by Matthew Dunn
He was breathing fast. “Just patching myself up. I brought along a medical kit in case you . . . got the better of me.” He laughed, though his voice was strained. “Didn’t expect to get hurt this way. Give me a few minutes.”
Within that time, Michael was at my side in the bare apartment. The sniper was by my feet, partly in darkness, his face lit by moonlight and the streetlights.
I crouched by the sniper. His appearance matched the description of the man who’d handed the letter to the hotel receptionist. I looked at Michael, didn’t say anything, but tried to gauge his support for what I needed to do. Michael was silent as he held my gaze and gave the briefest of nods.
I hate torture. So often, it’s pointless, barbaric, and says more about the man inflicting the pain than it does about the victim. But there are rare moments when lack of time, unusual circumstances, desperation, and the failure of other options can force one’s hand. I brought the blade of the knife to his leg wound, firmly but carefully.
While the sniper tried to stop himself from screaming I asked, “What is your name?”
“Fuck you!” He was English, with a deep voice.
I looked at the wound in his leg, then undid my belt buckle and loosened it by one notch. A small amount of blood oozed out of the cut. If I undid the belt completely I could walk out of here knowing full well that in a few hours the sniper would be a corpse, or incarcerated in jail because he’d had to call for help. “Who are you?” I repeated.
The sniper tried to move his arms but winced from his injuries. He remained slumped on the floor.
“Unless you answer my questions, you’ll die. It’s up to you. Do you want to die?”
The sniper glared at me, his expression defiant. “You do what you want.”
“Okay.” I yanked off the shoe on his injured leg, causing his back to arch from the pain, and removed his sock, which I screwed up into a ball and thrust into his mouth. Now, noises from his mouth were muffled. I kicked one of his injured arms and said calmly, “I think you’re the man who killed my former colleagues in the States. Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the killer is someone you work with. Someone better than you.”
I pulled out the sock.
He spat, “I work alone. For a reason. No one’s better than me.”
I put the gag back in his mouth and moved the knife in the wound before loosening the belt by another notch. His blood was flowing freely, though it was still restricted by the makeshift tourniquet. “If you’re not my friends’ murderer, then you’re of no use to me. You’re simply a man who tried to kill me in my hotel. And if that’s the case, I might as well leave you to die in here.” I leaned in closer toward his face. “But if you’re directly or indirectly involved in the deaths of my colleagues, know anything about the assassination of Israel’s ambassador to France, have insight into what happened inside an underground intelligence station in this city, and most of all”—I pressed hard on the wound on his right arm—“can tell me all you know about a man called Thales, then you have significant value to me. If you cooperate, I’ll let you live.”
He shook his head violently.
I pulled the knife from his leg, watching him writhe on the floor as his blood coursed strongly from the wound. I glanced at Michael. “An hour or two?”
“At best. I’m thinking thirty minutes.”
“Let’s be sure of that.” I fully undid my belt and tossed it across the room. “There.” I patted the sniper on his head. “Death is now a certainty.” I pulled out the sock and held it in front of his face. “There’s no need for this now, is there? I don’t have to do anything to you—just watch you fade away.”
The sniper looked desperate but still retained some defiance in his expression. “I can’t trust you!”
“Then who or what can you trust?” I pointed at his leg. “One thing’s for sure, you can certainly trust that to do its job unless you get medical attention. There’s a Lebanese doctor I know. He’s only a few blocks away from here. All I need to do is call him and he’ll be here in minutes. And he’s very good at what he does. He’ll have you patched up, without a soul knowing anything about it.” I smiled. “He owes me a few favors.”
“Why would you do that for me?”
“Information. I’m not after you. I want to know the truth behind the Paris assassination and what happened in this city. Give me your name!”
The sniper lowered his head. “I have your word, as a fellow Englishman?”
I nodded. “Providing you cooperate in full.”
He looked uncertain.
“Time is running out for you. Make a decision!”
“I . . .”
“Yes?”
“I was ordered to kill the Israeli ambassador and your friends.”
“By whom?”
“Thales.”
“And who is Thales?”
The sniper shook his head. “I can’t . . . I’ll be a dead man if I tell you.”
“The alternative is no better. Your name?”
A degree of resignation settled on the man’s face. “Rowe, formerly a colonel in Her Majesty’s Royal Dragoon Guards.”
“The weapon you used to kill the ambassador—do you still have it?”
“Of course not. I buried it on the outskirts of Paris. When my work on this project was done, and I thought it was safe to go back there, I intended to retrieve the gun and completely destroy it.”
“Where is it?”
Rowe said nothing.
“Where is it, Rowe? This is your only chance.”
He sighed and gave me a grid reference.
Urgently, I looked at Michael. “Is there anyone in your organization you can call right now? Someone powerful enough to immediately put a call into the French intelligence or security services and persuade them to deploy police? We need that gun retrieved, examined, and its ballistics compared to the bullet found in the ambassador’s chest. The results need to be sent to Israel ASAP.”
Michael nodded. “My boss has that sway.” He pulled out his cell and moved to the other side of the room.
“When I get the doctor to repair your injuries, I’m going to stay by your side. If I get a call from my friend”—I pointed at Michael—“in the next few hours saying you’ve just spun me a pack of lies, I’ll cut your legs off.”
“It’s the truth.”
I held the bloody knife under his chin. “You sure?”
“Yes.” Rowe lowered his head again. “I’ll have to disappear. Go on the run.” He looked at his bloody leg and smiled at the irony of his observation. The smile vanished. “Thales will use everything at his disposal to track me down and kill me.”
“That’s your problem, not mine.” I put the tip of the blade against his skin. “Have you been to Gray Site?”
Silence.
“Did you help on the day it happened?”
Rowe laughed, and blood trickled from his mouth, its color matching that of his sideburns. “I did more than help.”
“Of course you did.” I told him what I thought had happened on that day. “I suspect there would have needed to have been at least twice as many men with you as there were Gray Site operatives to get it done. Eight men?”
Rowe frowned. “Thales said no one would know how we did it.”
“Well, I know. Was it you who stayed behind? Or was it Thales himself?”
“Thales insisted only he had the skills to pull it off.”
“Why is he manipulating Israel to go to war?”
“He’s paid to do so.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I have my suspicions.” I reattached my belt as a tourniquet to Rowe’s thigh. I could see the assassin was getting weak. “You must tell me who Thales is.”
“You promised me you’d call the doctor.”
“I will. Two things need to happen first: you telling me Thales’s name; and my Israeli friend receiving confirmation the sniper rifle you used in Paris has been fou
nd.”
“I could be dead by the time—”
“Let’s hope both happen quickly.”
Rowe used his elbows to force himself to a sitting position on the floor, his back against the wall beneath the window, his face wracked in pain from the exertion. “His name’s Monsieur de Guise.”
“He lives in France?”
“I don’t know exactly where, though I suspect it’s somewhere in the north of the country, since that’s where we usually meet.”
“Vocation?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“A Frenchman?”
Rowe coughed violently. “He plays the part exceptionally well. But he’s English.”
“Anything about his previous life?”
“I don’t know. None of us do. He pays us. That’s all that matters.”
I sat next to Rowe, my back leaning against the same wall. “We must wait.”
“My life . . .”
“Depends on your rifle being found and its chamber matching the gun that killed a senior Israeli diplomat.” I looked at Michael. He was staring at his cell phone.
Twenty minutes later, it rang. Michael listened. He snapped shut the phone. “Local French police have found a weapon—high-powered, military-grade sniper rifle. It’s being rushed to a DGSE facility in Paris. DGSE is in constant communications with my country, the CIA, and the Pentagon. The French are confident they can get a ballistics analysis to Mossad within an hour. Sounds impossible, but they will try. And Mossad’s confident it can prove one way or the other whether the weapon was used by Rowe to kill the Israeli ambassador.” Michael pointed at his phone. “Without a match, this means nothing.”
Rowe croaked, “It’ll be a match. Rest assured. And you can match the weapon to me. I always wear gloves, but I didn’t wear a mask. They seem so crude. I like to be at one with my rifles when I fire them. Traces of my DNA will inevitably have transferred from my cheeks and mouth to the weapon.”
Michael said, “We’ll take a sample from you. But, how do we know you were acting on orders from Thales rather than Hamas? We only have your word.”
Rowe looked proud as he told the Mossad officer, “I only take orders from Thales. No one else. Who he chooses to take orders from is his business.”
Michael beamed at me. “If that’s true, you did it. You’ve got the evidence needed to stop war.”
“He’s got evidence and has established what happened in Gray Site,” Rowe said, his voice distant, “but it’s not enough to stop war.”
I turned to him and frowned. “What do you mean?”
“This has been a sideshow. State allegiances are created by shared fear. Thales didn’t care about such things, though he used them to earn his keep. An Arab boy of Gaza goes to America. Boom, boom. He scorches the earth. The world won’t care any longer about what I tried to do. Or you, for that matter.”
“A sideshow?”
“Followed by a reaction to something else. Unstoppable. Too late. Too last minute. The world looks at carnage. Israel moves forward again. America must support the country. So, too, many others. Unstoppable.”
“Who is the boy?” I asked with urgency. “Where is he going? What’s his target?”
Rowe answered, “I helped Thales get him out of Gaza, but I don’t know his name or anything else about him. That was kept from me.” He was growing faint. “There’s no reason for me to lie. I don’t win from this. Only Thales wins. I don’t know specifics, but I do know the boy’s target is someplace in America. Nothing overly dramatic. An Archduke Ferdinand spark—enough to create hell.”
I nodded. “Colonel Rowe?”
“Yes.” His voice now sounded slurred.
“The man standing in front of you is called Michael Stein.”
“I know.”
“My name is Will Cochrane.”
“Of course.”
“The Israeli man in Gray Site was Ben Stein. The American man, Roger Koenig. One was a brother, the other a friend. You butchered Roger’s wife and left her two sons without parents. You shot my father’s closest friends, as well as a brave man and woman.”
“It was nothing personal.” Rowe was seemingly growing distant from the room and our situation; life was ebbing away from him. “I just did what Thales told me to do. You’d have done the same. When are you calling the doctor?”
“There never was a doctor.” I thrust the knife into Rowe’s chest.
FORTY-TWO
Via Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, I flew overnight to Washington, D.C. The journey seemed endless. I poured black coffee down my throat and wished the flight attendants would stop trying to feed me congealed scrambled eggs and other crap while I watched the news on the back of the chair in front of me. Today officially became tomorrow, and reports said that Israel was ready to go to war in twenty-four hours but had decided to postpone that action based on new evidence about the assassination of its ambassador.
Before I’d departed Beirut, Michael Stein had told me the ballistics analysis was in no doubt that Rowe’s rifle had killed the man. Though it was guilty of numerous other atrocities, Hamas wasn’t guilty of this particular crime.
But the ballistics evidence wasn’t enough. According to what Rowe had told me, we were all about to be sucker punched. A boy would do that.
And remobilize Israel’s military machine.
Before I’d set off for the U.S., I’d called Mason plus some contacts I had in Homeland Security, warning them about an imminent attack and asking them to start investigating what targets the Arab boy might be focusing on. I’d also called my neighbor Phoebe. She was fine, as were David and Dickie. She had started her new job at the Tate Modern, and was oblivious to the fact that armed plainclothes SBS men were discreetly protecting her apartment building.
It was dark outside the craft. In the dim cabin light, I could see most people were asleep; some were reading; others were talking to each other while standing in the aisles; a few were pinging a summons to flight attendants to service their needs. Even if Israel did go to war, in the short term U.S. citizens were right to be unconcerned. Anything that happened wouldn’t immediately affect America or its nearby cousins, but in the medium to long term, what Thales would achieve would unleash devastation of the kind that creeps up behind the unwitting and rips their guts out.
Lone wolf terrorists, ill equipped to fight their cause on battlefields, would draw strength from their indignation at Israel’s war and strike the state’s supporters in more nefarious ways.
When the plane landed, I was like one of those travelers I normally loathe—staring at the seat belt light, poised to jump to my feet and grab the bag I’d stowed in the overhead bin, ready to barge my way up the aisle even though it would barely buy me any extra time when we hit the gridlock of passport control and baggage collection.
I was desperate to get out of Dulles airport.
There was nothing I could do to help catch the Arab boy. But it was within my power to expose a traitor. I wished Patrick, Alistair, Roger, Suzy, and Laith were in the States, ready to help me. They were people I trusted wholeheartedly and who’d consistently given me their unconditional support.
I walked through the arrivals hall of the airport and made a decision to call someone who’d tried to apprehend and kill me a year ago. Her name was Marsha Gage. She was a senior agent in the FBI, and I respected her tenacity and honesty. I didn’t have her cell number, so had to try to reach her via the switchboard of the Bureau’s J. Edgar Hoover Building headquarters. It was only eight thirty in the morning, so I didn’t know whether she’d be at work.
She was, answering her office phone almost immediately. “Agent Gage.”
I exited the airport and spotted a line of yellow cabs. “Mrs. Gage, this is—”
“Will Cochrane.” Marsha sounded pissed. “Are you back on my turf, causing problems?”
“Yes and no.”
“Tell me about the yes part.”
I told her what I needed. “Can
you get me clearance to the building?”
“Of course. Where are you?”
“Just leaving Dulles. I’ll be there in less than an hour.”
“You don’t go in there without me and my men.” Her voice was stern. “And if this turns out to be a false accusation, you might as well kill yourself.” She gave me details of where we should meet and hung up.
I felt weary in the back of the cab, traveling east toward the heart of D.C. Being under constant threat had put my body in a state of hypertension; it was now starting to relax and craved sleep. But my mind wouldn’t let it rest because so much was at stake. I’d achieved what I’d set out to do, and more, and yet my accomplishments now seemed irrelevant.
The cabdriver was an amiable young Indian man who spoke nonstop during the journey about the England cricket team and its current tour in his home country. It seemed surreal to be receiving an education on Britain’s national sport from a non-American in the States. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that just because I was English didn’t mean I knew a thing about cricket.
“Do you work here?” he asked as he brought his cab to a halt outside the Pentagon.
“No. I’m unemployable,” I added without thinking. I gave him a tip and walked fast across the huge parking lot, a suitcase in my hand, probably looking like a government official who was returning to work after an overseas trip.
Agent Gage and four of her men were outside the building, watching me as I approached. Marsha Gage was wearing a black pantsuit and white blouse, her long hair pinned up. She said, “A year ago, I told you never to come back to the States again.”
“Actually, you told me never to come back here and cause trouble.”
“And what does this look like?”
I smiled and held out my hand. “It’s good to see you, Agent Gage.”
The last time I’d seen the Bureau’s best agent, I was in an orange jumpsuit and shackles in a maximum-security penitentiary.
She hesitated, then shook my hand. “Do you have any evidence?”
“It’s circumstantial, yet logical.”
Marsha laughed. “We have federal jurisdiction to enter this building. But I’m not carrying a warrant, and I can’t stand in a court and swear an oath that I’ve conducted an investigation that gave me the right to interrogate a person here.” Her demeanor got colder. “I’m warning you, if this turns out to be a heap of crap, then I’ll have no hesitation in arresting you.”
