Assassin's Game

by Ward Larsen

  Assistant Commissioner Sjoberg walked through the doorway. He met Christine with a somber gaze that froze her in place.

  “Have you seen what’s happening in Geneva?” Sjoberg asked, not bothering with any preliminaries.

  “We saw something on television earlier,” Bloch replied. “A private yacht was attacked, and there was a shootout between an assassin and Hamedi’s security people.”

  Sjoberg’s eyes remained fixed, and for a moment Christine thought he was going to chastise her, say something along the lines of, You knew this was going to happen all along, didn’t you? What he said was, “There was a second confrontation soon afterward on a nearby bridge. The Iranian scientist, Hamedi, turned up. He was being held hostage by a second assailant, a man dressed in black. One of my men, Detective Sanderson, shot and killed the suspect. It was your husband, miss.”

  Christine’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the side of Bloch’s bed.

  “Are you certain?” Bloch asked.

  “The body went into the river. Until they’ve recovered it we can’t confirm his death. But as for the identity—yes, I’m sure. Sanderson interviewed Mr. Deadmarsh at length when he was here in Stockholm. He was positive. I can also tell you that Sanderson is an expert marksman. He was very close and wouldn’t have missed.”

  The pain was unlike anything Christine had ever experienced. “No!” she whispered hoarsely. “Please, no!” Then, as Bloch put an arm around her, the torment arrived in full.

  Oh, David, she thought, I did this to you! Christine doubled over, folded her arms across her stomach, and began to sob uncontrollably.

  * * *

  Dr. Ibrahim Hamedi was quickly identified by the surviving members of his security contingent, which was now under emergency leadership after Farzad Behrouz had been confirmed as a fatality of the attacks, and soon all were being whisked to Geneva International Airport under a heavy police escort. There were tepid protests from quarters of the canton gendarmerie, the detectives there wanting to interview Hamedi as a witness, but a beleaguered Swiss foreign minister intervened, and when Hamedi’s chartered jet departed at half past eleven that evening there were substantial sighs of relief both in the air and on the ground.

  The second man recovered from the bridge that night was taken briefly into custody, but soon confirmed to be a detective on the Stockholm police force. His gun was taken into evidence, and Detective Inspector Arne Sanderson, who seemed quite ill, did his best to answer questions from a hospital bed at Universitaires de Genève. He gave a precise, if broken, account of his engagement with the assassin, a story that the local detectives decided fit well with the evidence given by young Kammerer.

  Rescue operations on Lake Geneva continued into the early-morning hours, and by sunrise every soul on Entrepreneur’s passenger manifest—crew, guests, and the gendarme detail—had been accounted for. The casualty count reported in the morning papers was nine dead—eight from Hamedi’s security force and the assassin under the Pont du Mont Blanc. Ten passengers and crew members were reported injured, a number that insiders knew was optimistic, and forever left in question, due to the rapid departure of the Iranians. The flotilla of rescue vessels began to dissipate late that morning, and the investigative emphasis shifted to the only remaining loose end—a missing person, the man Officer Kammerer and two civilian witnesses had seen tumble fifteen feet down into the frigid Rhone River.

  Under a menacing gray sky, boats with grappling hooks began dragging the tireless Rhone downstream, and pairs of policemen walked both shores, parting stands of tall aquatic weeds and poking in eddies as they searched for the body of an unidentified terrorist who had, by all accounts, taken at least three nine-millimeter rounds from Inspector Sanderson’s SIG Sauer. In the opinion of one interviewed police captain, “a not unfitting end for a man who has terrorized Europe from Stockholm to the shores of Lac Léman.”

  In spite of everyone’s best efforts, nothing was found.

  * * *

  After a sleepless night, Raymond Nurin was ruminating in Mossad’s bunker when two very unexpected phone calls came. The first, from the operations center three floors above, sent him running to the elevator. He hit the call button, and when the silver door didn’t open immediately he bolted to the stairs.

  One minute later he was listening to a message that had been taken from a satellite download. “This has got to be a hoax!” Nurin insisted. “The Iranians are trying to spoof us, bring us in.”

  “No, sir,” the tech replied. “The authentication code is valid. He’s out there.”

  “But it’s been—what? Three weeks?”

  The man shrugged.

  “I want Veron in here.”

  “He’s already on the way, sir.”

  Nurin went to the large map on the wall and looked at Iran. “Where exactly?” he demanded.

  Another technician, this a woman holding a printout of the lat-long coordinate set, plotted things on the map and made an X with a Sharpie. “Right here. Seven kilometers east of Cheshmehshour.”

  In what seemed a disturbing new habit, Nurin realized that he had not considered every contingency. He was still staring at the map in the operations room, still reeling, when the second call came.

  “Sir! It’s the priority number you flagged!” Nurin tripped over a cable as he dashed to the console and picked up the correct handset.

  “Where are you?”

  Those three words were the end of his input. He listened for exactly ten and three one hundredths seconds before the line went dead. Nurin put down the handset, and said, “Have the Hawker ready in twenty minutes, fueled for Central Europe. I want a car now—and tell Veron to meet me at the airport!”

  As he hurried toward the exit Nurin considered the two calls. They were completely unrelated, but like the good spymaster he was, he immediately began incubating ways to join them in his favor. As Nurin trod down the central hallway, however, his clever schemes went adrift. The map of Iran fixed in his mind, and his calculating nature succumbed to a rare turn of reflection as he wondered, Where do we find such men?

  FIFTY-SIX

  Yaniv Stein sat against his rock—after twenty days anyway, he thought of it as his—contemplating whether crushing the scorpion near his sock-clad left foot was worth the effort. The creature wasn’t a threat. Not on the big scale of things. There was perhaps some food value, but food was not his problem. He was out of water. A man could survive for a long time in the desert without food. Water, on the other hand, was nonnegotiable.

  In the harsh morning light Stein looked down at his shattered leg. In a way the injury had saved him three weeks ago. The grenade he’d thrown into the truck that night had set off a large secondary explosion—how was he to know that was where they stowed their munitions? Shrapnel from the blast had ruined his leg, but the explosion also proved his salvation—it created smoke, fire, confusion, and most fortuitously, an Iranian corpse that was burned beyond recognition. Nearly delirious from the pain, Stein had removed his outer uniform and done his best to dress the victim as an Israeli commando. He’d then shoveled flaming embers onto what was left of the body until the poor grunt was smoldering again. Finally, in the most painful two hours of his life and under cover of a frenetic night, Stein had crawled eighty yards to this spot, a tiny cavern in the side of a low ridge.

  The next two days he spent bettering his camouflage and watching from his hole. Bands of Iranian soldiers came and went. They carted out bodies—first his three comrades and later their own—and then began kicking boot toes through the gory aftermath. The final groups looked more like tourists, senior officers mostly, one of whom nearly made it to his position. Stein was prepared to take the man with his only remaining weapon, his trusted Glock, knowing it would start an exchange that he would not survive. Then the colonel with the big gut had stopped ten paces short and taken a whiskey flask from his pocket, emptying it before heading back to his jeep.

  On the third day the visits stopped, the
charred equipment left to rot. Since then Stein had been alone. He supposed it was better than capture, yet the subsequent fight for survival had stretched his training and tenacity to their limits. Hydration quickly proved the most serious problem, but after four parched days a desperate Stein had crawled to the donkey’s carcass and found two untouched water bladders beneath. A full ten liters that had lasted until this morning.

  So today Stein had gone on another search, dragging himself over the sand like a bent snake, turning over burned canvas packs and looking under charred cloth. There had been no water, but he found something even more precious. At the bottom of a crater and half buried in sand—where Dani had been perhaps?—a personal locator beacon. A locator beacon with one bar remaining on the battery.

  His spirits soared on the discovery, and Stein crawled back to his lair where he dusted off the device under the makeshift shade tarp. They had each been issued one of the units, an ERB-6, the latest in personal satellite technology. Stein spent ten minutes composing his text message, knowing he would likely only have one shot. He included his emergency code word, and a brief mention of his injury. His position on the roof of the Kavir Desert would be accurate to within a few yards, and automatically enciphered before transmission. Stein hit the Send button holding his breath, and watched as the screen churned and finally announced: MESSAGE SENT.

  Now he could only wait.

  The sun was rising high, cooking night into day, and in the distance Stein saw a dust cyclone swirling. Farther yet, in a teasing image at the base of the northern mountains, he saw the lifting billow of a rain shower. He had turned the beacon off after his one transmission—it wasn’t designed as a two-way device—but now he wondered whether there might be one more burst in the battery. Probably not, he decided. With that depressing thought, Stein pulled out his last energy bar. He almost broke it in half, but then shifted his dirt-encrusted fingers to make two breaks. Three pieces. One for each day.

  If help didn’t come by then, it would almost certainly be too late.

  * * *

  Just after ten o’clock that morning, a bleary-eyed Raymond Nurin found himself walking lengthwise along the southern side of a steep hill outside Montvendre, France. To his left and right he saw long trellises anchored into the rich brown earth, and climbing these, matted in morning dew, were the priceless canopies of Roussette. The grapes had already been harvested and the vines pruned for the season, but that was the limit of his untrained assessment.

  Nurin’s nondescript aircraft had landed in Grenoble some two hours earlier. There he was told to rent a car, and subsequently guided by a series of texted directions and misdirections. Now, certainly nearing the end of his odyssey, he found himself wandering a family-owned Savoy vineyard with a ticket for the ten-thirty tour in his coat pocket.

  This too had been in the instructions.

  Nurin had never visited this part of France, and he knew little about wine. He liked red with beef, and knew that some seemed better than others, maddeningly subtle distinctions he could register but never quite quantify. He also knew that the prices listed on restaurant menus varied wildly, a detail that regularly escaped his wife’s grasp. Walking over the steep, terraced terrain, he wondered if there was some logic to growing grapes on a south-facing hillside. Better drainage? More sun? Or perhaps cheaper land. If he made it to the ten-thirty tour, he would likely find an answer.

  Nurin never got the chance.

  “I wasn’t sure if you would come.”

  The level voice came out of nowhere and Nurin froze.

  He had never met the man behind him, and wasn’t sure why he’d been lured to this meeting. The secure Mossad building from which he normally orchestrated things seemed suddenly very distant. Nurin had spent time in the field early in his career, but he did not delude himself—his mind-set had long ago shifted from tactician to strategist. So he was standing on foreign soil, completely unarmed, and quite alone. And behind him? Behind him was the most lethal assassin Israel had ever built, and by all accounts a man who would like nothing better than to kill him on the spot. Indeed, the fact that he did not already have a bullet in his brain was the greatest positive Nurin could summon from his situation.

  And with that lovely thought, he took a shallow breath and turned.

  Slaton was there, no more than two steps away, and the director made a quick study. Tall and athletic, fair hair and opaque gray eyes that seemed to look right through him. Or perhaps into him?

  The kidon said nothing, only responding with his own appraising stare.

  “I am alone,” Nurin said, trying to keep an even tone, “just as you instructed.”

  “I know.”

  “I wasn’t surprised to hear from you. When they couldn’t find your body I assumed you had egressed Geneva successfully. The Swede, the detective, I saw his statement. It was very convincing. Six rounds fired, three hits at point-blank range. His colorful narrative of how you vaulted end-over-end into the river. Quite compelling. I can only assume that you somehow conspired with this man?”

  “No comment.”

  Nurin nodded. “Very well. And regarding the rest—you are aware of the greater plan?”

  “I had a long talk with Dr. Hamedi. He explained everything.”

  “You did well to find a way to return him to Iran. Even better that you were able to eliminate Behrouz in the course of … in the course of events. Hamedi’s plan can go forward now.”

  Nurin saw Slaton’s attention dart to a pair of workers walking on a nearby path. They wore work pants and brown T-shirts, and had long shovels slung over their shoulders. Slaton waited for them to pass, then reestablish eye contact.

  Nurin asked, “So your plan was to abduct Hamedi? And what would you have done then?”

  “I was going to demand your public resignation, along with an admission that you had committed unspecified crimes, the details of which could not be revealed for reasons of national security. You would have gotten prison time. I was going to demand ten years—but I’d have settled for five. One always has to leave room for negotiation.”

  “Negotiation? With whom?”

  “I was going to bring the prime minister here, to the very spot where you’re standing. I wanted his personal assurance—in writing—that Christine and I would be left alone forever. Then I was going to hand him Hamedi to do with as he pleased.”

  Nurin felt more at ease, finding himself on increasingly familiar terrain. “Yes,” he said appreciatively, “that was probably the best you could have done.”

  For the first time Slaton’s eyes stopped scanning. Standing on wet earth between wire frames of hundred-year-old vines, the unsettling gaze drilled Nurin directly. “It wouldn’t have worked, would it? Not even if Hamedi was the fanatical anti-Semite everyone thought him to be.”

  “No,” Nurin conjectured, “probably not. You might have gotten a degree of retribution—but only against those of us in Israel who were forced to make the difficult choices. A few moments of gratification perhaps, but the outcome wouldn’t have changed.”

  “So for Christine and I there’s never going to be a way out, is there?”

  “Over the years you have done great things for Israel, David. But in your line of work success comes with a price. Tell me—would you consider coming back? Mossad can always use a man of your talents.”

  In the ensuing silence Nurin recognized a mistake. He quickly added, “You were very resourceful last night. When you learned the truth about Hamedi, how he was planning to neutralize the biggest threat we Jews have faced in decades, you immediately found a way forward.”

  “I’m not done yet,” Slaton said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Slaton explained what was yet to come.

  Nurin gave the assassin his most circumspect look. “I always suspected you were a good Jew. In the end, you are doing the right thing for Israel, David.”

  “And you?” Slaton asked. “Do you feel in your heart that you’ve done the
right things?”

  “Certainly not. It is the curse of my position. But I can say in good conscience that I have always tried.”

  The gray eyes turned ominous. “You’ve sacrificed a lot of good men for this cause, Director.”

  “No one understands that better than I. Yet in light of what you’ve just told me—there is one more important matter. In your early days with Mossad, did you ever work with a man named Yaniv Stein?”

  The kidon’s eyes narrowed. “Many times. Yaniv was a competent operator—a solid soldier who followed orders.”

  “Was?” Nurin repeated cagily. “A curious use of the past tense.”

  “It’s my understanding that he was one of the victims of your disaster in Iran a few weeks ago. Yaniv Stein died outside Qom.”

  For the first time since arriving in France, the spymaster smiled. “And this, I think, is something we should talk about…”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Three days later

  East of Qom, Iran

  The little car fishtailed and nearly slid from the road as Ibrahim Hamedi rounded a corner at a patently unsafe speed. He eased off the accelerator, but only slightly, his eyes squinting to see through a dust-encrusted windshield that was further obscured by the low sun. He checked the rearview mirror again, but saw nothing more than a swirling cloud of dust that could have masked a convoy.

  The car was owned by his best friend, a brilliant young technician named Hassan. When Hamedi first returned to Iran from Europe, he’d made a private rule to never become attached to his coworkers. This served a dual purpose: it promoted his image as a distant authoritarian, but also allowed for fewer reservations when the end came. And that end was today. Hassan, however, had been the exception. A young man as likable as he was hardworking, he was fresh out of university and an expert in computer modeling. The two had endured countless late-night sessions, hunched over bitter coffee and whirring laptops, in which they formulated implosion simulations and yield efficiency estimates. Yet even against such a sobering backdrop, the kid had made Hamedi smile. Hassan had been his one allowance. Early this morning Hamedi had sent him to Natanz on short notice, hustling him out on a fool’s errand and insisting he take the bus that shuttled twice daily between the two facilities. Once he was gone, Hamedi had rummaged through Hassan’s desk and found the keys to his rattletrap car right where he knew they would be.