Assassin's Game

by Ward Larsen

  Sanderson rose and went to the bathroom, and for the first time in weeks his head didn’t hurt. He did, however, have an unusually stiff neck, likely from having slept in an awkward position. He was happy to find a clean towel and a bar of soap. The room had been reasonably priced by Geneva’s standards, which was to say a rate that stretched his policeman’s salary to the breaking point. Or was it his policeman’s pension? He showered and dressed before checking his phone for messages. There was nothing from either Almgren or Blix, and this struck him as a disappointment. Sanderson was a patently methodical man, but one could not be methodical without facts to sift through. At the moment he had no more to work with than a single far-fetched idea—that the American he was chasing had come here to gun down a visiting Iranian scientist.

  Where to start? he wondered.

  He racked his brain, and the only thread of hope that came to mind was a tenuous one. His research had told him that Dr. Hamedi would present Iran’s case in a speech at the United Nations Office at Geneva. It seemed as good a place as any to start. Sanderson went to the front desk.

  “Can I help you?” the clerk asked in English.

  “Yes, the United Nations Office. Is it far from here?”

  “Not at all, monsieur. Only ten minutes on the number six bus—you can catch it right outside.”

  Sanderson thanked the man, pulled up his collar, and went outside to wait on the curb.

  * * *

  Slaton decided he should not be surprised that the Iranians were here. In truth, he should have anticipated it. He entered the lobby and saw them at the front desk: four dark-skinned men, one with gold-rimmed glasses doing the talking, and the other three studying the room with sharp eyes. Soon they were all walking toward the elevator, escorted by a tight-lipped man in a fine suit and a uniformed security guard. Presumably the hotel manager, who gestured airily to emphasize the property’s finer points, flanked by his head of security.

  Slaton made a quick study of the lobby. A central fountain was surrounded by tall columns and a polished marble floor, and rising from this were five floors of gilt railing, interleaved with hand-carved angels and cherubs that made certain heavenly promises about what lay above. It was a resolutely stylish place, the sort of hotel that would advertise Old World charm or savior vivre. The kind of place where each guest room would hold unique furnishings, and where the more exclusive suites kept names in lieu of numbers.

  As soon as the Iranians and their escorts disappeared into the elevator, Slaton walked briskly to the stairwell. He pushed through a heavy fire door and climbed the steps three at a time. The Beau Rivage was a five-story concern, and with the ground level obviously committed to common areas, Slaton took a chance and skipped the second-floor landing. He paused on reaching the third. Standing still against the hallway door, he listened but heard nothing. He cracked the door open slightly and saw the elevator door twenty paces up the hall, an elderly woman waiting with the Down button illuminated. Slaton turned and headed up, pausing again at the fourth floor. This time he heard them.

  The manager’s voice prevailed in lilting French, yet Slaton also registered a barely audible background chatter in Farsi. He didn’t speak the language, but he knew enough to recognize it. Sensing that the voices were receding, Slaton edged the door open to see the group bunched in the hallway. He planted his foot to hold a sliver of light at the door, but kept to the stairwell’s darkness as he listened to the manager’s well-practiced pitch.

  “Your primary rooms are adjacent to one another. A beautiful view of the lake from the main suite, and from the other you can see Mont Blanc. Security? Of course. Marcel here will be at your disposal tomorrow from the moment your delegation arrives. We at Beau Rivage keep a long and proud history of hosting dignitaries for important events. A common door between the rooms? Yes, of course, monsieur.”

  He chanced a look and saw an open door midway down the corridor. When they all disappeared into the room, Slaton let the door slip shut. He went back to the stairs, but instead of descending he climbed up to the last landing. There he noted that the roof access above the fifth floor was barred and secured with a rusted padlock, a modification that would likely not be appreciated by the canton fire marshal. He turned into the vacant fifth-floor hallway, strode halfway down and stomped his foot hard on the carpet. Slaton was rewarded with a hollow thump that told him what he needed to know—under the gold and blue runner, with prints of rose petals and fleurs-de-lis, was a plywood understructure. Two minutes later he was back outside and negotiating his way across the busy street.

  The Iranians spent another twenty minutes inside, probably getting a tour of the hotel’s security center, which Slaton imagined to be no more than a few closed-circuit video monitors and a bank of phones. When they all came outside and bundled back into the cars, Slaton counted from a bench near the distant carousel and got the number he wanted—five Iranians. This meant no one had been left behind to sanitize the room for listening devices or cordon the area against further incursions. The cars pulled away, and Slaton again noted the diplomatic tags. The vehicles had been drawn, he was sure, from the motor pool of the Iranian embassy in Bern, this a two-hour drive up the A1, the busiest highway in Switzerland.

  Things were falling into place quickly. With the cars out of sight, Slaton stood and looked at the dock and the surrounding lake, working everything through a careful sequence. He challenged his blueprint, trying to identify fatal flaws and insert unexpected complications. All plans had them, no matter how well drawn, and in the end it always came down to a matter of probabilities. So he did the math, and was satisfied with the results.

  He struck out at a brisk walk back to Sécheron Station, regulating his pace in order to meet the scheduled one-fifteen departure back to Rolle. Slaton’s planning was done. He knew what he was going to do.

  Even better, he had an audacious idea of how to do it.

  * * *

  Sanderson was riding the number 6 bus, skirting the verdant edges of Geneva’s Botanical Gardens, when he saw Edmund Deadmarsh striding past on the sidewalk. His blue eyes went wide. He bolted up from his seat and watched Deadmarsh slip past the windows frame by frame, like a film clip in slow motion. The bus was maneuvering, weaving through a lane change, and Sanderson’s hips rattled against seat backs and shoulders as he scrambled up the aisle toward the front. He was halfway there when the driver veered into a right-hand turn.

  “Stop!” Sanderson shouted. “Vous Arret! Polizei!”

  Three languages. None worked. The bus continued onto the side street.

  Sanderson looked back over his shoulder, but the angles had changed and he no longer saw Deadmarsh. The bus straightened out just as Sanderson reached the front.

  “Stop!” he screamed.

  Sanderson now had the driver’s full attention—a set of wary eyes looked back at him in the big central mirror.

  “Polizei! Let me off here!”

  He slapped the big silver arm that controlled the door, and as soon as the bus shuddered to a stop the driver was happy to comply. Sanderson half jumped, half fell to the pavement, and began running back to the corner. He made the turn without stopping, his eyes raking the sidewalks for a man in khaki trousers and a dark shirt. He was nowhere to be seen. Halfway up the street he stopped and spun a wobbling circle.

  With his lungs heaving, Sanderson’s attention went to the walking paths that led into the Botanical Gardens. He sprinted to the nearest and soon found himself winding through an emerald garden of sculpted topiary and trimmed lawns, moving as fast as his old legs would carry him. He reached an intersection where one path split into three, and there Sanderson stopped. He spun another hopeless circle looking in every direction, but saw only miles of blacktop possibility. The three paths each branched to others, all curving behind hedges and looping around trees. Back across the street he saw other sidewalks, some leading to the lakefront, others encircling the massive World Trade Organization building. People were milling in
every direction, shunting between workplaces, running errands, and strolling the gardens.

  Edmund Deadmarsh was nowhere to be seen.

  Sanderson bent down and put his hands on his knees, completely out of breath after his furious burst of effort. “Dammit!”

  * * *

  Paul Sjoberg was nearly frantic, but he’d done all he could. When the unexpected message had come this morning he’d tried to get through to Sanderson, but had no luck. He next summoned Gunnar Blix to his office—as far as he knew, Sanderson’s closest friend on the force—and explained the situation.

  A stunned Blix tried to help but said he didn’t know where Sanderson had gone, leaving an exasperated Sjoberg to claim, “It’s bad enough I can’t find a killer, but now I can’t even find my own damned detectives!”

  His last idea was to call Sanderson’s ex-wife, Ingrid. She didn’t pick up, so Sjoberg left an urgent message to return his call without going into details.

  Out of ideas, he sat at his desk and stared at the email:

  A/C Sjoberg,

  While patient confidentiality is normally paramount, I have no choice but to breach it in this instance for the well-being of the patient in concern. By his recent MRI, Inspector Arne Sanderson has been diagnosed with a low-grade brain stem glioma. While there is a favorable chance that this tumor is benign, without prompt treatment other life-threatening complications are imminent. It is imperative that we find Inspector Sanderson and present him for an immediate consultation with an oncologist.

  E. Samuels, M.D.

  NPB Health Services

  FORTY

  The waitress slid a beer in front of him, and Sanderson took his first sip flummoxed that he wasn’t able to convert the prices on the menu from Swiss francs to kronor. He knew the rough conversion rate, but the math simply escaped him. He pushed the menu aside and wrote it off to fatigue.

  The pub was on Avenue de France, across the street from the Sécheron rail station. He’d canvassed the area for three solid hours searching for Deadmarsh but had not seen him again. Given the direction his suspect had been walking, Sanderson’s best guess was that he’d been heading for the train station. If so, the American—or Israeli or whatever the hell he was—would be miles away by now. Nevertheless, Sanderson had opted for a stool at the front of the pub in order to watch passersby through the big bay window. It had been the briefest of encounters, but there was no doubt in his mind—it had been Deadmarsh. And even if he’d gotten away, Sanderson recognized the larger positive that overrode this setback—his narrow assumption had been dead on target. The man was a killer, and he had come here to undertake a political assassination. Which meant he’d be back.

  But what to do about it? he mused.

  Sanderson saw three options. He could call Sjoberg and explain that he’d tracked Deadmarsh to Geneva. The AC might give his sighting the credence it deserved, but the more likely outcome was that Sjoberg would reject the political assassination scheme, deem Sanderson deranged, and order him home. Alternatively, he could slip the news to Elin Almgren and let her run things up the chain of command at SÄPO. This, however, was equally problematic. Almgren was already assisting him outside formal channels, and the first thing her superiors would do would be to verify things with Sjoberg, or perhaps Anna Forsten, either of whom would certify Sanderson to be an unhinged cannon. In both cases there was some chance of getting proper surveillance in Geneva, but more likely a pair of men with a soft-sided wagon to retrieve Sanderson himself.

  The third option, of course, was to hunt down Edmund Deadmarsh himself. The drawback of this was obvious enough. What if he succeeded? The man was a highly trained killer and presumably armed. And while Sanderson had spent his early years on the force in some of Stockholm’s toughest quarters, the man he was hunting was easily half his age, and—something that had not escaped his eye—in superb physical condition. He remembered the gray eyes that kept moving, the way he’d positioned himself in the car to see yet not be seen. Today Sanderson had spotted Deadmarsh from behind the darkened windows of a bus. Tomorrow such an encounter might easily be reversed, and given his present circumstances—unarmed and without backup—Sanderson would not be an odds-on favorite in any confrontation. If he somehow cornered Slaton his only option would be to call the police and plead, in the most rational terms he could muster, for them to arrest a man for an assassination that had not yet occurred.

  The waitress, a thin woman with overmanaged blond hair, slid a plate of fresh bread and cheese in front of him. Sanderson began carving as he sorted through his doubts. Perhaps his colleagues in Stockholm would work things out, make the same connections he had, and issue an alert to the Swiss authorities about a lurking assassin. It was plausible, he supposed, yet Sanderson found himself hoping otherwise. He quickly recognized this for what it was—the self-interest of redemption. Edmund Deadmarsh could be his ticket back in. If Sanderson stopped the assassin single-handed, he would become an instant legend. If he blew it, of course, he’d be facing retirement. But then, that was where he already was.

  Sanderson looked at his watch, then pulled out his phone and placed a call.

  His ex-wife answered.

  “Hello, Ingrid.”

  “Arne! Where on earth are you? I just got a message from Paul Sjoberg. He says he needs to get in touch with you about something urgent, but that you haven’t been picking up and aren’t at home.”

  “Yes, I’ve been ignoring his calls. And he’s right—I’m out of town. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to him. He’ll only make my job more difficult.”

  “Your job? What are you doing?”

  “Exactly what you told me to do.”

  After a long silence, she said, “Are you having any luck?”

  “Surprisingly, yes.”

  “I’m not sure I like that answer. Blix told me this man is very dangerous. I think you should get in touch with—”

  “Ingrid,” he interrupted, “I need you to do something for me right away. And please do it without questioning my motives. You have to trust me.”

  “I always have, Arne. You know that.”

  “Good. Do you still have your key to our flat?”

  “Yes, I think I might.”

  “If not there’s a spare under the pot by the back door—the one with all the dead tulips. I need you to get something from the house and send it to me express overnight.” He told her what he wanted and was met with silence. “Can you do this for me?”

  He heard a long intake of breathe, then, “Yes, Arne. I’ll do it.”

  * * *

  Christine was looking at the picture of domesticity. Her colleague from residency, Ulrika Torsten, had just arrived home from work and was reading a story to her thirteen-month-old son. Her husband was making dinner in the kitchen. Unavoidably, she contrasted this to her own circumstances. In order to aid her fugitive husband, she was hiding out with friends after giving them a far-fetched story—lies given and accepted with equal ease.

  She hated every minute of it, and hated that David had put her in this position. Yet there was never a question of following through. By some profound influence, she felt closer to David than ever, and she knew that he despised the lies as much as she did—probably more. She also knew that at this very moment he could be risking everything to protect her and their child. For all the trouble that dogged him, Christine was rock-solid in one belief about her husband. More than anything, he wanted what she was witnessing right now—a quiet Friday night at home with his family.

  Goodnight Moon came to its end, the mouse and clock having run their ritual courses, and Ulrika held up a bottle and asked, “Would you like to give Fredrik his supper?”

  Christine smiled. “Yes, please.”

  The babe was handed over with a warm bottle, and she tried to make Fredrik comfortable. The child latched on and relaxed instantly in the crook of her arm. Christine felt a protective instinct that was distinctly maternal, and this caused her to wonder how David w
ould react in the same situation. Would the kidon be changed by holding his child in his arms?

  “You’re a natural,” said Ulrika. “He always screams when Anders feeds him.”

  “Not true,” rang a voice from the kitchen. “That is only gas.”

  Christine smiled, and said, “I’m glad I can do something to help. Dav … Edmund said it might be Sunday before he can get a flight.”

  “It’s no problem. You can stay as long as you like, Christine. Edmund is welcome as well.”

  Ulrika went to the kitchen, and Christine found herself mesmerized by Fredrik. He was a beautiful child—but then, weren’t they all? His mouth suckled in a slowing rhythm, and before the end of the bottle he was fast asleep, a white dribble running over his cheek that she wiped away with the ever-present slop cloth.

  “I think he’s done,” she called out softly.

  Ulrika reappeared and Christine tried to rise without waking Fredrik. Halfway up she felt an excruciating pain in her midsection. She fell back into the chair.

  “What’s wrong?” said Ulrika, taking Fredrik.

  “I don’t know,” Christine said, grimacing. “I had a fall the other day, bruised my ribs. They’ve been sore ever since, but not like this.”

  “I should have a look. Perhaps we can get an X-ray to see whether—”

  “No, no! I can’t have an X-ray because I’m—” She stopped there, tearing up as pain seared through her upper body.

  Ulrika looked at her with concern. “I’m going to put Fredrik to bed,” she said. “Then I’m taking you to the emergency room.”

  * * *

  Slaton retrieved the Range Rover in Rolle and headed north on the A1. He estimated a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Basel, the city that divided the Rhine and was forever fixed as the junction of France, Germany, and Switzerland. With the sun falling low, what had been a glorious day looked ready to descend into something else, dark clouds riding the northern horizon. Slaton scanned through radio channels until he found a weather report. It promised a foul early weekend, with improvement late Sunday. For what he had in mind, a useful forecast.