by Ward Larsen
“We have a picture,” said the tactical commander.
Behrouz referred to his phone and saw a grim photo of their victim. The eyes stared blankly skyward, and one cheek had been ripped away by a bullet. A fitting end for a hired gun, he thought.
“One minute until Dr. Hamedi’s arrival,” the commander announced. “Are we to continue operations?”
As Behrouz considered it, his phone rang, and he saw it was his liaison officer with the Swiss police. He ignored the call but expected a redial soon. It occurred to him that if they didn’t all get on the boat now, they’d spend the rest of the night answering to the Swiss police. This made his decision.
He replied buoyantly, “Yes, I don’t see why not. Dr. Hamedi has dodged another bullet. Let’s bring him aboard.”
The commander stepped away to issue the order.
Behrouz found himself drawn back to the photograph he’d just received. A grisly image, to be sure, but he’d seen worse. At least the man had found a mercifully quick end. The lighting was poor and the resolution wobbly, yet certain details were clear. The killer’s fingers were still wrapped around his weapon. There was blood everywhere—pooled on the concrete and blossoming on the killer’s shirt, streaked over his dark skin and matted in his curly black hair.
So this, he thought, is Israel’s lone assassin.
FIFTY
Sanderson had heard the gunfire quite clearly. In the excitement of the moment he’d jumped to his feet, but immediately felt dizzy. He kept standing, though, leaning on a white metal rail to watch the proceedings. He was a quarter mile from the dock where Entrepreneur lay, her elegant superstructure bathed in yellow light and framed by the lively city. That was where his eyes had gone first, until it became apparent that the disturbance was farther off at the base of the distant bridge, half a mile from where he now stood. Back in the day, as a young constable with his life ahead of him, Sanderson might have covered such a gap with an easy three-minute run. But now, as a broken-down veteran and soon-to-be pensioner? A man with no more to look forward to than needles and scalpels? It might as well have been the moon.
The rally of lights grew at the Pont du Mont Blanc, alternating pulses in the hues of authority—blue and amber and red. There were soon a dozen cars and two ambulances, and regular vehicle traffic across the bridge was halted in both directions. Then he saw a motorcade rocket up Quai du Mont Blanc and pull to a stop at the foot of the dock. It could only be Hamedi’s entourage, and their arrival spoke volumes to Sanderson. If Hamedi had not been diverted, it meant any threat against him had been decisively neutralized.
So there was his answer.
Imagining Deadmarsh bullet-ridden and lying in a heap, Sanderson was struck by a bolt of recrimination. Could he have prevented it? Had any policemen been killed or injured? He realized now that it had been a mistake to not call Sjoberg and tell him what he knew. Sanderson had made a lot of good decisions over the years, but his last one had been wrong. And people were dead because of it.
He watched the man who had to be Hamedi get hustled up the pier by a security detail. They all clambered up the gangway and disappeared into Entrepreneur, and minutes later he watched the crew lift mooring lines and heard a low rumble from the engines. The big boat pushed away from the dock with a stately demeanor, and on her aft mast the United Nations flag flew in a bright spotlight, flapping smartly in the evening breeze.
So that’s it then, he thought. It’s all over.
The slight detective fell back to his rock, this time not so much a physical slump as a deflation of spirit. Sanderson was overcome by the idea that he’d screwed up. Desperate to prove his continued relevance, he had let his ego get in the way of the job. His chin wrinkled and tightness racked his chest, and he held his throbbing head in his hands. Sanderson forced his gaze away from the evidence, the grandeur of Entrepreneur getting under way and the tragedy being cleaned up under the bridge, and his eyes settled on the tiny lighthouse to his left. It was surrounded by a breakwater, a U-shaped pile of white boulders meant to protect the outer jetty. In the half-mote between the two, bobbing in the early-evening shadows, Sanderson saw something that seemed curiously out of place.
He saw an untended jet ski.
* * *
Oded Veron put down the phone in Mossad’s operations center. He was clearly livid, his face red and veins bulging on the sides of his thick neck. Two strides later he was inches from Nurin’s face. The director held his ground, knowing that calm was his best defense against an old soldier who made his living by intimidation. All the same, he would not be surprised if a blow came.
“You sacrificed my man!” the Direct Action commander screamed. “You sent him in with his hands tied. You told him exactly how to do his job, and when things went to hell you ordered his support team to back away! What the hell is going on?”
Nurin glanced at the room’s third party, Ezra Zacharias, who nodded knowingly.
“Yes, I’ll explain everything, Oded. I owe you that much. But right now we have to know exactly what is happening. Please give me a few more minutes.”
Veron backed off, still seething, and strode to the far side of the room. He sank heavily into a plush chair, soft leather crinkling under his bulk.
With that storm abated, Nurin turned back to the information flowing in from Veron’s team in Geneva. He was relieved that Slaton had aborted the mission. Difficult as the evening was, Nurin realized that he should have done things this way from the beginning. Using Slaton had been a desperate measure.
No, he thought. It was a sign of weakness.
Zacharias spoke up. “Sir, I think there is something I should take care of?”
Nurin nodded. “Yes, Ezra. It’s time for you to wrap things up on your end.”
Without another word, Zacharias left the room.
* * *
After stepping aboard Entrepreneur, Hamedi endured a succession of handshakes that seemed to have no end. Strangers claimed they were glad to meet him, which he doubted given his present reputation, yet he smiled and said the same in return, thinking, Soon each of you will have a story to tell.
On clearing the arrival contingent, a man Hamedi recognized as Behrouz’s number two pulled him aside, and after a quiet word ushered him toward a remote corner of the ship’s quarterdeck. They passed heavy tables stocked with hors d’oeuvres, crab quiche, and Provençal tarts, and to one side was a well-stocked bar where a pair of young women in black uniforms were busy pulling corks. Hamedi felt a rumble in the deck that told him the boat was maneuvering. Empty teacups began chattering on the tables. He was guided round a makeshift stage where the members of a tuxedoed string quartet were making final delicate adjustments to their instruments. Hamedi’s escort came to a stop behind the stage backdrop, a thick velvet curtain that put them completely out of sight.
The guard said, “The minister of security has requested a private word with you, Dr. Hamedi.”
“A word about what?”
The man walked to the port rail and pointed across the water.
For the first time Hamedi noticed the sea of lights pulsing around the northern half of the first bridge. He said, “You mean … it has happened again? The Israelis?”
“Yes, only minutes before you arrived. But everything is under control. It appears to have been a lone assassin—he did not survive our counterattack. Colonel Behrouz,” the man continued, using his boss’s old Revolutionary Guards rank, “wishes to give you a full account.”
The guard disappeared, but Hamedi had a sense he was waiting just on the other side of the backdrop. He went to the rail and stared at the disquieting scene. On the previous two occasions he had been forewarned by Behrouz. A third attempt, of course, was always a possibility, but the idea had slipped from Hamedi’s head amid the blurring course of his work and the preparations for today’s speech. Now reality stared back at him, blue and red strobes reflecting from the lake like lasers.
“A third attempt?” he whispered to hi
mself. “Why do they not stop?” The guard had said it was a lone assassin, but this seemed small relief. A shaken Hamedi hoped it was the last.
The boat was moving, and the city seemed to rotate as she slipped further from the dock and began picking up speed. Hamedi closed his eyes tightly. The prayer that came to mind was the first his mother had ever taught him, and he versed the words softly under his breath, mimicking her distinctive musical cadence. Hamedi was not quite finished when he sensed a presence behind him. He abruptly went silent, and turned to see Farzad Behrouz. The look twisted into his pockmarked face was nothing less than exultation.
“Yes,” Behrouz said. “Yes, I knew it all along. Only the proof escaped me—and now I have it.”
Hamedi opened his mouth but no words came. Thoughts he had not harbored in thirty years surged to the forefront. Dangerous, reckless thoughts. It is a curious paradox that those brilliant men and women who design nuclear weapons are not, on balance, inclined to physical violence. Yet as a boy Ibrahim Hamedi had seen more than his share of scraps, and so he knew where his fists were. He had, of course, never killed a man, but there was a first time for everything. A lifelong disciple of physics, Hamedi resisted the urge to work things through mathematically. Mass and momentum and conservation of energy were all good and fine for a classroom, but right now he thought it better to simply lunge for the little cretin’s throat.
Behrouz saw it coming and opened his mouth, presumably to call for help.
Neither man’s intent came to pass because in the next moment, under the vigorous opening notes of Brahms’s String Quartet Number Three, they were both slammed to the deck by a massive explosion.
FIFTY-ONE
Slaton’s head was just out of the water, having risen from the lake mere seconds before the explosion—the only sure way to protect his ears from the concussive effect of the blast. Even fifty yards away and above the surface, the submarine blast was deafening. A wave of energy struck his wetsuit-clad body as it transferred through the frigid water, but Slaton’s eyes remained locked on the slow-moving ship. Entrepreneur seemed to hesitate for a moment, teetering on a foaming section of lake a hundred yards from the dock, her silhouette framed by the city’s shimmering reflections.
Water dripped from Slaton’s camouflaged boonie hat, but he remained completely motionless. One eye was fixed to his thermal imaging optic, but at any instant he could shift to the fixed night sight of the MP7. His stillness was a stark contrast to the scene forty yards away. Entrepreneur was foundering quickly, her back broken, and the bow and stern had already begun to list in opposite directions. Water frothed from a breach amidships and flames belched from the waterline, the latter a result of compromised fuel lines that would soon carpet the lake in fire. All anticipated. For a brief moment Slaton wondered if he’d overdone the Semtex. But only for a moment.
Smoke on the water … The classic Deep Purple song, recounting a fire on the opposite shore of Lake Geneva, was tonight being rewritten.
He kept the MP7’s black barrel trained loosely on the stern section—the site of the gala, and where nearly everyone had been at the moment of detonation. Forward of the breach he saw only a handful of crew and hired help. The guests were surging aft, away from the blaze. Again, precisely as anticipated. Slaton began shifting his optic with sharp, mechanical corrections, settling on each flailing body for the necessary two seconds. With roughly forty people to sort through, he concentrated on small groups, knowing Hamedi would be quickly surrounded by security staff wanting to steer their principal to safety. And on this sinking ship, safety meant one thing—at the stern, hanging on a pair of davits, a skiff with an outboard motor. There were other lifeboats, of course, but these were less obvious and not yet deployed, so Slaton reasoned that Hamedi’s guardians would move aft and commandeer the seventeen-foot Boston Whaler. Any quaint laws of the sea regarding women and children would be decisively overruled by their submachine guns.
The crewmen were distributing life jackets, but this too Slaton had foreseen. He hoped he had predicted every complication because the next two minutes would be critical, indeed the part of the plan that had concerned him from the beginning. Amid the smoke and chaos of a sinking ship, he had to identify Ibrahim Hamedi. Slaton kept shifting, looking through the sight and studying thermal images as rising flames licked the water. Waves of smoke rolled through his field of view, obscuring the ship for brief intervals, but Slaton held fast, held patient, long enough to eliminate potential targets one by one. On his fifteenth shift the kidon caught a glimpse of what he was after.
A group of three, the men on the flanks brandishing weapons and hauling the man in the middle by the elbows. Slaton had to be sure, so he kept watching. When one of the guards stumbled he got a clear look and saw what he wanted—one clear band over the left shoulder. It wasn’t a brilliant difference—you would have to know to look for it in the first place—but the variance in thermal signature was conclusive. Two subtly discrete coefficients of heat retention in the cool evening air.
Scotchgard.
Hamedi.
For the first time Slaton’s finger engaged his trigger. The kidon knew who to kill.
* * *
Slaton submerged and began breathing again through the high-pressure regulator, kicking briskly to close the gap. Sight was useless in the pitch-black lake, so he went with dead reckoning, using his initial bearing and knowing precisely how fast he could swim at flank speed in full scuba gear—the kind of thing a kidon had to know.
He surfaced, by the luminescent hands of his Movado watch, twenty-eight seconds later, this time rising without any attempt at stealth. He saw a crewman trying to run the davit motors to lower the Whaler, but it was fast becoming an exercise in futility as the lake rose to meet Entrepreneur’s sinking stern. So the sailor waited, and when he had enough slack he simply untethered the runabout. The crewman was the first to climb in, and Hamedi went next, half-guided, half thrown into the boat by his minders, one large and one small, who quickly followed. As the crewman went to the helm, four more Iranians—looking ridiculous in dark business suits, orange life jackets, and carrying submachine guns—reached Entrepreneur’s disappearing stern. Two made the leap to the drifting Whaler. Two didn’t.
With the gap increasing between the boats, Slaton’s target was effectively separated and his defenses quantified. Four guards and a crewman had reached Hamedi, two others remained nearby. Slaton shifted from the viewing optic to the MP7’s sight. It was time to live by an assassin’s rules. Anyone with a weapon died. And those with the biggest weapons died first. From twenty yards his first target’s head appeared massive. Slaton widened his legs to stabilize in the water and settled his sight, already planning his next two shots. He gave a quick double tap, and a guard who was trying to step across—one leg on the yacht and another on the Whaler—crumbled into the divide between the boats. The second man on Entrepreneur, his semiautomatic still strapped to his chest, had a bullet in his head before his partner hit the water.
Slaton’s gun was suppressed for sound, but the guards were trained and so they knew they were under attack. Using his long fins, Slaton spun left and settled his sight on the Whaler. One of the guards was tall and obvious, and Slaton traded shots with the man. A round from his MP7 found home as the water to his right exploded. Uncomfortably close.
Then he heard shouting. “There! In the water!”
More shouts from the sinking yacht. The kidon submerged.
* * *
With strong kicks Slaton swam straight under the Whaler, the boat’s dark outline clear in the dancing orange reflections. He popped up this time on the shore side, his MP7 ready and new angles of fire already fixed in his head. But he could not shoot indiscriminately. With the optic he positively identified a guard at the bow, fired and watched him go overboard when hit. Hamedi’s protection was now down to two—but they began learning. They fell to the deck and disappeared, leaving Slaton no shot. Rounds suddenly exploded all around him, t
he water churning like a blender. He snap-sighted on a figure near the stern of the yacht, but before he could fire his MP7 jerked to one side. Slaton felt stinging pain in his scalp and saw that his gun sight was gone, nothing but the jagged metal bracket remaining. He answered with a quick, unsighted double, and his target twisted but stayed on his feet. Slaton fired again from twenty yards and finished the job.
He submerged again knowing time was short. It was time to get close.
It was time to take Hamedi.
* * *
Behrouz was scrambling on the deck of the Whaler when a foot caught him in the face. He looked up and saw Hamedi backing away.
“The Israelis!” the scientist screamed. “They are after me again! Don’t you see that?”
Behrouz didn’t know what to think. The Israelis were attacking. But what of the words he’d heard slip from Hamedi’s mouth only minutes ago? There was no time to think about it. He screamed at the white-uniformed crewman at the little boat’s helm. “Get us out of here!” Behrouz pointed his handgun at the man to leave no room for questions.
The crewman’s eyes went wide—wider than they already were with bodies and mayhem all around. He cranked the outboard motor and it came to life, and from a kneeling position the man put the motor into gear and slammed the throttle forward. There was a roar from the back of the boat but nothing happened. They went nowhere.
“What is wrong?” Hamedi shouted.
“I don’t know,” the helmsman said. “We must be hung up on something. Maybe a line.”
Bravely, the man lifted his head above the gunnel and looked over the side. Then he moved aft and looked over the stern.
“The propeller is gone!” he shouted.
* * *
The propeller, in fact, had been removed forty minutes earlier and was now resting on the bottom of Lake Geneva. The crewman, befuddled by the missing prop but growing more confident, leaned in for a closer look. He never saw the gloved hand come out of the water.
