by Ward Larsen
As planned, she’d spent the previous night with her friend Dr. Ulrika Torsten. Christine had lied convincingly, a breathless account of her escape from the Strandvägen shootings, and ending with an offhand mention that the police had sought her out for an official statement. All variations of the truth. She’d built on this by telling Ulrika that the whole affair had left her shaken and in need of a quiet place in Stockholm to relax for a few days. When she added that her husband would arrive in a few days to escort her back to the States, Ulrika had insisted that Christine stay at her home.
So it was, for one night she had imposed on a friend’s gracious hospitality. But late this afternoon Christine gave her regrets for dinner, missing out on a home-cooked meal, and claimed the need for fresh air and an invigorating walk. She was now back at work. David’s work.
It took fifteen minutes, but the candidate she saw was perfect. Slightly on the tall side, perhaps a bit blonder. Otherwise, a perfect match. He was moving fast with a briefcase in one hand and an umbrella in the other.
She hurried away from the wall near the ATM.
“Excuse me!”
The man stopped.
“Do you speak English?” she asked.
“A little, yes.”
“Could you please help me? I’m trying to get money from this machine, but the instructions are in Swedish.” She gave him her most engaging smile and made sure her wedding band was behind her hip.
The man smiled back. Just as David had said he would.
* * *
The use of Deadmarsh’s credit card at a midtown ATM machine registered almost instantly with the Stockholm police. The nearest officers were dispatched, and reached the bank in five minutes. They were three minutes too late.
Headquarters built a head of steam, and Commissioner Forsten and Assistant Commissioner Sjoberg were soon meeting in a side room with technicians. They poured over video that had been fed directly from the bank’s security office, and everyone saw a tall blond man in an overcoat withdrawing money from the machine.
“He withdrew a thousand kronor,” Sjoberg said. “He’s running low on cash. Maybe he’s trying to get out of the country.”
“Are we sure it’s him?” Forsten asked.
Sjoberg looked at the screen uncertainly. “It’s not the clearest image … the lighting is poor. Let’s ask someone who’s seen him.”
Sergeant Blix was summoned to join them. When he arrived Forsten explained, “An hour ago there was a cash withdrawal on Deadmarsh’s credit card. We have video from the bank surveillance camera. Unfortunately, since his passport dumped we don’t have a decent photo to compare. Of all the people in the building, Blix, you had the best look at him.”
The video footage looped and Forsten froze it on the clearest image. “Well?” she asked. “Is that him?”
Blix stared at the grainy black-and-white image, but didn’t answer immediately. He finally said, “It does looks like him, but it’s hard to say. I can’t be certain.” Under two disbelieving looks, he tried again.
“It’s a good likeness,” he said, “but something about it…” Blix’s face contorted as he racked his brain. “He’s keying the numbers with his left hand.”
“Was Deadmarsh left-handed?” Forsten asked.
Blix shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t remember.”
“I know who could give us a definite answer,” Sjoberg said.
They all stared at one another in turn.
“All right,” Forsten ordered, “call him in.”
“Ah…” Blix hesitated, “I’m not sure Inspector Sanderson is available right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I believe he’s taken a holiday,” Blix replied.
“Holiday?” Sjoberg burst.
“Well, sir—you did just let him go.”
* * *
Slaton exercised his newfound wealth in customary Zurich fashion—with a shopping spree on Bahnhofstrasse.
In perhaps the world’s epicenter of casual self-indulgence, he caused barely a ripple with his shotgun approach: a pair of Peter Millar twill trousers were partnered with a button-down cotton shirt and Chanel tie, followed by a charcoal Armani sportcoat, and finally a set of black Nike warm-ups with trail shoes. Just off Bahnhofstrasse, he paid a reasonable price for a down sleeping bag and a Prada travel case—somehow relegated to the clearance rack—and an unreasonable one for a Movado wristwatch, a high-end sport version with luminescent dials. With full arms and half-empty pockets, Slaton decided he’d done enough damage for one evening.
He found the Rover in Krueger’s reserved parking spot, an upgraded model with four-wheel drive and a massive engine. Before leaving the garage he circled the Rover’s exterior once, checking that all the exterior lights were operational, and that the license plate and vignette, or autobahn sticker, were current and not obscured. He would be driving a perfectly valid vehicle, and wanted no excuse for a random traffic stop. Slaton brought the machine to life and was rewarded with a heavy purr under the thick leather and walnut trim. He wheeled out of the parking garage into a thin mist, turned north and gathered speed.
He swept past the up-lit spire of St. Peter’s Church, rounded the Swiss National Museum, and ten minutes later was merging comfortably onto the N1. The lights of Zurich began to fade, and using the cruise control to govern his speed, Slaton struck westward into darkened countryside toward the Limmat Valley. Estimating a three-hour drive ahead, he should have used the time to refine his next steps, or at the very least reflect on a long and productive day. Slaton was making progress, nearing his target, and he now had unlimited funds at his disposal. Yet try as he might, he couldn’t concentrate on the mission.
The reason was clear enough.
The simple life he and Christine had built in Virginia was gone, and certainly unrecoverable. Now he was racing across Switzerland, his vehicle acquired by way of coercion, and once again being hunted by the authorities. With terrible suddenness, the past year had fallen to little more than another assignment, a temporary operation, pleasant as it was, that had come to its natural conclusion.
Had life in America really been any different? he wondered.
Not a day had gone by when he hadn’t lied to keep up the legend of Edmund Deadmarsh. The sounds of fireworks and cars backfiring still stiffened his spine. He invariably kept a ready supply of cash in their home, and without fail filled the tank on the Ford when it was half full—the Ford because it had twice the horsepower of the Honda. In Virginia he’d taken the same precautions he always had, the lone difference being that he cared about his partner in a very different way.
Her parting words drummed in his head.
If you kill this man in Geneva … don’t ever come back to me.
Against this was Nurin’s countering promise—the assassination of Hamedi was his only chance to return to a normal life. Catch-22. If he killed the man, Christine would leave him. If he didn’t, Slaton would have no life to go back to. It was a collision of ultimatums, a mathematical equation that seemed unsolvable. All he could do was keep looking, keep moving to find a better angle. Like the sniper he was.
Find the perfect shot.
And so Slaton drove onward, the Rover pointed west at a measured pace as he traversed the left half of Switzerland.
THIRTY-SEVEN
His eyes opened instantly to a sharp noise.
Slaton immediately tensed, but didn’t move other than to shift his gaze toward the uncorrelated motion, a dark silhouette behind the Rover’s frosted side window. Someone was outside, very close, their hands low and out of sight. That was always the most important thing—the hands. Slaton kept still, and soon the shape sank lower and disappeared. He heard a car door close, a cold engine labor to life.
The car parked in the adjacent spot began to back out.
He rose to an elbow, his breath going to vapor. He was laying in the Rover’s cargo area, wrapped in the heavy sleeping bag and with the rear seats folded dow
n. Slaton had arrived in the waning minutes of Thursday, exiting the A1 at Mont-sur-Rolle, and from there traveled no more than three hundred yards south. He’d parked in a small lot outside the Rolle train station, choosing a tight spot between a panel van and the big Mercedes sedan that had just pulled away. Rolle was centered midpoint along the curved northern shore of Lake Geneva, roughly twenty-five miles from the city of Geneva. Today Slaton would close that gap.
He climbed in front, started the engine and spun the heater knob to full. Rubbing circles in the fogged left and right windows, he surveyed the area around him. He saw an empty parking spot immediately to the right. In the distance, others that had been vacant were now filled by morning commuters. Otherwise, everything looked as it had when he’d arrived six hours ago. The heater blew for five minutes before starting to make a difference. In the backseat he changed clothes, trading the rumpled attire in which he’d slept for the khaki trousers, button-down shirt, and designer tie. He stopped at the train station restroom, and at a washbasin Slaton did his best to revive his coarse appearance. By six-thirty he was waiting on the platform, a ticket in one hand and a newspaper in the other. He stood with ten other commuters who in aggregate could not have matched him more perfectly. A train slid to a stop right on schedule—the Swiss being timekeepers of the world—and the crowd shuffled aboard in an orderly fashion.
Slaton was increasingly alert. His eyes flicked across every person, and in the tight confines of the car he backed against a bulkhead and shifted his stance regularly to alter his vantage point. He was sure he had separated cleanly from Stockholm, and then Zurich. But Geneva was something else. In Geneva he might well be expected.
The run to the city took twenty-seven minutes, the train shouldering to the shore of the serene lake while the massive form of Mont Blanc roused in the distance, its snowcapped peak struck brilliant in the new morning light. No one around him seemed to notice the spectacle. He watched young professionals tap their phones in the name of urgent business affairs, while their older counterparts probed newspaper financials, presumably to calculate how much more or less they were worth on this glorious morning.
Slaton scanned Le Courrier, a French-language local paper. French was one of his better languages, and used widely in Geneva—no surprise as Switzerland’s westernmost city was virtually enveloped by her sister state. On the front page he saw an article regarding a speech in which the Israeli prime minister had strongly urged the United Nations to take a harder line on the “pariah state” of Iran. Slaton saw nothing in Le Courrier about the recent shootings in Stockholm, nor anything about Anton Bloch’s identity, which had certainly been verified by now. That the police were holding this out of the headlines did not surprise Slaton, yet he knew it was a risk for whoever had taken over for poor Inspector Sanderson. He wondered briefly what the little detective was doing right now. Was he still involved in the case on some level? If so, Slaton hoped the ice blue eyes were not boring into Christine, but rather darting over old files and endless camera footage, losing focus as they tried to match unmatchable fingerprints.
Searching for a man who didn’t exist.
Slaton had a fleeting urge to contact Christine. He imagined how it would feel to hear her voice, to know that everything was all right. It was, of course, no more than a teasing thought. He had not briefed her on any method of making contact, and with good reason. Slaton had seen more than one mission blown in the name of comfort. He had seen men tracked down and shot because they’d exposed themselves in order to say good night to their child. He’d seen a wedding party bombed because one guest had allowed sentiment to override reason. Slaton knew exactly what came of such breaches, and he would not allow it. He could only trust that Christine was safe. Trust that he had done enough, and that she was making good decisions. Because right now, his concealment was the best weapon either of them had.
* * *
Slaton disembarked at Geneva’s Sécheron Station under a splendid sky, and he dispersed with the other commuters into the heart of the city. Geneva was a place Slaton knew well. He had come here twice before, once as a teenager to attend the nearby Montreux Jazz Festival, and again years later to kill a man. Both aims had been achieved and, for reasons that escaped him, seemed fixed in his mind with equivalent weight. On one shore of Lac Léman he had spread himself on green grass and listened to Ray Charles play his glorious standards, and on the other he had spread himself on a rooftop ventilator to put under his reticle a Yemeni bomb-maker, a proven and indiscriminant killer of women and children. Two fulfillments that could not have been more divergent, yet both set here, on a pristine lake charged by Alpine water, crisp air flowing under a faultless blue sky.
He walked west along Avenue de la Paix, and in a matter of minutes arrived at Geneva’s United Nations Office. The main building, originally built to house the League of Nations, was as grandiose as the ideals it represented, a blunt ivory tower of stone and columns and square edges. All around were offshoot wings fronted by broad lawns and reflecting pools, and on a central pathway the flags of the world were aligned in perfect harmony. It was a splendid and pompous place that Slaton might have ignored but for one reason. This was his starting point.
According to Nurin’s file, Ibrahim Hamedi would present Iran’s case to the world from this stage. At seven in the evening, two days from now, he would stand at a podium in the grand hall and, in all probability, lie about Iran’s program of nuclear weaponization. He would then mingle with the invitees for precisely twenty-three minutes—this also from the file—before being hustled to a side entrance and a waiting motorcade. Three cars, or possibly four, would turn up Avenue de France and make two miles at speed before merging onto Quai du Mont Blanc. There, minutes removed from his diplomatic duty, Iran’s chief nuclear designer would be deposited at Lake Geneva’s northern shore and walk, amid a thick and watchful security contingent, to his next appearance.
And there the kidon would be waiting.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The A-320 airliner slid smooth and true through the thin air at 35,000 feet. A distracted Ibrahim Hamedi looked through the oval window and saw the Black Sea to his left. On the right he could just discern the distant Caspian Sea, and so the thin mountain range before him, capped by Mount Elbrus, had to be the Caucuses.
Hamedi had always been good with geography, and on long flights he found it a useful diversion to reckon his position. A pilot had once taught him the trick. You started with the most prominent features—mountain ranges, oceans, and lakes—and then applied an approximate compass orientation. With a basic knowledge of natural features, the rest quickly fell into place. It worked well enough, he supposed, but over the years had become a less pleasurable exercise. For Hamedi it only emphasized the world’s overriding problem—if topography was unwavering, the underlying political and cultural lines were far more unsettled. The Caucuses were a case in point, once claimed by Iran and later dominated by Russia, it was one of the most ethnically and linguistically divided regions on earth. Yet from where Hamedi sat, with his God’s-eye view, things looked peaceful, even bucolic. He supposed it was something of a metaphor for the human condition. Appearances can be illusory.
The flight was a chartered affair, the crew and aircraft having been rented from an Emirates-based leasing company. As such, the six flight attendants were all attractive young females who scurried about the cabin and did their best to make everyone comfortable, serving meals and drinks, fluffing pillows and tucking blankets, their boundless smiles never wavering. It was the sort of pampering that would not exist on an Iranian state-owned aircraft. Hamedi was seated in the first-class section, and behind him in coach was a security detail and support delegation of nearly sixty. He closed the window shade and forced himself back to the cheerless reality of the figures in front of him, an inventory of critical machine tool parts. His index finger was halfway down the page when the only other person authorized the comforts of the first eight rows came up the aisle and took a
seat across from him. Behrouz had earlier looked tired and drawn, but he now seemed revitalized as he pecked on a laptop computer.
“This Wi-Fi device is impressive, is it not?” Behrouz said. “I have just received a message from our advance team. The preparations are running on schedule, both at the hotel and the United Nations building. I even have a picture of your cruise ship.” Behrouz turned the computer around and Hamedi saw a gleaming white yacht.
“I’m glad you are satisfied,” he replied dryly.
“Aren’t you looking forward to it?”
“What I am looking forward to is confirmation that the last tranche of fissile material has arrived at Qom from the Natanz complex. These final two shipments have taken weeks.”
“Such logistics are not always easy. Much of the delay was due to your own restrictions, Doctor—you insisted on multiple deliveries.”
“Highly enriched uranium is our most valuable commodity—and you know how rabid the Israelis are about this. If we coordinated a single transfer and their spies caught wind of it? Can you imagine? They would commit every agent on their books to attacking or even stealing our hard-won prize.”
“Now there is a terrible thought,” Behrouz lamented. “But I will let you in on a little secret to put you at ease. By the time we land in Geneva, the last shipment will be in place.”
Hamedi looked at Behrouz and saw he was serious. In what would have been a first, he nearly smiled at the little cretin. “It’s about time.”
Behrouz went back to his laptop. He seemed enthralled, and Hamedi supposed he should not be surprised. The security man had climbed through the ranks before the age of technology had arrived in Iran. Behrouz had risen on broken legs and execution killings, the kinds of things that were not furthered by an understanding of bytes or pixels. He considered briefing the man on the vulnerabilities of unsecure signal networks, but decided not to waste his breath.
