Assassin's Run

by Ward Larsen

  “Should we run it past the front office?” he asked, referring to Langley.

  Sorensen pondered it. On appearances there was nothing damning, just two freighters that had thrown down anchor hundreds of miles apart. It was curious because they were owned by the same company. And unremarkable for the same reason. “Maybe their corporate controllers told them to lay up,” she speculated. “I’ve heard that oil tankers often do it as a business strategy. They’ll drop anchor outside a port to delay delivery if the owners think the price of crude is about to go up.”

  “Could be, I guess. But we don’t know what they’re carrying.”

  “No, not yet.” Sorensen thought about it long and hard, then shook her head. “I can only play my director card so many times. This isn’t enough—we need to keep watching.”

  “Okay, I’ll stay on it.”

  Mike went back to his coffee, then began typing.

  Sorensen moved toward the door, yet before she left the room she turned and looked at the screen one last time. From a more distant vantage point, the big picture on the map left a more unsettling impression. From where she stood, it looked very much like Saudi Arabia was being surrounded.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Slaton’s hands were going numb. He was wearing ski gloves, but after ten minutes of digging through snow and ice, enough frozen moisture had invaded the cuffs to leave the inner linings permeated.

  He’d found what he wanted within minutes of beginning his search of the hill—a cavity in the snow the width of a one-euro coin. Slightly larger than the diameter of a fifty-cal round, but that broadening could be due to any number of factors. The bullet might have flattened after striking Romanov, and probably wobbled as its ballistic energy died. Or the increased diameter of the hole could indicate the snowpack had melted slightly, then refrozen overnight. Whatever the reason, Slaton was confident of one thing—the bullet that had struck Romanov lay very near the spot where he was digging on hands and knees.

  He’d done his best to trace the hollow path, which ran on an acute angle along the slope of the mountain. In no time he cleared a five-foot-long trench. It was perfectly feasible that the round might have penetrated the frozen earth as well, but that would leave telltale marks of a different kind. He had to be getting close.

  He glanced toward the ski lift, and noticed a pair of men staring up at him. They didn’t look like police officers, nor the ski patrol, and he pegged them as resort workers—perhaps lift operators or hotel clerks.

  Slaton dug faster, his frozen fingers clawing through the wet insulation of his gloves. He saw a glint of metal and felt a surge of adrenaline, only to be disappointed when he recognized the shaft of a shattered ski pole. He tossed it aside and kept going, ripping away snow and ice until the tunnel intersected the ground beneath.

  He heard a shout from the bottom of the mountain. A female police officer was waving him away. Slaton heard an engine roar to life, and he saw a young man in a ski patrol jacket astride a snowmobile.

  He pulled off his gloves and tore into the soil with his bare fingers. He discerned a spot where the dirt looked freshly turned, and he clawed into the frozen earth. He found it not by sight but by feel—something smooth and hard and cylindrical. He wedged his fingers beneath and pried, trying to get a grip on something that definitely felt metallic. The snowmobile began revving up the mountain.

  Finally, the object in the dirt flipped free. Slaton picked it up, hoping his guesswork had held together. It was mostly covered in mud, but the when he wiped one side clear it became shiny and sleek. Menacingly thick. Surprisingly undamaged. It was like nothing he’d ever seen. But it was what he was after—a spent fifty-cal round.

  Slaton pocketed his find, jumped to his feet, and locked his skis into their bindings. The snowmobile was a hundred meters away, closing fast. Leaving his gloves on the snow behind him, he set off straight downhill. Accelerating quickly, he began an arcing turn toward the tree line to his right.

  Over his shoulder he saw the snowmobile alter its path, an attempt to cut him off. Yet the driver veered toward the middle of the hill—he was waiting for Slaton to shift in the opposite direction, the second half of an S-turn that would repeat to the bottom of the mountain. That turn never came.

  Slaton flew headlong into the wooded glade. The world turned to a blur, foot-thick tree trunks flashing past left and right. One of his skis struck a snow-covered rock, and Slaton nearly lost control, but with windmilling arms he righted himself and kept going. He slalomed left and right, giving mature trees and saplings equal respect. He couldn’t avert his eyes for an instant, cutting continuously left and right in a path that had likely never been taken. More importantly—one that even the most experienced snowmobile driver would never try to mirror. With his eyes riveted to the forest ahead, his only inkling of what was behind him came from sound. He tuned out the rhythmic swishes of snow and ice, and heard the snowmobile engine go to idle.

  He was forced to slow where the slope steepened and boulders predominated. He planned each turn in a split second, and went airborne over a patch of ice. Three frenetic minutes later Slaton burst clear of the forest, ending on the road where he’d begun.

  The Mercedes was parked somewhere uphill. He tore off his skis and bindings, threw them in the forest, and retrieved his hiking boots from his backpack. Knowing that some kind of response would already be organizing at the base of the mountain, he took off uphill on a dead run.

  * * *

  There was indeed a response, but it was slow in coming. The local police first trundled up to the mid-mountain crime scene, trying to determine if evidence had been corrupted by the stranger they’d seen. That question went largely unanswered, although they did discover one alteration to the slope: near a pair of wet ski gloves, a freshly dug trench in the snow.

  Within the hour two inspectors from the national police arrived, a pair of men who’d been assigned to the case late yesterday. Their involvement had been ordered by the foreign ministry when it was realized that the shooting victim who’d gone careening down a Davos mountainside was a prominent foreign national.

  On being informed that a stranger had been meddling at the scene, the pair from national quickly took charge and surveyed the area. They surmised correctly that the man had been trying to locate the unrecovered bullet from yesterday’s murder. Whether or not he’d found it could only be speculated upon, but their thinking soon coalesced on one sensational possibility—that the individual seen digging might have been the shooter himself. A spirited search was launched of the adjacent glade, continuing until nightfall. The evidence recovered was minimal, but not inconsequential: two skis, two poles, two bindings, and two sets of fresh tire tracks on the nearby road—one led up the mountain, the other down.

  The most useful detail, as it would turn out, was that the ski gear appeared to be new. The investigators considered that it might have been purchased recently, and, in a swift victory, they confirmed it had been sourced the previous day from the main outfitting store in Davos. It was here, however, just as momentum was rising, that the wheels fell off their investigative chariot. Not one, but two suspicious men, both fitting the general description of the stranger seen on the mountainside, had purchased nearly identical sets of gear in the last two days. The inspectors presumed a bit too quickly that the pair had been working in concert to eliminate Romanov—indeed, the second man to visit the outfitters had admitted to the sales manager that he was an associate of the first.

  The inspectors from national canvassed local hotels, asking every desk clerk, housekeeper, and proprietor if a room had recently been rented by a pair of young men. One might have been from Eastern Europe, the other perhaps Scandinavian. Getting nowhere, they scoured CCTV footage from across town, looking for two men plotting an assassination. The results were ambiguous at best.

  In the weeks that followed the detectives from national would gradually sort things out. They would revert to the basics of tire tracks, climbing gear, an
d eventually even identify the ledge high on the mountain where the shooter had perched to target the Russian. Unfortunately, by the time they established that accurate big picture, other events would have occurred to render their progress moot.

  Events that would unfold very soon, far from Davos. Events that would doom any chance of the police ever determining who had killed Alexei Romanov.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Slaton drove nonstop for two hours, happy to have had the foresight of keeping the Mercedes’ gas tank full. When he finally pulled onto a gravel siding, he had a sharply angled overlook of Lugano, Switzerland, just north of the Italian border.

  For the last hour he’d weighed how much longer to keep the rental Mercedes. He decided it would soon be linked to Davos, making it a poor option for crossing into Italy. His identity papers were almost certainly still clean—he’d paid cash at the rooming house and checked in under a throwaway name. He had also done his best to avoid cameras, and doubted any high-quality photographs were circulating, although these days one could never be sure.

  The greatest uncertainty: How serious were the police about finding him?

  He’d been seen nosing around a crime scene, and fled when confronted. Suspicious, but on its face no more than a minor offense. He supposed that, at the very least, it would make him the Swiss equivalent of a “person of interest” in the inquiry into Romanov’s murder. The police would ask questions around Davos, but no nationwide hunt would be instigated for a man in a dark blue ski jacket.

  Not yet.

  The natural escape from Davos would have been north toward Zurich, with its people and airports and trains. By going south, Slaton knew he’d made an unexpected move. Yet that wasn’t why he’d done it.

  His ski jacket was resting on the passenger seat. Slaton pulled it closer and sank his hand into the left front pocket. He removed the spent round he’d recovered, snapped on the interior light, and inspected it closely for the first time. He’d seen many a fifty-cal round in his time, all the lethal variants: standard ball, tracer, armor piercing, and the ever-popular explosive incendiary. What he held now was none of those.

  The projectile appeared extremely well machined, not a standard metal jacket but high-grade steel that had undergone minimal deformation after passing through a rifle barrel, half a mile of air, one human, six feet of snow, and a final deceleration through ten inches of Alpine mud. Yet there was one distinct aberration in the finely manufactured projectile—the tip had been completely crushed, and beneath the remnants of its thinly capped nose he saw something other than burnished metal: a tiny wafer, now mangled, that shone almost mirror-like in the reflection of the SUV’s dome light.

  Slaton sat mystified.

  After a long period of thoughtful silence, he returned the spent bullet to his jacket pocket. From another he retrieved the phone the CIA had given him. He turned it on and placed a call.

  * * *

  “There you are,” Sorensen said, picking up immediately.

  “I’ll assume that’s only a turn of phrase and that you don’t have my position nailed down right now,” Slaton replied.

  “I’m not trying to find you, but apparently others are. We got word that the police in Davos are looking for a guy who was seen tampering with their crime scene today. They say he was on the tall side, and a very good skier. They suspect he’s one of the two men responsible for killing Romanov.”

  “Two men? That’s what they think?”

  “It’s a theory.”

  “So is Castro ordering the hit on JFK.” Slaton noted a slight intermission between their exchanges, an oddly comforting sign that told him the call was encrypted. “Did you learn anything else?” he asked.

  “The police interviewed Ovechkin. As soon as they ran out of questions, he bolted from town.”

  “Any idea where he went?”

  “No, but I’d say he’s running scared.”

  “Can’t say that I blame him. With his two business partners dead, he’s the last man standing.”

  “It causes me to wonder what’s in the articles of incorporation of MIR Enterprises. His ownership stake might have gone up two hundred percent in the last week.”

  “You think Ovechkin is behind these shootings?”

  “It has to be considered.”

  Slaton thought about it. There was a certain interdependency among Russia’s kleptocratic elite, but they were also a cutthroat lot. He remembered how Anton Bloch, the former Mossad director, had once characterized the breed: They exist like crabs adrift in the ocean on a plank of wood. In heavy seas some are invariably swept away, a few perhaps with a nudge. “It’s possible,” he said. “But I’d still give odds that Ovechkin is getting fitted for body armor right now. And as for those articles of incorporation, good luck tracking them down.”

  “Obscured ownership?”

  “You’ll find more shells around MIR than in the Red Sea. Speaking of which, are you still tracking those freighters?”

  “We’ve got a bead on all three. Cirrus and Argos have both anchored, one off the Saudi coastline and the other in the Gulf of Aden, near the Yemen-Oman border. Both are just outside the twelve-mile limit.”

  “Any idea what they’re doing?”

  “As far as we can tell, just sitting there. We did get some message traffic—it was captured by one of our missile cruisers near the Gulf of Aden. Apparently Cirrus reported on VHF that they were having minor technical problems.”

  Slaton didn’t reply right away.

  “I know,” she said, “it sounds suspicious that both would break down at the same time.”

  “It sounds impossible. What about your third boat?”

  “Tasman Sea is moving through the Straits of Hormuz as we speak.”

  “Same bad neighborhood,” Slaton remarked. “So what do you think the chances are that Tasman Sea will anchor for a technical stop somewhere in the southern Persian Gulf tonight?”

  “Pretty high. We’re going to watch them all closely. What about you—other than stirring up a hornet’s nest at the scene of the crime, have you made any headway?”

  Slaton eyed his jacket. “Maybe. I’ve got some research to do.”

  “Research?”

  “I’ll explain when I know more. In the meantime, I think it’s important to find out where Ovechkin has gone.”

  “That may not be easy.”

  “I’m sure your agency is up to it.”

  “I don’t have an agency behind me—not yet, anyway. I’m still on a manpower budget … but I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Are you at the embassy?”

  “I am.”

  “How’s my family?”

  “They’re great. Want to talk to them? They’re just down the hall.”

  Slaton did, and for the next twenty minutes he suffered not a single thought about dead oligarchs or suspicious freighters. Christine and Davy lifted his spirits, and he assured them he’d be home soon. Only after he ended the call did it occur to him how obscure that concept was. Where was their home at that moment? A guest suite in the United States embassy in Rome? A docked sailboat in Amalfi?

  No, he realized. It had nothing to do with cities or residences. It’s wherever my wife and son are.

  He turned the phone off, cranked the Mercedes to life, and pulled out into thin traffic. It was time to advance his primary reason for turning south from Davos. It was time to visit an old friend in Milan.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The number of assassins on earth whose reputations were in Slaton’s league could be counted on one hand. Every one of them would tell you unreservedly that Pietro Vittorio, whose field of expertise was very much affiliated, was a man without peer.

  He had been born on the island of Sardinia, the product of a man with good hands and a sharp eye, and a woman for whom food was a religion. The elder Vittorio ran a small tool and die shop, making pipes until the start of World War II, then gun barrels during and after—during because the fascists had demanded it, an
d after because rifle barrels proved far more profitable than threaded pipe.

  Signori Vittorio’s talents with lathes and grinders were reflected clearly in his only son. Young Pietro skipped school in the seventies to learn how to drill, and skipped marriage in the eighties to build the business his aging father had begun. In the early nineties he finally married, a guileless woman who knew nothing about guns but everything about authentic Sardinian cooking. It was then, with his belly full and his clientele growing, that Pietro Vittorio’s comfortable life had come undone.

  His troubles began when he signed a minor contract with a Serbian militia at the outset of what would become an ugly war in the Balkans. Vittorio’s contribution was a mere handful of modified, high-end sniper rifles that proved devastatingly effective. From a financial standpoint the venture was but a minor supplement to his established accounts, no more than a few dozen highly accurate guns. As a business strategy it was a disaster.

  The Balkan War played out in all its viciousness. Truces were declared, breached, then awkwardly reinstated. The world watched from a distance, and with more than its customary revulsion. When the Adriatic dust settled and details emerged, the world stood aghast. From soft chairs in the Hague, lawyers of the United Nations did their best to catalogue war crimes and bring charges to bear. Among the least egregious, but most provable, offenses involved a registered arms contract between a certain Sardinian gunsmith and a ruthless Serbian strongman.

  As the lawyers of the International Criminal Court began to debate matters of temporal and personal jurisdiction, the Italian government decided to take the lead in soothing the collective conscience. They instigated their own proceedings against anyone who could be proved to have aided and abetted the worst of the Balkan criminals. Among the first to fall under their magnifying glass: a boutique armorer from a tiny village in Sardinia.

  Vittorio claimed, in a classic armorer’s defense, that he could have no way of knowing that the end users of his weapons were targeting schools and churches. He tried to distance himself, claiming he was no more than a simple gunsmith. It was all to no avail—he, or more accurately his business, was among the first sacrifices. While not held criminally responsible, his license to manufacture arms in Italy was permanently revoked. So stung, a bitter Vittorio sold his building and most of his machinery and let go six employees. To make his exile complete, his good wife, shamed by her husband’s illicit dealings, left him and went back to cooking for her mother.