The Assassin tc-3

by Stephen Coonts

  Marisa gathered herself and ran. I followed, twd doors down, through a hallway that led to a corner room suite. The old woman was sitting there at her desk working on something.

  I looked around the room, in the bath, in the closet. God, I was so ready to shoot somebody. I don’t recall ever being so frustrated or keyed up.

  “Get your passports and your purses and any medication you have to have. Quickly, now. We’re leaving.”

  “Where—?” Marisa asked.

  “London. A safe house. That’s the only place I know that killers can’t get to you.”

  Marisa said something in French to the old lady, and by gum, she jumped up and ran into the bathroom. In thirty seconds she had her purse and her passport from the desk and was ready to go. I wondered if her late husband knew what a jewel she was.

  It took about the same amount of time to collect Marisa’s stuff, and then I was leading them down the stairs.

  When we saw the butler and maid sprawled out, Isolde stopped dead. She began spewing French at Marisa. She bent down, gently touched the butler’s white hair.

  I thought this wasn’t the time and place for long good-byes, and reached for her. Marisa put a hand on my arm.

  Isolde Petrou got down on her knees beside the butler and seized his hand. Tears were running down her cheeks and she was biting her lip. “No, no, no,” she muttered. After a moment she hoisted herself up and went over to the maid, who was lying on her back with her eyes open, staring at infinity. Isolde got down on her knees again, closed her eyes, touched her cheek, said her name, said good-bye.

  Marisa reached for the older woman’s arm, helped her to her feet, nodded at me. Together, they followed me.

  We went out through the kitchen toward the garage, taking our time, looking for anyone at all. Didn’t see hide nor hair of the cook or gardener or wine cellar dude. I wondered if they were all asleep … with bullets in their heads. No time to look — they were alive and well or they weren’t. I was going to keep these two women alive or die trying.

  I put Marisa in the front seat of the Mercedes limo and Madame Petrou in back, then hunted through the chauffeur’s quarters over the garage for the keys. It was like an anxiety dream. Lurking around somewhere, maybe, was an assassin, and I couldn’t find the damned keys. I kept expecting to wake up any second in a cold sweat.

  Just when I was ready to admit defeat, I found the keys hanging on a nail at the head of the stairs. Don’t know how I missed them coming in.

  I shot down the stairs, punched the garage door opener and stood to one side, watching, as it rose at its usual pace. It made a noise going up. Needed oil.

  No one in sight. I dove into the car, backed out smartly and got going down the drive. The gate was open. I slowed and looked into the guard shack.

  I intended to drive on by, then thought better of it. Slammed on the brakes, jammed the transmission into park and turned it off. Took the keys with me, just in case. I didn’t trust Marisa far enough to throw her. The last thing I wanted to see was her and Isolde disappearing down the road while I stood there surrounded by corpses, looking stupid.

  One glance into the guard shack was enough. The day man was facedown on the floor.

  I got back into the car, jammed the keys into the ignition and lit that thing up. As we roared away, I got out my cell phone and pushed the 1 button. In about a minute I had Robin Cloyd. “Tell Grafton that someone killed Speedo — a bullet in the brain — and at least three of the Petrou household staff. I have both the Petrou women in their limo, and we’re heading to London.”

  “I have been listening to the audio from the bugs.”

  “Call the police. Maybe they’ll get lucky.”

  “I’ve already talked to the admiral.”

  “Where is he, anyway?”

  “Here.” That would be Washington.

  “Put him on.”

  “He’ll call you in a few minutes.”

  The connection went dead.

  Marisa was watching the road and checking the rearview mirror on her side of the car. She had her purse in her lap, and the top was open. I grabbed it and glanced inside. Sure enough, she had that Walther in there. I took it out and put it in my pocket, then dropped the purse in her lap.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” she said.

  “Maybe not in the last fifteen minutes, I’ll grant you that. And I certainly don’t want you shooting me.”

  “I am not going to shoot you, Tommy.”

  I adjusted the rearview mirror in the middle of the windshield to keep an eye on madame in the back. Maybe she poisoned her son and maybe she didn’t. She was biting her lip, looking out the windows … Once, when I glanced in the mirror, I caught her wiping her eyes.

  “Honestly, I’ll feel better having the gun in my pocket,” I told Marisa.

  “If you don’t slow down, we’re going to be killed in a car wreck.”

  Those big Mercedes Benzes sure can roll. I let off on the gas and took a deep breath and tried to get my thoughts in order.

  Poor Speedo. He was a dweeb, but still… to die like that.

  I wondered if he even saw it coming.

  Jake Grafton took the call from Robin Cloyd at Sal Molina’s desk in his tiny White House office. On the other side of the desk was CIA director William S. Wilkins, and he was in a sour mood. He knew far more than he had before about Huntington Winchester and his friends, and the president’s aide’s personal direction of this operation.

  As the admiral listened to Cloyd’s summary of events at the Petrou chateau on the other side of the Atlantic, Wilkins snarled, “You’re a fool, Molina. I don’t give a pinch of rat shit what commitment the president made to Huntington Winchester. Involving the agency in a harebrained scheme like this — one that is bound to blow up in your faces — strikes me as a classic case of rotten judgment.”

  Molina looked unperturbed. “In the president’s judgment — and mine — the possible rewards justified the risks. Yes, the risks are substantial, but we are going to have to take risks if we expect to have any chance at getting the terrorist masterminds.”

  William Wilkins shook his bald head. “I’m not a fool and I’m not an optimist. I have spent thirty years assessing risks in covert operations, and believe me, this one meets none of the criteria for approval.”

  He was wasting air, and he knew it. During the last twenty years the agency had lost the trust of many of the politicians in Washington. It had missed the impending collapse of Communism in the late eighties and early nineties, assured the establishment that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and been overly optimistic about the prospects for some kind of political settlement between the three major groups in Iraq after Saddam was removed, to name only three of its blown calls.

  The agency’s record of penetrating terrorist organizations and combating them effectively was even worse. This was the unspoken fact that hung in the air now, although neither Wilkins nor Molina was willing to voice it, and was undoubtedly one of the factors in the president’s decision to provide support to Winchester’s quixotic quest. Knowing the political forces at work merely deepened Wilkins’ gloom. Amateurs mucking about, getting killed or scared and squealing to the press, weren’t going to get it done. Other than filling some coffins with their own corpses, their main accomplishment would be triggering another congressional investigation, destroying the president politically and throwing even more mud on the agency.

  As he sat watching Grafton on the phone, avoiding Molina’s calm scrutiny, William Wilkins contemplated retirement. The hell of it was, it was his agency, and, by God, his country, too.

  “I’ll call him in a few minutes,” Grafton said and hung up the telephone. He glanced from face to face, then told them of the events in the chateau and of Carmellini’s departure with both women.

  “What is your recommendation?” Molina asked calmly. The man would wear that expression when they lashed him to a post in front of a firing squad, William Wilkins thought
savagely, and wished that day would really come.

  Grafton deferred to his superior. Wilkins was having none of it. He held out his hand to Grafton and opened it. “The floor is yours,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “I think we need to inform the French government of what just transpired,” Jake Grafton said, “and get those two women out of the country. My recommendation would be to bring them to the States, collect the other members of Winchester’s group and put them in a location where we can trap whoever will come after them.”

  “How do you know anyone will come after them?”

  “Marisa Petrou told Carmellini that Abu Qasim plans to kill them all.” Grafton didn’t mention that Marisa had said that he, the admiral, was also on Qasim’s list.

  “He’s doing a fine job, so far,” Wilkins said acidly.

  “Not a safe house?” Molina asked.

  “We want Qasim to find them. I was thinking the Winchester estate, in Connecticut. We’ll use some security, not too much. Qasim must see this as an opportunity, not a trap.”

  “Has the thought occurred to you, Grafton,” Wilkins said, “that you may be doing precisely what Qasim wants you to do?”

  “Yes, sir. I think it very probable that he wants us to gather all these people in one place so he can kill them in a spectacular manner.”

  That comment caused Sal Molina to lose control of his face for a moment. He found himself staring at Jake Grafton.

  “And you’re going to do it?” Wilkins growled.

  “To kill a tiger, you need a goat.”

  “What if this Marisa Petrou is a double agent?”

  “If she tells Qasim where she is, that might be a plus,” Grafton said.

  “The eternal optimist,” Wilkins said acidly. Sarcasm was a poor weapon, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself.

  “Did she or did she not kill her husband?” Molina asked.

  “She might have.”

  “She might have killed Zetsche, or helped.”

  Grafton nodded in acknowledgment.

  “She might be an assassin,” Sal Molina said, eyeing Grafton carefully.

  The admiral nodded again.

  “So how are you going to keep Winchester and his pals alive if she is? All she has to do is poison the soup.”

  “Carmellini and I will be inside with them. We’ll keep an eye on her.”

  William Wilkins snorted.

  “Your comments, Mr. Director,” Sal Molina said politely.

  “I wish you people hadn’t told me about this,” the CIA director said. “I would rather have just read about it some morning in the Washington Post as I drank my coffee. I would have had my heart attack there on the spot and quietly died.”

  Then he rose from his chair and walked out of the room.

  The silence that followed was broken when Jake Grafton said, “He’s right, you know.”

  “I do know,” Sal Molina said forcefully. His icy composure cracked again; his face fell, and he reached up and rubbed his forehead. “If this blows up, as William so eloquently predicted, I’ll resign and take full responsibility.”

  “I just want to do my time in a country-club prison,” Jake Grafton said with feeling, “with the stock fraud artists, Ponzi schemers and inside traders. Those drug dudes are bad company, so I’m told.”

  “What about Tchernychenko?”

  “He refused to take serious precautions. He has two competent bodyguards, he said, and he promised to call Gnadinger, pass on a warning.”

  Molina said a cuss word.

  “We’d better get cracking,” Grafton said, “before Abu Qasim kills them all.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I received a series of calls on my cell phone from Jake Grafton as I drove past Paris and headed for the ferry to England. We were a few miles northwest of Paris when Grafton informed me that the U.S. ambassador to France, the French intelligence service — the DGSE — and the French police had been told about the murders that morning at the Petrou chateau. The police demanded that Marisa and Isolde Petrou return to the chateau. With Grafton’s concurrence, I kept driving northwest. I started watching for police cars — and saw them everywhere. They took no notice of us … yet.

  Nor did anyone seem to be following us. I spent so much time looking in the mirrors I almost crashed twice.

  Twenty minutes later Grafton called again. The French police, he said, were now only demanding that the Mesdames Petrou not leave the country. The police had found four bodies and six people alive, huddled in the basement, where they had fled after a masked gunman had killed the butler and one of the maids. He also told me the Swiss banker, Rolf Gnadinger, had been found dead the day before yesterday on the stoop of his house. Stabbed to death with an icicle, apparently. The Swiss police were investigating.

  When Grafton hung up, I informed the women. “You’ll need a new butler, maid and day security man,” I said. “Bet you have a hard time finding new people.”

  Marisa didn’t say a word, which didn’t improve my mood. The problem here, I decided, was that Jake Grafton had given me only background without telling me who was really doing what to whom. These women probably knew enough to write a book. The old woman hadn’t said ten words to me, and Marisa only went in for cryptic comments to be passed on to Grafton. I felt completely out of the loop. The darkness was stygian.

  A black Porsche got behind us and settled in. I changed lanes, and he did, too. Not that I could see the driver, because the windshield was slanted too much and the sky reflecting on it made it opaque.

  I sped up. He stayed right with me.

  Fearing the worst, I slowed down. A minute later the Porsche passed me — the driver, a woman, was using me to clear the road of police looking for speeders. I had been doing ten over.

  “And Rolf Gnadinger is dead. Murdered. On his porch, apparently.”

  “Rolf?” That was Isolde.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Isolde Petrou had been hit hard today, and she winced as she took this body blow. Marisa turned and looked at her. They stared at each other for a long moment before Marisa turned around.

  In the next call Grafton said the coast was clear; I could take the ladies to England. “Roger that.” I flipped the phone shut.

  “You’re off the hook,” I informed Marisa in a nasty tone of voice. “You won’t have to spend tonight in jail.”

  She turned her head and gave me The Look. She had, of course, heard my side of the calls, which mainly consisted of a series of grunts and yessirs. In keeping with my role as loyal, obedient slave, I hadn’t asked any questions.

  After checking again for tails, I glanced at Marisa. She was examining her hands. Probably looked the same as they had this morning, I suspected. Her face looked thinner, though, and drawn. The second time I looked, I could see some of the hairline scars, little white lines, that the plastic surgeon had apparently been unable to eradicate from her adventure in Paris last year.

  “So,” I said conversationally, “is Abu Qasim your father?”

  “He says he is.”

  “Well, he oughta know. He was there at the conception or he wasn’t.”

  Silence followed that flip remark. Okay, okay, that was ill-advised.

  “Do you believe him?” I asked, glancing her way again.

  She took a moment to reply. “I used to. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “There’s such a thing as DNA testing, you know.”

  Those brown eyes swiveled my way. I met them and then put my attention back on the road, where it belonged. Every so often I glanced her way, trying to decide if she was part Arab. She was a lovely woman, perhaps a shade darker than your average French chickadee, but so were a lot of women. Dark brown hair, almost black, those big brown eyes, perfect lips. No hook nose — nothing like that. Just a nose. Actually, a nice nose.

  “It’d be nice to know,” I said after a while.

  “No,” she said softly. “It would not.”

  Isolde Petrou leaned fo
rward and put a hand on her shoulder.

  Eide Masmoudi didn’t tell his fellow spy, Rahwan Ali, about the bottle of binary poison in his pocket. In his life as a spy he had learned that a secret is a secret only as long as no one knows it. The fact that Jake Grafton knew about the poison didn’t count — he had supplied the stuff. Anyway, Eide thought he knew Jake Grafton, and the admiral would never tell a soul. Rahwan wouldn’t, either, for the simple reason that his life was also on the line. Still, if he didn’t know, he didn’t have to carry the secret around. The other thing Eide had learned was that secrets had mass and radiated energy. The more powerful a secret, the more it radiated, like a glowing pile of plutonium, and when a secret reached critical mass, the possessor had to tell somebody.

  Eide was surrounded by young men, Muslims from the mosque, who couldn’t keep secrets. They lived in rented flats, as many as could be packed into a small apartment. The mosque was the center of their lives, where they worshipped, where they hung out, where their friends were. They told everything they knew to their comrades, every hint they picked up, everything they heard, everything anyone said. After all, they were involved in a great quest, were planning glorious deeds that would earn them entrance into Paradise. So of course they talked to each other, incessantly. The mullah, al-Taji, and his lieutenants, knowing this, told them as little about the planning of the glorious deeds as possible. Still, the young men got hints, and they speculated. These speculations and hints were the raw intelligence Eide and Rahwan passed to Jake Grafton, and he forwarded them on to his opposite number in MI-5.

  Eide’s secret was giving off light and heat in his pocket — he thought everyone could see it. Could see the bulge in his trousers, could feel the heat, could see his guilt. Could see in his face that he was a traitor to jihad, their holy war against the infidels.

  Not that he believed in jihad, because he didn’t. His mother’s death— murder — had convinced him. Jihad was an evil, a betrayal of Allah.

  Still, the sooner he got rid of this bottle, the better. And the sooner he got out of this mosque, this gathering of the Devil’s disciples, the better.