He removed them from his pocket and tossed them to her, and she caught them in midair. Leo struggled to say something, but she cut him off and glared at the captain. “I said get going. Now.”
The young man thumbed the starter, and the motor revved to life. Jet untied the bow and stern lines and tossed them into the boat, and then the craft was heading for the harbor mouth with a sonorous rumble of exhaust.
Jet looked around and spotted a five-meter-long wooden fishing boat with a battered Evinrude outboard that looked like it was older than the marina. She scooped up her submachine gun and dashed over, her eyes fixed on the shooter’s dinghy. Jet climbed into the stern, and after four tugs on the starter cord, the motor coughed to life. When she was sure it wouldn’t die, she cast off the lines and pointed the bow at the dark shape of the dinghy adrift in the middle of the harbor, its gray rubber form barely visible in the partial moonlight.
Chapter 43
The assassin heard Jet’s approach and renewed his efforts to start the dinghy’s outboard, pulling on the starter cable again and again as the wooden fishing boat bore down on him. When it was obvious that the motor wasn’t going to cooperate, he shifted his wounded leg and felt for his pistol in the bottom of the dinghy, which had filled with water as the outer chambers had deflated.
His fingers brushed against the familiar shape and his face twisted in pain as he raised it and fired at Jet’s boat. He had little hope of hitting her, but he wasn’t going to go without a fight, and he continued squeezing the trigger until the magazine ran dry. He ejected it and groped in his pants for a spare, and had nearly fit it into place when the wooden boat rammed him, sending the pistol spinning through the air and into the harbor with a splash.
The impact knocked him from the dinghy, and he followed his gun into the water. He splashed as he tried to get his bearings, lances of pain from his wounded thigh blinding him as he fought to keep his head above water, and then he found himself staring directly down the ugly snout of a submachine gun held by a woman in a black robe.
Jet tossed the assassin the bow line and kept the MP7A1 pointed at his head.
“Pull yourself into the boat,” she said, her tone flat. When he didn’t comply, she glowered at him. “I can take your head off before you can get deep enough to matter, so don’t even think it.”
The man sputtered water and reached for the line. He snagged it and, using both arms, pulled himself close to the hull.
“I can’t get into the boat without your help,” he said. “Please.”
She shook her head. “Pull yourself up and over, or stay in the water waiting for the sharks to come. Doesn’t much matter to me.”
“I…can’t.”
“Then hang on. I’m headed over to the breakwater,” she said, the muzzle of the submachine gun never leaving his head. She backed across the bench seat and made it to the stern with the H&K pointed at him the entire time, and then shifted the transmission into gear and gave the throttle a small twist with her free hand.
A minute later they were at the rock slope of the long breakwater, and Jet cut the power and drifted the final few meters. The bow gently bumped against the boulders, and she eyed the assassin dispassionately.
“Drag yourself onto the rocks,” she ordered.
Jet kept the gun trained on him while he pulled himself onto a particularly large stone’s flat surface and lay on it, breathing hard, blood staining the rock beneath his wounded leg.
She moved to the middle bench seat and held the MP7A1 steady. “You killed my friend. Who are you working for?”
He glared at her. “What does it matter? I’m dead if I tell you.”
Jet shrugged. “It’s a matter of how you go. Quickly and painlessly, or in excruciating pain.”
“I’d rather die honorably than as a coward.”
The submachine gun popped once and the man’s knee exploded. He screamed in agony, the wail loud as a siren, and Jet waited until he was gasping for breath before speaking.
“I know you were doing a job. This doesn’t have to be personal unless you make it. Who are you working for? You have one chance to answer, and then you lose the other knee. So talk.”
“You won’t live to see tomorrow,” he spat, voice strained from pain.
“Wrong answer,” she said, and shifted her aim to blow his other kneecap off. The gun spit again and she was rewarded by another shriek of agony, followed by anguished whimpering. “I can keep at this for an hour if you want,” she said. “Next will be your shins, then your hips, then your arms – and then I’ll start on that embarrassment between your legs. This is your chance to avoid it. Who are you working for?”
He tried to speak, but it was nothing more than a strangled curse. Jet shook her head in obvious disappointment and fired again. This time he passed out from the pain, and she took the opportunity to climb from the boat and secure it to a smaller rock before moving to the unconscious man and sitting a few meters away, gun in her lap.
When he came to, he could barely focus from the pain. Jet was humming to herself, sharpening the edge of her survival knife against the rocks, the sound a soft scrape, methodical as the ticking of a clock. She held the blade up and inspected it, then eyed the assassin.
“You’re not going to be of much use to your seventy-two virgins without your manhood. I’ve decided to save ammo and cut directly to the chase. Get it? Cut to the chase.” She smiled. “So if you want to lose your eyes first, and then the family jewels, keep it up. Or we can stop all this, and you can tell me what we both know you eventually will. It’s just a matter of time. And I’ve got all night.”
Four minutes later Jet was back in the boat with the name and location of the man the assassin had been working for. She whispered the name as she made for the far dock, eyes roving over the empty waterfront, the suppressed shooting having failed to attract any curiosity after days of gunfire throughout the town.
“Tariq Qaddafi,” she said, her expression grim. “Small world. Looks like Fate wants us to cross paths after all.” The shooter hadn’t known where Qaddafi was holed up, but before he died, he’d given her the location of his subordinate who’d organized the hit, and from there she would follow the crumbs to the great man himself and terminate him with as extreme a prejudice as he’d employed with Salma.
She throttled up, urging the old boat faster now that she had a target for her wrath. The terrorist had seen fit to murder Salma just as she’d been about to escape with her life, and Jet could think of nothing she’d rather do than return the favor. That the director had wanted her to go after him barely registered. No, Tariq had killed Hannah’s aunt, and the only connection to her father that had existed. Now she’d never get the chance to meet her, and Salma’s life had been cut short with little to show for it but misery at the hands of animals.
That would not go unavenged.
“Not as long as I’m in the mix,” she murmured, and leaned forward to minimize her silhouette on the off chance that the assassin had been working with a partner who was lying in wait. He hadn’t mentioned one, and she’d been very persuasive, but Jet wasn’t about to take chances after seeing Salma gunned down before her eyes.
Jet was already in motion when the boat bumped gently against the dock, and bolted along the platform as the craft drifted away, the motor’s rough idle the only sound on the waterfront besides the thumping of Jet’s running boots as she made her way to the gangplank and the parking lot beyond.
Chapter 44
Tel Aviv, Israel
Yevgeni sat in his hotel room contemplating how to proceed since his botched attempt to follow the man that morning. He’d immediately been suspicious when the sedan had appeared to pick him up, and had taken evasive action when the target had disappeared, including leaving his rental car parked by the school in case it had been compromised. He’d used one of several alternative identities to rent it, so he wasn’t worried about the ramifications of it being found, and he’d worn latex gloves while driving i
t, so an inspection of the vehicle wouldn’t yield anything but dead ends.
He more than understood that if his intuition was correct, the man had spotted him, in which case he was blown. How the man might have managed to do so remained a mystery to Yevgeni, whose history was one of successes, not aborted assignments where he’d alarmed his quarry. He’d done everything by the book, taken no chances, hadn’t gotten careless that he could see, yet he’d been detected within minutes of taking up the chase – a first in his career, and not one that augured well for his future.
He had few options that he could see if the Mossad was involved. He had nothing but respect for that agency, which, unlike the bumbling Americans or laughably inept MI6, was serious and effective. If they’d spirited the man away, as he suspected, his time in Israel was already over.
Yevgeni used his burner cell and dialed a Moscow number. When Sergei answered, he laid out the situation in flat, emotionless terms. Once finished, Sergei took a moment to respond.
“I expected better than this,” Sergei said, the anger in his tone clear.
“I have no evidence that my suspicion is correct. But I wanted to keep you informed,” Yevgeni replied.
“If you’ve tipped them off, they’ll go to ground and disappear from the radar. We both know that.”
“Yes, I would expect they will. But this is a small country. They’ll turn up again now that we have their images. The little girl makes them especially vulnerable.”
“There was no sign of the woman? The man was merely a means to that end. I can’t believe it could have gone so wrong before anything of importance took place.”
“Perhaps it hasn’t. But my field sense is that he’s taken himself out of play. If that’s the case, the girl won’t be showing up to classes any longer. So we’re back to square one.”
Sergei was silent again for a long beat. “Get out of Israel. Now. Take the first plane to anywhere. Assume the worst.”
“I’m afraid it isn’t that easy. There’s a good chance they’ll have my description from the rental car agency, which means they’ll be stopping anyone who looks remotely like me at the airports.”
“Not my problem. Our business is concluded.”
“I understand. But I thought you would want to know all the details should you wish to deploy another contractor.”
“Understood. Best of luck.”
The line went dead, and Yevgeni removed the battery from the cell, tossed it into the garbage, and pocketed the phone. He stood and regarded himself in the mirror – he’d bought hair dye and was now a brunette, but his appearance was still too close to that on the passport he’d used for comfort. He’d thought about his next step all day and had concluded that the airports weren’t an option, which left the worst of all possible alternatives: making it overland to one of the frontiers and crossing into either Egypt, Syria, Jordan, or Lebanon on foot.
He didn’t like his odds traversing the country, where there were sure to be traffic stops, nor was he enamored with the idea of spending days trying to get out of Israel. The only other choice was the one he’d decided on in the last hour, and he’d seen no way that it could fail if he was careful.
Yevgeni retrieved his carry-on bag and the rucksack with the weapons, and took the stairs to the ground level. He walked to the rear of the hotel and departed through the service exit, and then walked eight blocks to the water and headed south toward the Carlton Tel Aviv hotel and its marina.
It was dark by the time he made it, and he studied the layout and the comings and goings of the two security men who were safeguarding the expensive yachts. One remained in the guardhouse near the main dock at all times, and the other roamed along the waterfront; a straightforward setup with no obvious surprises. He watched the pattern for over an hour from a bench overlooking the water, and once the last of the evening’s couples out for a romantic waterfront stroll had vanished, he made his way down to the marina perimeter.
Another hour passed, but still he waited, patience being one of the virtues that had saved him many times in the past. At midnight, two new guards replaced the ones on duty, and he smiled in the shadows – as he’d suspected, the night shift would appear to spell the evening shift, and he’d have many hours to execute his plan.
The new guards got settled and repeated the pattern of their predecessors, with one remaining in the shack while the other roamed the marina. After twenty minutes, Yevgeni was ready to make his move.
He worked his way along the water behind the roaming guard and, when he was a dozen meters from the man, put a single subsonic round through the back of his skull. Yevgeni dragged the man’s body to the rocks and rolled it halfway down the slope, where it came to rest as though staring eternally out at the water.
The guard in the shack was surprised when Yevgeni appeared in the doorway, and was pushing back from the CCTV monitors when the Russian’s slug blew the back of his head onto the wall behind him. Yevgeni removed the set of keys on the man’s belt and, after locking the door behind him and wiping the knob with his shirt, hurried to the gate that protected the docks.
The third key opened it. He descended to the water, where he eyed the long string of yachts before settling on a particularly hardy-looking twenty-meter sport fisherman in pristine shape, the dinghy on the front a hard bottom on a pair of stands beside a crane. He stepped aboard and tried the cabin door lock, and wasn’t surprised when it didn’t budge. A round from the pistol solved that problem, and he kicked the shattered lock open and entered the salon.
A set of ignition keys was hanging on a rack by the breaker panel. He switched on the blowers and all the operating equipment, set his bag on the expensive leather sofa, and mounted the ladder to the enclosed flybridge. After confirming that the fuel tanks were three-quarters full, he powered on the radar, autopilot, and GPS navigation systems, and then started the big diesel engines, which rumbled beneath his feet with satisfying intensity.
Yevgeni lowered himself from the bridge and untied the dock lines, and after tossing them onto the deck, climbed the rungs and engaged the transmissions. The heavy boat backed from its slip at a crawl and, once clear, made a wide turn and headed for the breakwater and, beyond it, the Mediterranean.
By his reckoning, he was seventy nautical miles from the nearest marina in Lebanon, where if he was lucky, he could use the dinghy to enter, and then vanish on foot toward Beirut well before dawn. He set a waypoint for a mile off the marina and eased the throttles up till the boat was slicing through the moderate seas at twenty-five knots. The radar indicated the course north was clear of threats, with any Israeli naval vessels farther out to sea than the kilometer from shore his route would take him.
When the lights of Tel Aviv had died behind him, he went through a mental checklist of errands to perform before he abandoned the boat on an autopilot course to nowhere. He’d ditch the weapons, as well as anything that could connect him to Israel, and would stick to back roads until he reached Beirut. From there he’d book a flight to Germany and then to Moscow, to make a refund of his fee to Sergei. Then he would drop off the grid for several months, the poorer for having failed for the first time in his career.
He cursed in Russian at the thought of returning the money, but quickly got his emotions under control. His contracts called for satisfaction guaranteed, not best efforts, and he would do what he had to do in order to keep the client happy. In this case, that might not be possible, but he didn’t want his reputation tarnished, so in the end the price he’d have to pay might turn out to be a bargain.
Chapter 45
Tripoli, Libya
The night air was crisp, a wind off the sea blowing any lingering smoke inland as Jet arrived a block from the decrepit hotel that the assassin’s boss was using for his base of operations. She left the scooter in the shadows at the side of a market whose display window was protected by a heavy layer of roll-up steel, and crept down the street until she stopped at the sound of big diesel engines rolling toward her.
Jet made for a building on the corner across the street from the hotel and pressed herself into the darkness of a doorway as a big truck ground its gears and lumbered past. Moments later, a second followed it to the hotel, where both vehicles entered through a wide gate, which a gunman closed behind them.
She tried the handle of the door beside her, and it didn’t budge. She backed out onto the street and regarded the exterior of the building and spotted a drainpipe to her left, running from the roof. Jet moved to it and jerked on the pipe, but it didn’t budge. She reached as high as she could and tested her weight and, when it didn’t give, shimmied up the pipe and pulled herself onto the flat roof.
The lip on the far side provided sufficient cover for her to look into the hotel courtyard without being seen. She removed the binoculars from under her robe and studied the hotel. Inside the walled area, men were carrying crates to the larger truck while gunmen waited nearby, rifles in hand. Several imposing figures stood by the side of the building, watching as the laborers struggled with the crates, and the closest one called out something Jet couldn’t discern, and everyone stopped while he inspected a container that was about to be loaded onto the truck bed.
A discussion ensued among the supervisors, who crowded around the crate and gestured at the truck, the men, and the courtyard. Eventually a consensus was reached, and the loading resumed under the watchful eye of the bosses. Jet wished the area was better illuminated, but she could make out enough. She recalled Salma’s account about Tariq’s plan to ship nerve agent to Europe, and a shiver ran up her spine. Was it possible she was witnessing the preparations for exactly that?
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