Slaton relented—he needed help, and as distasteful as it was, there was only one logical place to get it. And there was the truth of the destination he’d given the driver.

  He reached into his newly acquired canvas bag and began composing a message. Slaton settled on a bullet list, a format that emphasized directness. He had three objectives: establish his bona fides, generate urgent interest, and arrange contact on his terms.

  Using a Morgan Stanley pen and stationery—a nice touch, he thought—Slaton wrote:

  Mdina last Tuesday, 1 dead

  Zurich Friday, 2 dead

  Wangen Saturday, 2 dead

  1 each city to my credit

  Barclay’s account 90202-002838-0

  I have time-critical info on WMD in Aadra

  Les Palmiers, Station Chief, 2 p.m. today

  No more than two in support

  He read it through once and was satisfied.

  Two o’clock allowed roughly one hour. Plenty of time for them to verify his information and launch a search team toward Aadra. Just long enough to instill fear at the highest levels of the organization, yet not enough time to devise a countersurveillance mission, at least not one so deft he would have trouble spotting it. If they came to the shops and pubs along the coast road of Dbaiyeh, in a rush of good haircuts and laundered shirts, Slaton would spot them like so many moons in a night sky. It was good, he thought. Their only option was to play by his rules.

  In one hour he would have what he needed: an audience with the CIA.

  * * *

  The journey to Dbaiyeh took fifteen minutes, and two blocks short of the convention center Slaton directed the driver’s attention to a church, and said, “I’ve changed my mind. Drop me there.”

  The driver shrugged and did as asked. Slaton settled with the man from the curb, and the cab departed with a canvas bag full of financial brochures pushed deep under the driver’s seat. He traversed a sun-swept courtyard, and rounded the administrative annex of the church to reach an ageless cathedral. It was a typical Armenian Catholic house with tall and narrow windows, and above everything rose a trinity of domes topped by crosses.

  Slaton was here because he needed an emissary, and while it was always possible to hire beggars or prostitutes or street urchins, he had long been convinced that the most reliable secret agents were God’s own.

  With a dwindling stash of five hundred euros in his pocket, he passed under a limestone arch at the cathedral entrance, appreciating the symmetry, fit, and color of the curve-cut stonework. He pushed through heavy doors into the holy realm, and there, at the front of the long aisle and below a wooden depiction of Jesus on the cross, stood the man Slaton was looking for.

  FIFTY-TWO

  With considerable fanfare, the United States of America established its first diplomatic outpost in Beirut in 1833. It has been neither a happy nor continuous presence. In 1917 all personnel were abruptly evacuated when relations with the Ottoman Empire soured. During World War II diplomatic services were suspended intermittently until the Battle of Beirut, in 1941, when the remaining Vichy French occupiers were evicted. In 1975, the Lebanese civil war brought a precautionary reduction in station staff and dependents. Soon after, as if to validate this forethought, the incoming ambassador, Francis Meloy, was kidnapped as he was being driven across the Green Line to present his credentials, his bullet-riddled body later recovered from a nearby beach. In 1983, a suicide bomber killed forty-nine embassy staff and injured dozens. In the name of security, a beleaguered U.S. State Department relocated the embassy to the safety of Awkar, north of Beirut, where it was bombed again a year later to the toll of eleven dead and dozens injured.

  It is a telling fact that the embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, is the only U.S. diplomatic mission to keep a standing memorial honoring staff members killed in the line of duty. That the outpost endures today is nothing less than a monument to diplomatic tenacity.

  And it remains as much a target as ever.

  Father Vartan Bartakian approached the embassy with no small measure of caution. He knew he was being watched closely as he crossed the street, no allowance given for his black robe and collar, nor the benevolent smile etched on his face. He walked past a queue at the main entrance, where young men and women waited patiently for information about visas and study abroad opportunities, pausing twice to issue blessings along the way. After a sharp turn at the northern wall, he navigated a maze of concrete barriers with the agility of a slalom skier before coming to a stop in front of two United States Marines, the no-nonsense sentries of the iron-gated employee entrance.

  One of the men—the thicker and burlier of the two—stepped forward and said, “Can I help you, Father?”

  Bartakian’s smile did not waver. “Yes, I do hope so. I am here without an appointment, but the ambassador sees me regularly. I have urgent information that must be brought to the attention of your chargé d’affaires.”

  The guard exchanged a look with his partner. “The chargé d’affaires,” the big man repeated. “You’re sure?”

  It was plain knowledge within these thick walls—and apparently plain enough outside for local priests to be privy—that the resident chargé d’affaires was in fact the head of the CIA’s Beirut station.

  Bartakian held up a thin envelope. “I am to deliver this,” he said. “I’ve been told it contains extremely vital information.”

  “Just a minute.” The guard went to a hardwired phone in a nearby shack, and Bartakian used the pause to admire the new embassy. The architecture was impressive, a monument to wealth and grandeur that rivaled even his church. Also like the church, it reminded him of a grand ship—a place whose superstructure was there to be marveled at, but whose means of propulsion lay well below the waterline.

  The grim-faced guard returned.

  “Mr. Donnelly is busy, but he would like to see the envelope.”

  “I am under very strict instructions, my son. I must deliver it personally.” The father smiled with what could only be taken as holy purpose. “I have been assured that to ignore this information would prove extremely embarrassing for all involved.”

  A second phone call ensued, and soon Father Bartakian was being ushered inside.

  * * *

  “We found the airplane in Iraq,” Sorensen said guardedly.

  “What’s the bad news?” Davis asked, having been told that this too was coming when she’d found him in the break room.

  “It’s already gone. We did like you suggested, concentrated on the most likely airfields and took snapshots every thirty minutes. There was an MD-10 on the ground at Al-Basrah International just before three a.m. local last night. We got hits on two passes, but the jet definitely wasn’t there thirty minutes before or after.”

  Davis broke away from his study of a vending machine. “Okay, that fits our profile.
But how can you be sure it’s the right airplane? Since it was night, we can’t go by paint color.”

  “I’m ahead of you on that. We have a tech team that specializes in LTD.”

  “LTD?”

  “Like-target discrimination.”

  Davis raised a questioning eyebrow. “What the hell is that?”

  “It was developed with vehicles in mind. For example, say we come across a random Isuzu in the middle of the desert—it might be a sheep farmer, an opium smuggler, or a terrorist we’ve been after for years. We’ve developed a system for turning high-resolution radar data into what is essentially a fingerprint for a particular vehicle. It can match dents, antennas, gun mounts, broken door handles … even the amount of wear on the spare tire on the tailgate.”

  “I’m impressed,” said Davis, “both by the technology and that someone had the foresight to develop it.”

  “It really works. If you look at any car or truck closely enough, especially one that travels off-road in the Middle East or Southern Asia, you’ll find distinguishing marks.”

  “And you used this software to ID our airliner?”

  “We drew a baseline from the picture taken when the airplane was parked in Brazil, then compared that profile to the airplane in Al-Basrah last night. It was a slam dunk.” Sorensen smiled.

  “Okay,” he said, looking at his watch. “That puts us only ten hours behind. Not to strafe your kite, but that still leaves us with about a four-thousand-mile search radius.”

  Sorensen deflated, but only slightly. “It puts us in the ballpark, Jammer.”

  “True,” he said supportively, “but it’s a helluva big stadium.”

  “We have people swarming all over the airport.”

  “Have they found anything yet?”

  “An empty fuel truck, some loading equipment. There was also a pickup truck in the desert nearby with two bodies in the cargo bed. Both male, both executed. One of them had on a uniform—we think he was the fuel truck driver.”

  Davis waited, but there was nothing else.