by Ward Larsen
Slaton could think of only one answer.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his burner phone. The coast road was a mile away, and the signal there, which he’d made a point of checking, had been strong. But here? On this desolate ledge with his back against a rock wall?
It all depended on where the towers were situated.
He powered up the phone and prayed.
By God’s grace, he saw a tenuous signal.
* * *
The burner phone in Rome was on the veranda table next to a fresh baguette. Christine answered before the second ring.
“David?”
“Hey … it’s good to hear your voice.”
She didn’t like the sound of his. It seemed strained and breathless. “Are you all right?”
“Honestly, I could use a little medical advice.”
Christine felt something inside her turn cold. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing dire,” he said. “But my left shoulder … I’m pretty sure I dislocated it.”
“Then you need a hospital.”
“At the moment, that’s not really an option.”
She heard a dull roar in the background. “Where are you?”
A hesitation. “I’m in a place where I can’t get help—not anytime soon. I’m on my own, and I was hoping you could help me work through this.”
“We are talking about your shoulder here?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Mommy?” Davy said. “Is that Daddy?” He was sitting across the table fingering cereal into his mouth.
“Yes, honey, it is. But he can’t talk to you right now—Daddy’s very busy.”
David had surely heard that little exchange, she thought. The fact that he didn’t ask for a minute with Davy spoke volumes. He really needed her—not as a wife, but as a doctor. “Has this ever happened before?” she asked.
“Yeah, once in training, maybe ten years ago. A doctor fixed it on the scene.”
“If you’ve dislocated it once, you’re prone to recurrences.”
“He might have mentioned that.”
Through the line she heard his breathing, sharp and irregular. A seagull cried in the background. Christine put it all aside. She made him describe the injury, and when he did she decided it was the most common type—an anterior dislocation in which the upper arm was pushed forward out of the socket. “And it hurts like hell?” she asked.
“It really does. For what it’s worth, I’m also wearing body armor.”
Christine held steady, no inquisition about how he’d injured himself while wearing body armor. “Will that restrict your movement?” she asked.
“Not much. It’s a lightweight vest, just canvas over the shoulder.”
“Okay. You have to understand, it’s not always possible to do this yourself. And you’ve really got to be careful. We don’t want to damage any tendons or blood vessels.”
“I know. But from where I’m sitting, trust me … it’s very important that we try.”
SIXTY-SIX
Slaton put the phone to speaker as Christine walked him through it.
“First of all,” she said, “make sure you’re in a safe place. There’s a chance you could lose consciousness.”
Slaton looked past his right hip. He saw a hundred-and-fifty-foot drop, waves crashing over boulders in a maelstrom of energy. “Next?”
“Do your best to relax the muscles in your arm and shoulder.”
“Okay.”
“Now, reach your bad arm out to the side, slow and easy.”
Slaton did. The pain was excruciating, daggers through nerve bundles that radiated into his arm and neck.
“Now try to bend the elbow, like you’re trying to reach the back of your neck. Imagine a baseball pitcher winding up to throw. I know it’s hard, but the more you can relax the better chance you have of this working.”
Slaton did his best, grunting from the pain. “Okay,” he said. “Hand’s on the back of my neck.”
“Good! Now just a little more—push it farther to the opposite shoulder.”
He seemed to hit a stop. “I don’t think this is going to—”
“Do it, David! Fix it!”
He made a final push, and through a torrent of pain he felt a distinct pop. He felt light-headed and his eyes closed. When he opened them again he was looking down at nothing but sea. He clutched a cliffside rock to steady himself.
“David?”
He looked at his shoulder and saw a more normal profile. “Yeah, I’m good. I think we did it.”
He heard a long release of air over the phone. “Are you okay otherwise?” she asked.
“Never better. But now that I’ve got you, I need something else.”
“Anything.”
“I think the phone Sorensen gave me is compromised. Go to the comm room at the embassy and make sure Langley gets this number. I may not answer right away, but they can use it to reach me.”
“Okay, I’ll do it now.”
“Thanks.”
She was silent for a time, then asked, “Will you be back soon?”
“Yeah. I’ll explain everything then. And Christine … I mean it, thanks. You really are a life saver.”
* * *
At Langley, the threat level had risen to the agency equivalent of a five-alarm fire. In rapid succession it was learned that the royal family had hours earlier boarded the king’s Boeing 747, and that the flight had initially taken up a westerly course. Since no palaces existed in that part of the kingdom, one question rose to the forefront: Where was the family gathering?
It wasn’t long before the operations center had its collective palm-to-the-forehead moment. The monarchy had recently put the finishing touches on its first official palace abroad—in of all places, Morocco.
“Security at the new palace might be loose,” one analyst surmised.
“Or someone could ambush the convoy on its way from the airport,” another said.
Coltrane began issuing orders under the highest priority.
The duty officer began getting results within minutes. “We’ve located the jet carrying the royal family. Right now it’s eighty miles north of Casablanca. We still have no comm link established—we’re getting the runaround from SANG headquarters. I’m guessing General Abdullah and most of his senior staff are on that airplane.”
“Can we put together some kind of response in Morocco?”
“According to JSOC, we have no Special Ops detachments anywhere near. Team Six, Delta … every available unit in theater was sent to Saudi Arabia to deal with the crisis there.”
Coltrane sat in silence. He felt far behind in a fast-moving situation. Uncomfortable associations began brewing in his head. He thought about the RosAvia complex. About a Russian killer who’d flown in hours ago from Yemen. He considered the pictures Slaton had sent—a hangar full of MiGs that had been modified as drones.
He repeated one of his unfulfilled requests. “Do we know Slaton’s whereabouts yet?”
“I’m just getting word on that now,” said a voice in back. “It appears the phone we issued him has been compromised—sometime in the last twelve hours.”
“Compromised? What does that mean?”
“Comm says it was some kind of hack and grab. Someone broke the encryption and altered the routing.”
Coltrane didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he was quite sure who was responsible. “So do we have any assets in Morocco?”
“Our standard CIA contingent at the embassy in Rabat. That’s about two hundred miles from the palace.”
“Sir, I’m getting something from NRO now,” a technician said, breaking in.
Coltrane had put in an urgent request with the National Reconnaissance Office for coverage of a number of sites in Morocco.
“Something on the palace?” Coltrane asked hopefully.
“Actually, no. It’s RosAvia’s airfield near Tazagurt. Apparently … sixteen minutes ago … one of those MiGs to
ok off.”
* * *
Slaton negotiated his way to safety with limited use of his left arm. The bolts of pain were gone, but it remained sore from shoulder to hand, and he sensed nerve pain with certain movements. To the positive, everything seemed to function—at least well enough to grip a gunstock.
On reaching the gulley, he had little trouble climbing to the top of the bluff. There he melded into the brush and paused long enough to check the graze near his collarbone. The bleeding had nearly stopped. He maneuvered southward until he saw the villa where the shot had come from.
Slaton’s vision had always been exceptionally sharp, and even without binoculars he could discern two men standing on the distant terrace. He could not say who they were or what they were doing, but the fact that they were standing in the open spoke volumes. The assassin was confident he’d succeeded. And why wouldn’t he be? He’d minutes ago watched his target take a hit from a fifty cal and go careening over a cliff.
With his immediate tactical crisis behind him, Slaton began to deconstruct what had happened. In essence, the assassin had set him up—and he wasn’t the only victim. The killer had clearly put Zhukov in harm’s way. He’d made sure the colonel was carrying what looked like a rifle, and sent him to a rendezvous that put him squarely in Slaton’s sights. I kill Zhukov, Slaton thought, then the sniper kills me. The calculus of why it was done that way escaped him. But it did make sense.
As he thought about it, a great deal more fell into place.
At some point in the last twelve hours, his CIA-issued satellite phone had been hijacked. Taken over in support of an assassin. His conversations had been monitored, his messages tracked. Then, at the most critical moment, that electronic lifeline had been severed, leaving him to drift alone in the wind. A very cold and deliberate wind.
Slaton saw all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored hack, and there could be only one suspect: some shadowed cyber arm of Russia’s FSB. Taking that idea further, he considered the surveillance photos he’d been given showing the obvious lure of the case in the clearing. The discovery of a rental agreement for the nearby villa. The UMP, body armor, and optic—all of it was promptly forwarded as per his request to the CIA, yet now he realized it had been cobbled together not by that agency’s Morocco station, but instead its Russian counterpart. The Rabat rezidentura. And handed over by a most convincing gravedigger—in retrospect, a curiously apt impression.
How could I not have seen it? he thought.
The response to that question came in the form of a second.
What am I going to do about it?
To that, Slaton had a resounding answer.
SIXTY-SEVEN
Ovechkin stood by the pool of his borrowed villa absorbing a view he would enjoy for a few more minutes—and then never see again. It truly was spectacular. Perhaps I can find something like it, he mused. Chile or Ecuador.
“It’s done!” The voice, coming from behind, shattered his daydream.
Ovechkin turned to see the assassin emerge from the main house. He carried the massive gun effortlessly. The man had spent all morning on the northern balcony, the weapon and its guidance system poised and ready. Waiting. When the shot finally came fifteen minutes ago there had been no warning. Ovechkin had instinctively recoiled.
The man set the gun on a cushioned lounge chair, walked toward him, and handed over a compact set of binoculars. Ovechkin trained them on the distant cape. At this range the scene was not particularly detailed, but he could see enough. Poor Zhukov lay crumpled next to the empty equipment case. Ovechkin scanned the surrounding area for the second body.
“I don’t see Slaton,” he said.
“I finished him—doubly so. The bullet struck with such force it sent him over the cliff.”
Ovechkin pulled away from the binoculars. He saw perhaps a trace of amusement in the man’s expression. He felt nothing close to it. He had arranged his share of violence over the years, but rarely did he find himself in such close proximity to its execution. “He fell into the sea?”
“I can’t imagine otherwise. It’s a sheer drop of sixty meters.”
Ovechkin set the binoculars on a table that was stocked with pastries and coffee. “That could be a complication.”
“Not really. The body will be found. When I place the rifle there later, I’ll create a bit of evidence to show the police the way. The scene was never going to be perfect from a forensic standpoint—which is in line with our objective. The more confusion the better. It will be enough to fix responsibility for the elimination of your corporate partners on an elusive Israeli assassin. Anyway, the police in Morocco are not the world’s best.”
“But the world’s best will become involved … given what is still to come.”
“It doesn’t matter, I tell you. Combine the scene we will build here with the one being set in Tazagurt. There will be far more questions than answers. And don’t forget—Petrov will insert his own investigators into the process to muddy things further. What’s happening at the RosAvia complex assures Russia a stake in the inquiry.”
Ovechkin eyed the killer pensively, trying to grasp his thinking, his motives. He always preferred that—to know, as the Americans were fond of saying, “what makes a man tick.” In this case, the divergence between the two of them seemed unfathomable. He could only trust that their objectives were one. He shifted his gaze to the distant hill where the big truck was parked between two aerials. The engineer would be inside, guiding the MiG. Ovechkin wondered how far away the jet was at that moment. Thirty miles? Fifty? He nodded upward and said, “It’s almost time. You’ll need to deal with the engineer as soon as his part is complete.”
The assassin casually selected a pastry from the table and took a bite, bits of sweet icing crumbling to the stonework below. He patted the partially visible holster beneath his unbuttoned outer shirt, the matte-black grip of a semiautomatic obvious. “I am ready. But I think I will delay my hike for a few more minutes. The airshow we are about to see is not to be missed.”
Ovechkin nearly rebuked the sergeant, but something held him in check. Perhaps the fact that his own security staff had largely departed, only two men remaining at the villa. He checked his Rolex, a Christmas gift from Estrella. In thirty minutes they would all be gone—he and his detachment in one car, the assassin going his own way in another. Ovechkin wondered if he would ever see the man again. He found himself hoping against it.
The assassin poured a cup of coffee, having put his most recent murder behind him. The two locked eyes, and the sergeant lifted his cup in a mock toast. Ovechkin had to grin. Standing side by side, the two Russians turned their eyes skyward. They looked eager and expectant.
Like children waiting for a fireworks display.
* * *
Three miles south of the patio where Ovechkin and an assassin stood gazing skyward, a crescent-shaped tract of tan beach swept pleasingly out to sea. It was situated just beyond the next seaside cape, at the threshold of what had long been among the least developed and pristine shores of Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Above the high-tide line, gently undulating dunes carried inland as far as the eye could see, a minor geologic curiosity in a country that abounded with them.
It was on an eighty-acre plot of this shore, cradled in the swale of a bluewater bay, that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had been granted special dispensation for the most unique of undertakings: the construction of its very first palace outside the Saudi peninsula.
The king himself had been the driving force behind the effort. For a ruler who spent considerable time abroad, the idea of another penthouse in London or New York had long lost its appeal. Everyone was doing that. Instead, the king envisioned a necklace of great palaces across the globe, residences whose scope and grandeur would reflect the monarchy’s ambition. After considerable debate, he selected Morocco as the trial for his royal expansionism. The choice was as practical as it was esoteric: situated in a stable and friendly Muslim country, the site offered wondrou
s views of the Atlantic with its seemingly endless bounds. On any number of levels, it was a new frontier.
Four years under construction, the palace north of Agadir was without question among the most extravagant ever commissioned. The main residence was as majestic in scale and finish as any in the Saudi realm. There was a string of lavish guest villas, four separate kitchens to rival the five-star restaurants of Paris, and brilliant blue helipads dotting the compound like so many focal points on a grand mosaic. The parking lot of the main residence had spaces for over a hundred cars, those behind the service buildings three times that.
It had all been completed only weeks earlier, just in time to fulfill what had been the king’s wish from the outset: that his new palace would make its debut as the venue for this year’s family gathering.
If the construction of the palace had been impossible to conceal, the royal assemblage now taking place had been held far closer to the House of Saud’s vest. As secrets went, it had been reasonably well kept, yet no event of such grandeur could be shaped without hints of what was to come. No fewer than a thousand members of the Moroccan Royal Guards were on loan to secure the grounds. Twice that many drivers, cooks, housekeepers, and gardeners were in well-compensated attendance, although most with minimal forewarning.
As vital as they would all be for the coming week, in that moment there was one group of hirelings who were of outsized importance. They were a small contingent who in the last hour had scattered to various points around the palace grounds. One was lying prone on a helipad, while another had saddled into the umpire’s chair of a tennis court across the street from the main residence. There were twelve in all, a tiny battalion of photographers and videographers making final checks of batteries and foregrounds and sun angles. The product of their efforts during the coming week would be packaged in commemorative albums to be distributed to attendees. There would be posed group photos along balustrades, and candid shots of every pool party. Yet for all the photo ops, none would be more spectacular than the opening scene.
