AHMM, September 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  His phone rang at nine thirty.

  "Hans Gruss may be of interest,” Donaldson said.

  "Really?"

  "Don't sound so surprised. Depends whether it's the same Hans Gruss. There's a Gruss in Bremer who traffics in industrial information. I've sent you a passport photo."

  Marley looked. The man was bearded and wore heavy-framed eyeglasses. His hair was thick and blond, spilling onto his forehead. Marley examined the nose, the lips, the ears. “Possible."

  "Have you taken photos?"

  "The angles on Gruss aren't good."

  "Upload them. Challenge the software.” The software, Donaldson was certain, was better than they were. Marley sent a dozen shots of Hans Gruss and two of his wife out to Langley. Donaldson called him from home before midnight to say the recognition search had been inconclusive.

  * * * *

  In the morning Marley watched the Asian couple pack their car.

  Before noon, the German pair and their boys loaded up a high-end SUV and drove away.

  In the afternoon, Werner left his cabin, angling up the hillside, his step implausibly jaunty. Marley pulled on a heavy jacket. He got to the dining hall in time to see Werner on the hillside above the office, where a weathered log house overlooked the camp. Werner was on the steps. Marley saw the front door open. A blond woman stood in the doorway for a moment. Werner entered the house, and the door closed.

  Marley tucked his hands into his coat pockets. What was he missing?

  And of less importance, which blonde had admitted Werner to the house?

  He looked in at the dining hall, but it was empty.

  When he reached the office, Lori Miner was behind the desk. She looked up from a stack of papers and said, “Hullo, you're staying on?"

  "Just a couple of days,” Marley said.

  "It really clears out here Sunday afternoon. You have to jump out of the way of the cars leaving."

  "I'm not that eager to get home,” Marley said. “Does a lot of your business come from Washington?"

  "Eighty percent. We're close enough for a weekend getaway, but it feels like another world."

  "That's not a bad thing,” Marley said.

  * * * *

  He walked back to his cabin and phoned Donaldson. “Check out a family named Miner. Woman used to own this place, sold it to her daughters. One is Lori—” He spelled it. “—the other Barbara, married name Follett. Also run Merle Follett."

  "What are you looking for?"

  "I don't know.” His idea was far fetched. “Let's find out whether the family is political."

  "You think one of them is Werner's contact?"

  "I'm running out of possibilities.” Marley sat on his cabin's small porch, thinking about Werner. Near dusk the man still hadn't come down the hill. It had been not quite two hours. Time enough for a debriefing. Time for a romp with the married blonde. Merle Follett had driven out of the camp soon after lunch.

  The place had a deserted feel as he labored uphill. Cars sat in front of a half dozen cottages, but as the cold deepened nobody was out walking. Smoke trailed from a couple of chimneys. He poked his head into the office, found it empty. A cook was working in the kitchen, but neither woman he sought was in the dining hall. Marley continued up to the log house.

  As he reached the steps, Lori Miner emerged from the house. “Oh, Mr. Marley! How are you?"

  "Out for a stroll before dinner,” he said. “How are you?"

  "Just fine!” Her voice trembled as a shiver took her.

  "I was looking for Mr. Werner,” Marley said.

  She stared at him.

  "I have business with him.” He had dropped his avuncular tone. “Do you mind if I come in?"

  "Shouldn't you visit his cabin?"

  "He's not there.” He thought, perhaps too late, of Werner's little Astra automatic and wished he had brought a weapon.

  "He's not here either,” she said with a childish smile. Her shivering was almost violent. “Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Marley, while we get dinner going? It's a good night for a hot drink."

  He looked up the four steps to the house. He couldn't press the issue, even if he were armed.

  "Tea sounds splendid,” he said as he walked with Lori Miner down to the dining hall. She was attentive to him at dinner, and he was almost flattered. Perry Werner didn't appear. As Marley hiked back to his cabin, his phone vibrated. He stopped in the dark and listened as Chick Donaldson told him the Miner family's politics stopped at the local volunteer fire department. “Merle Follett makes good money in the investment business, so they don't need income,” Donaldson said. “Are you going to wrap this up?"

  Staring down at Werner's dark cabin, Marley said, “I don't know."

  * * * *

  They came at three in the morning. Two figures dragged a third into the cabin across the way from Marley. No lights came on. After a minute, two shapes left the cabin and faded up the hill. Marley waited ten minutes, then crossed the yard and entered Werner's cabin. The A-list spy was on the floor. An expensive-looking checked shirt had two patches of dried blood on the chest. Marley knelt, puffing in the cold. Werner had been dead long enough for rigor to set in. The body was as cold as the room.

  He had to admire the women, dragging a wood stiff two hundred pounds down the hill.

  His first task was to sanitize the cabin. He pocketed the handgun, hesitated over the condoms, and finally stuffed them into a pocket atop the book of Arabic poetry. Someone at Langley could see if there was a code buried in the book. He saw nothing else that pointed to Werner as anything but a vacationing bureaucrat.

  He labored up the hillside. Lights were on in the log house. Marley sympathized. Hard to calm the pulse enough for sleep after disposing of a dead man.

  "Good evening,” he said.

  Neither woman seemed surprised to see him. They had been huddled in sweaters and jeans at a round wooden table. A bottle of port sat in the middle—fortification for before or after?

  "We need to speak about Mr. Werner,” he said mildly.

  "Are you a policeman?” Lori Miner stepped closer to him. It would be hard for her to miss at that distance with a pistol, he thought abstractedly.

  "No, no—not in the least. But I am interested in your late guest. He was here to do something, and I wonder if he accomplished it before he was killed. Did he meet anyone? Privately,” Marley elaborated. His manner was calm, as if he had the authority to ask.

  The sisters looked at one another. Barbara Follett spoke. “Ursula Gruss, a German woman. He was at her cabin."

  "All right,” he said, turning to go. “Thank you."

  "What about—” Lori said.

  He stared at her. “I told you, I'm not with the police."

  Barbara Follett folded her arms tight. “He was here before, when Merle and I were having trouble. I had an affair with him. This time—he also wanted my sister."

  "And you were jealous?"

  She shook her head. “I couldn't stand him. It was extortion. Either we cooperated, or he would tell Merle. So I did what I had to do, and I'm prepared to take the consequences."

  "Are you?” Marley said, in a tone of wonder.

  "You've got to tell the sheriff, I know."

  "I don't have to do anything,” he said. He sounded peevish even to himself. He had been trying all evening to remember the Arles girl's name, and if not that, her face. He couldn't bring either out of the past, which made the thin memory he held useless, a mere taunt. He asked her, “Do you have an irresistible urge to confess? Ruin your life. Ruin your husband's and your sister's? Spend time in prison you could spend having babies? Or running your lodge?” He waited because she had to make up her mind.

  Finally she said, “No."

  He hoped she meant it. “Does your sister have enough sense to keep her mouth shut?"

  Lori Miner nodded, her mouth shut.

  "I'll take care of this,” Marley said.

  He limped back to the cabin. He held his v
oice firmly neutral when Chick Donaldson answered after a half dozen rings. He had thought everything out, and he had to play the sleepy deputy director just right.

  "Werner is dead. Shot."

  The distant voice slurred. “Jesus, Charlie, was that necessary?"

  "Don't be cute. Did you have him killed?"

  "No, I swear! We don't kill everyone who sells us out a little. What happened?"

  "If it wasn't you, it was his contact, Ursula Gruss. He was shot at least twice."

  "You'd better get out of there."

  "I intend to."

  "You're sure you didn't pop him?"

  "I'm sure."

  "You used to get impatient."

  "I'm impatient now. You need to get the body out of here."

  "I'll send people.” Abruptly Chick Donaldson sounded alert, adept at cleaning up messes.

  Marley cleared his throat. “It appears the Gruss woman got more information than we imagined. It's possible Werner was compromising the Directorate of Operations. You think you can round up the family?” Let Ursula Gruss sit in an underground cell for a year or two, denying, denying. By the time she convinced her interrogators, nobody would care who shot Perry Werner. By then, her children might not recognize her.

  * * * *

  It was a day before he remembered the Ma'arri in his bag. He sat in his chair, wishing his leg had stayed warmer, and opened the book. His Arabic was rusty, but this didn't seem a promising volume for seduction. Nine hundred some years ago, Abu'l ‘Ala’ al-Ma'arri had written:

  My aim is to speak the truth. Now, the proper end of poetry is not truth, but falsehood, and in proportion as it is diverted from its proper end, its perfection is impaired. Therefore I must crave the indulgence of my readers for this book of moral poetry.

  Marley set the book aside until he was feeling better. He was not devoted to poetry, but he heartily believed in falsehood.

  Copyright (c) 2007 John C. Boland

  * * * *

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  BOOKED & PRINTED by Robert C. Hahn

  Thrillers, with their outsized action, international settings, and heart-stopping pace, certainly seem to dominate the bestseller lists these days and practitioners keep finding ways to stretch the genre in new and exciting ways. This month we look at three that succeed in taking the reader into realms of danger and adventure best experienced vicariously—since the mortality rate is pretty high in these exotic climes.

  Randy Wayne White's well-written Doc Ford novels are consistently entertaining—successfully combining Doc's home ground, West Coast Florida, with exotic locations, and Doc's mysterious past as a government agent with his present career as a marine biologist. In the fourteenth book of the series, Hunter's Moon (Putnam, $24.95), White is at his most imaginative.

  White is adept at making the incredible credible and he does so from the outset of Hunter's Moon as Doc agrees to help a dying former U.S. president accomplish one last task—escape the Secret Service detail assigned to protect him.

  After President Kal Wilson's wife is killed in a plane accident while on a humanitarian mission to Nicaragua, the president becomes a changed man, speaking his mind without regard to the consequences of his candor. He is convinced it was no accident that killed his wife.

  That candor has earned him enemies on the far right and even a “fatwa"—a religious decree issued by Islamic clerics that makes him a target for assassination. Now Wilson, with only weeks left to live, is bent on revenge, and Doc is the man he has chosen to spring him from his protectors and accompany him on a last, desperate mission that takes Doc all the way to the Panama Canal to capture an evil villain.

  To win Doc's help, Wilson wields both carrots and sticks, including a suggestion that Doc's nemesis from Tampa Burn (2004), a serial killer, is somehow linked to the death of the first lady. Doc is persuaded to undertake some of the most dangerous and unlikely tasks of his career as his assignment morphs into rescuing the former president from enemies domestic and foreign.

  Two things set White apart from many of the thriller writers who construct their novels around outlandish scenarios: First, White recognizes and deals convincingly with the objections readers might have; and second, White doesn't rely on his hero's virtual invincibility or on technological superiority to extricate him from tight spots. The result is pure pleasure—fine writing, tight plotting, believable characters, and suspense that repeatedly climbs to new heights.

  Barry Eisler's professional assassin, Japanese-American John Rain, is likely to show up anywhere in the world and death seems to be his closest companion. In an interview with Publishers Weekly last year, Eisler indicated that this, his next thriller, might be Rain's last. Its suggestive title, Requiem for an Assassin (Putnam, $24.95), nevertheless leaves the question open.

  Whether Requiem for an Assassin is the last of the series, it certainly shows that retirement for John Rain will not be easily accomplished. Professional assassins do not have easy lives or long careers, and few, if any, are able to retire peacefully when they decide to call it quits.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Rain has few colleagues, fewer still that he would count as friends. One friend and colleague is Dox, a former Marine sniper who saved Rain's life and who, despite his size, is almost as effective a killer as Rain. Another is beautiful Israeli Mossad agent, Delilah, with whom he has both professional and romantic relations.

  Despite Dox's skill and all the precautions he routinely takes, he is kidnapped by an old enemy of Rain's, Jim Hilger, with the objective of forcing Rain to take on an unpalatable assignment: He must eliminate three targets of Hilger's choosing. If he completes those tasks, Dox will be released. If not, Dox will die.

  Rain knows, of course, that Hilger can't be trusted. Dox will die unless he is rescued, and Rain will die also if Hilger can manage it. All Rain can do is agree and stall for time until he can figure out where Dox is being held and how he can effect a rescue. Hilger is a professional in his own right, and he has his own team already in place, so the deck is heavily stacked against Rain and Dox.

  Ethical lines don't just blur, they disappear as Rain tries to save his friend's life. In his desperate, globe-spanning search to locate Dox and avoid traps set for him by Hilger, Rain discovers he has more friends and better allies than he ever knew.

  Eisler is certainly one of the best thriller writers when it comes to describing trade craft, much of which he learned while working for the CIA. He is also among the best when it comes to vividly describing hand-to-hand combat—and Rain has never had to be better just to stay alive.

  If this is the last John Rain novel, it is a fitting send-off, but it would be foolish to write off a character still capable of producing these kinds of thrills.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Anthony Flacco's debut novel The Last Nightingale (Ballantine, $12.95 paper) finds inspiration in the cataclysmic San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the depredations of a vicious serial killer known by the sobriquet, “The Surgeon."

  Flacco's San Francisco prior to the earthquake is a city already on a precipice: a bustling city where the wealthy class lives large, a port city with a section given over to every vice imaginable, and a city of grinding poverty and discrimination. All in the care of a very corrupt police force.

  One of the few policemen not on the pad is Sergeant Randall Blackburn, whose reward is the mistrust of his fellow officers and the worst assignments from his superiors. Blackburn routinely pulls graveyard shift on the waterfront with its endless fights, drunks, and prostitutes. The “surgeon” patrols this area, too, dispatching his victims with a “heavy-bladed” knife.

  Then the earthquake, which struck on April 18, changes everything. With the city in ruins, the Surgeon's depredations take a new tack as he slaughters the female members of the Nightingale family while an adopted son, Sha
ne, cowers unseen in a nearby closet. The terrified youngster, traumatized by what he heard, drifts away, pretending to be just another orphan of the earthquake.

  The lives of Shane Nightingale, Sergeant Blackburn, and a spunky girl who calls herself Vignette will intersect in the chaos that is now San Francisco. Meanwhile the killer searches for Shane to complete the extermination of the Nightingales, as he prepares to loose a plague on the reeling city.

  Flacco's villain is truly lunatic and is his least successful characterization, but his vivid recreation of San Francisco and the delightful trio who struggle against the surgeon make this a winning debut.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  TIME AND TIDE by David Harrison

  Nick Randall stood by the railings and tried to put himself into the mind of a dead man.

  There were plenty of times you could see Brighton at its best from the vantage point of its one functioning pier, but this wasn't one of them. A Monday morning in February, complete with torrential downpours and a vicious wind. Turning away from the city, Nick watched seagulls tossed like rags across a backdrop of dark slouching clouds.

  By all accounts it hadn't been much better a month before, when a motorcyclist had committed suicide in spectacular fashion, speeding along the pier and plunging to his death in the churning waters around the base.

  It was Nick's job to pick up the pieces, metaphorically, not to make sense of the tragedy, nor to find an explanation. But standing at the end of the pier, buffeted by wind and rain, there was only one question that interested Nick.

  Why?

  * * * *

  Thanks to the proliferation of camera phones, many people had snapped pictures of the rider's progress along the pier, but only one enterprising tourist captured his demise on video. On a slow news day the footage made both local and national TV, and that was where Nick first saw it.