The Holy Assassin

by Luís Miguel Rocha

  Sarah found the toy donkey on her key ring and fit the key in the lock just as a shadow darkened the whiteness of the solid wooden door. She looked behind her and saw a London bus stopped in front, letting passengers with normal lives get off and on. If only she could be the same. Instead she had to remember things like the place she put the dossier that JC, or someone working for him, more probably, had left in her room on the seventh floor of the Grand Hotel Palatino in Rome.

  ‘Sarah Monteiro?’ she heard a voice say in her ear. It wasn’t Simon. She looked at a man dressed in a black suit with a scar on his face from his right eye to his upper lip. He looked like a typical bad guy from pulp fiction. She felt panic, among her other feelings, but to her surprise, she managed to control it enough not to let it show.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ she asked, showing no nervous trembling in her vocal cords.

  ‘My name’s Simon Templar,’ he replied succinctly. ‘I need you to come with me.’ One more thing to deal with. He gripped her arm as he showed his identification, a card inside the wallet with his photograph, a few years younger, with his affiliation printed underneath. SIS. Secret Intelligence Services.

  ‘Why?’ Sarah asked, flushing. Her nervousness gave her chills. Was this really happening?

  ‘Affairs of State. I can’t tell you more,’ he concluded, showing some irritation. The State with a capital S is above everything. Faith, race, profession, personal life, nothing matters when it concerns the State. You can’t question it. You just comply.

  The agent, Simon Templar, whose name seemed to have come out of some 1960s television series, took Sarah’s arm, like a prison guard, alert for any unforeseen or illicit action.

  ‘I don’t need a guide. I know how to walk, thank you,’ Sarah told him, freeing her arm and looking confidently at the agent.

  They walked to a black car with official markings, somewhat reassuring for Sarah.

  ‘Sarah,’ the other Simon called, running to join her. Her assistant had been in shock, not reacting, but soon had recovered his quick thinking. ‘What do you need me to do?’

  ‘Ah … I don’t know how long this is going to delay us, so …’ She thought hard. ‘Go in my house and in the bookcase in the hall look for a wooden box with a bottle of vintage wine, Oporto 1976. Behind it is a dossier. Take it with you and wait for me to contact you,’ Sarah concluded, getting into the backseat of the vehicle.

  ‘Will do, Sarah,’ he calmed her. ‘Anything you need … anything.’

  The government car took off fast, its interior hidden by tinted glass. Simon, a well-trained employee, approached the solid white door. The key was still in the lock. In the unexpected confusion, Sarah had forgotten to take it out. The refrain of Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ began to sound on Simon’s phone. He didn’t let it reach the third verse.

  ‘Hello, my love,’ he greeted his lover. ‘You’ll never believe what just happened. I’m right in the middle of things … I’ll tell you later.’ He listened to the voice of love on the other end of the imaginary line. ‘We’re going, I mean, we were going … we still have to go, as soon as she’s free.’ More conversation. ‘Free is just a figure of speech. As soon as she’s ready … I’ll tell you more … Now? Now I am going in her house.’

  In order to explain why two seconds later Simon was lying on the ground between the sidewalk and the asphalt with the door broken in half on top of him, it is necessary to use a slow-motion camera, since two seconds have been enough to separate the last words from all the rest that follow. And, if two seconds seem very little, they’re more than enough for the key to turn in the lock of the solid white door, for the door to hit him, forced by an explosion from inside, and throw him several feet through the air, striking his ribs against a double-decker bus that was pulling away. He’d crushed the vehicle’s body in a little without breaking the windows. The explosion had taken care of that, not only in the bus, but in a radius of hundreds of yards. Almost all the cars and houses had seen their windows disintegrate into thousands of pieces, thrown in all directions. Simon was on the ground with his feet on the sidewalk and his head in the street, next to the bus, showing no signs of life. He didn’t notice the flames erupting from Sarah’s house and reaching the ones next door. Incoherent cries resounded through the street. They recalled older and more recent attacks on the lives of normal people. Lives ended, without appeal or grievance, without pity.

  Simon opened his eyes for a moment, blood running over his face and body, splinters of glass, wood, and ashes on top of him. The boards that were the door had split over him. His unfocused eyes tried to see, but couldn’t make out anything. Where was he? Was he dead? Was he entering heaven? He felt no pain. He sensed shapes moving closer. A second, a millisecond, and something in his own mind, a fleeting focus on one of the shapes, provoked a smile before he lost consciousness, murmuring.

  ‘My love, my love.’

  It was curious how everything could change in seconds.

  17

  Having just passed through the automatic glass doors of the entrance, let us continue ahead to the elevators. Except for Sunday, it’s very crowded all week. Since today’s Thursday, we can understand the movement, at first sight chaotic, of all those who work here, on every side, in the elevator, going up the stairs, walking up and down the maze of hallways, everyone with a plastic identification tag hanging on jacket, shirt, or low-cut blouse. Each person is an important piece, a part of the whole system. Once in the elevator, we press 3. Once there we come across a long hallway, take a right and cover a hundred yards, more or less, where we come upon a pair of aluminum doors. They’re closed, but open with a push. Twenty or thirty yards down, where the hallway makes a sharp ninety-degree turn at the corner of the building, is another pair of aluminum doors with a burnished plaque engraved with the word ‘Pathology.’

  Inside are three stainless-steel gurneys, as well as a number of monitors, utensils, and cabinets. A whole wall is covered with steel and eighteen square doors, uniformly arranged, three rows of six covering the length and height of the wall. These are refrigerated chambers that hold bodies that left this world under doubtful circumstances. We are speaking of the autopsy room of the Nederlands Forensisch Instituut, the place where the dead await their final judgment.

  Here we see the three Americans enter, Geoffrey Barnes, Jerome Staughton, and Thompson. They’ve come to view the bodies of the two English fornicators and Solomon Keys, and they don’t have much time.

  Unlike conventional morgues, rooms vary in temperature between fifteen and twenty degrees centigrade below zero in order to totally interrupt decomposition, preserving as much forensic data as possible. In hospital and funeral morgues the intention is not to stop decomposition, but slow it down, so they keep the rooms between two and four degrees centigrade above zero. These are two different ways of preserving the departed long enough to say all there is to say about the causes of their death, before sending them to their last resting place, wherever that may be.

  A man in a white gown, a coroner, according to his name tag, was cleaning one of the tables with a fine hose shooting out liquid antiseptic, preparing for a new autopsy, free from any old germs contaminating the new tests. He looked at the three big men who’d just come in while he washed the blood into the adjacent drains. How many corpses have passed under his scalpel today to suffer the ultimate incision, the most invasive of all, which will relate everything, the vices and virtues without omission or lies or half-truths, in black and white, in the entrails, the arteries, the veins, and other organs whether vital or not? After observing everything, annotating, noting, measuring, disconnecting inside and out, he would close the skin together again and sew it up, depending on the particular results, with or without all or some of the organs put back inside. A former life was now filed away in one of the refrigerated compartments awaiting the funeral, cremation, identification, or claim by the family. Everything society has to show ended up in these chambers: happy families struck down by
an accident, victims of crimes of passion who miscalculated the risk of a spur-of-the-moment affair, John Does, and criminals who saw their deals turn bad. Whatever a human being is capable of doing to his fellow man, his family, his friend, neighbor, or stranger, because an argument got out of control, or even for profit.

  ‘Are you Dr. Davids?’ Barnes asked impatiently, in English obviously.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ the other answered in the same language, continuing his routine.

  ‘Lieutenant Balkenende gave us permission to come in,’ Barnes continued. ‘We want to see three bodies.’

  ‘Ik wil ook veel dingen,’ the other said in his own language. I also want many things. ‘Wait a minute, please.’

  ‘Wij willen deze dode drie zien, nu,’ Barnes demanded irritably, shaking a paper in his hand. We want to see these three bodies, now. He was not truly multilingual, but an understanding of basic phrases in the most important European languages like Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian was required for his appointment to a position in Europe. ‘And don’t make me grab you by the neck and shove you into one of these compartments,’ he concluded in English.

  ‘Amerikaanen,’ the doctor let slip between his teeth, grabbing the paper out of Geoffrey Barnes’s hand. Always arrogant.

  He read the names written on the paper, turned to a computer installed on a small square table, and pressed the keys that made the first name appear. Solomon Silvander Keys, the victim’s complete name. After he pressed the Enter key, detailed information appeared on the monitor with the certificate of autopsy attached, and many other facts of little relevance to Barnes and his agents. What Davids wanted from this procedure was to know the location of the victim, which appeared immediately in the lower right screen, number 13. Since the count was made starting from the top and left to right, we know that the thirteenth door Davids is heading toward, or Dr. Davids, we should say, is in the bottom row on the left side.

  The doctor opened the square steel door and slid out the rack he found inside, where the corpse was lying stretched out, inert. A container that held Solomon Keys’s life of eighty-seven years. The tone of the skin, noticeably ashy, was a result of the temperature to which the body was subjected, interrupting completely the decomposition, but giving him a cadaverous, supernatural, vampiric look. If three of the men hadn’t been used to dealing with the most revolting scenes, they might have doubled over with fear or vomited their guts out, as we see Jerome Staughton doing at this moment into a blue plastic bucket.

  ‘Go outside, Staughton,’ Barnes ordered. He had no time for his subordinate’s weakness.

  Staughton went gladly, with no desire to be heroic. Barnes knew perfectly the strengths and weaknesses of those who served him and what they could tolerate. Otherwise he would’ve made him stay there for the entire observation. Staughton was good at other things, as he’d already proved in the bathroom at Amsterdam Centraal. To observe and deduce, summarize and process facts. Yes, no one could compete with Jerome Staughton in analysis.

  A serious Barnes looked at the body. Totally naked of clothes and prejudices, sanctified by death. There were two entrance wounds corresponding to the police report, one in the chest and the other exactly in the center of his head, brown, lifeless, since even the blood loses vitality.

  ‘Do you have the ballistics report?’ Barnes asked without taking his eyes off the body of the old member of the agency.

  ‘Yes, wait a minute,’ the doctor answered, reluctantly returning to the small table, where he looked at the monitor. ‘Nine millimeter.’

  ‘Nine millimeter,’ Barnes repeated. ‘Of course. It had to be.’ He continued looking at the corpse. ‘Were all of them killed with the same gun?’

  He couldn’t take his eyes from the body. He knew that one day it could be him stretched out on another gurney in some other morgue, with a bullet in the head and wrinkles cut with age, if he made it to Solomon Keys’s age. Solomon’s world didn’t exist anymore – the time when people trusted strangers who came out of nowhere suddenly, manipulating them at their will, paying generously for information, eliminating those who had to be, and avoiding risks to those who took care of that. Today things were more dangerous, the criminals much more intelligent, cautious, always two steps ahead of the intelligence services, and never thinking twice. Besides, double or triple or totally invented lives, as in his time, didn’t make sense now. Everything was done at a distance on the Internet or other wireless technology. The demand was much greater. Communications were encoded, and millions of dollars required to validate or decode a message, with no certainty it was trustworthy. That was one of the reasons the company opted for surveillance on everyone, not just those who might be considered suspicious, since in reality they have no idea who is or isn’t. After an information scan in which the supercomputer uses key words such as ‘president,’ ‘attack,’ ‘bomb,’ ‘United States of America,’ ‘menace,’ ‘gas,’ among others on a long list, via Internet, audio, and video, from time to time they manage to catch someone. No, Barnes wouldn’t make it to Solomon Keys’s eighty-seven years, nowhere close. The shot to the temple was practically guaranteed. Hence the compassionate look he gave the deceased old man.

  ‘Yes. All with the same gun,’ the doctor concluded.

  ‘I want to see the other two,’ Barnes demanded.

  More fast finger movement on the keyboard, and the information appeared on the computer screen. Doors 15 and 16 held the bodies of the English couple. Davids went to 15 first and slid out the rack to reveal … no body.

  ‘This is unexpected,’ Davids uttered, paralyzed with surprise.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right one?’ Barnes asked.

  ‘It’s what the computer says,’ the doctor informed him.

  He opened 16. Nothing.

  ‘Fuck,’ Barnes swore. ‘Do you see this?’ He whirled around to ask Thompson.

  Irritated, impatient, Barnes started opening all the refrigerated compartments and sliding out the racks.

  ‘Hey,’ the doctor protested.

  ‘Keep quiet,’ Thompson warned, also opening the compartments and reading the tag attached to each corpse’s toe.

  Thirteen corpses later, some compartments empty, they still hadn’t found a sign of the English couple. They reviewed the list, and everything seemed to be in order with the rest.

  ‘Who could have taken them away?’ Barnes asked the doctor.

  ‘No one. The bodies aren’t even prepared for transfer yet.’

  ‘And when will that be? Who takes them?’

  ‘In this case, since they’re foreigners, the family or a representative of their country of origin, but always accompanied by a family member.’

  ‘Could there be an error? Could they already have been handed over and the information not yet entered in the computer?’ Thompson wanted to know.

  ‘It seems strange to me, but I’m going to find out,’ Davids informed him, much friendlier now than in the beginning. It was the morbidity of the situation. Irony. Irony.

  He picked up a telephone attached to the wall next to the entrance door and punched three numbers, an internal extension. Three seconds later he started a conversation in his nasal Dutch that ended with violently slamming down the receiver, leaving it dancing on the end of the cord.

  ‘He’s coming,’ he explained.

  ‘Who?’ Barnes and Thompson asked.

  ‘The boss. Dr. Vanderbilt,’ he explained. ‘Zoon van een wijfje’ – son of a bitch.

  The reasons for his blasphemies were his own, of no interest to us, nor to Barnes, Thompson, or Staughton, who came in white as a cauliflower, cleaning his mouth with a cloth handkerchief and covering his nose with it.

  ‘Everything is sterilized. It doesn’t smell of anything,’ Davids pointed out, fed up with all the interruptions. They were going to set his work back. Staughton paid no attention to the remark. He looked at the open doors of the gigantic refrigerated bay and the thirteen corpses slid out fro
m the compartments. He looked at Thompson curiously. The latter, seeing him, turned his eyes away.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ he advised.

  Meanwhile, the doctor, who must have been the previously mentioned Vanderbilt, Dr. Davids’s boss, came in. He was wearing a blue suit with an indigo tie underneath his open white gown. His posture radiated confidence and arrogance. He cut short the ‘Goede nacht, heren’ – Good evening, gentlemen – upon seeing the macabre spectacle. It looked like someone wanted to buy bodies, or parts of them.

  ‘Davids, sluit alles, nu,’ he shouted at Davids, the equivalent of ordering him to close up all the shit, without the profanity, but inherent in the tone he used. ‘What’s going on, gentlemen? Are you trying to screw things up?’ he offered in a joking tone.

  Barnes gestured to Thompson to place himself in Davids’s path and keep him from carrying out his chief’s order.

  ‘Stop there, Davids,’ Barnes said. ‘Nobody is touching anything in here until you tell me where the two missing corpses are.’

  ‘But what’s going on, gentlemen? Where do you think you are? In your own country? Here you don’t give orders about anything,’ Vanderbilt made clear, abandoning his conciliatory tone.

  ‘This American was murdered in your country in this city. If you knew how important he is for the United States, you’d think twice. If we were able to get to Baghdad in three weeks, we can easily get here in three days.’

  ‘Okay, okay. You needn’t get all worked up. Besides, you’re under Dutch jurisdiction. That body isn’t going anywhere unless I give the authorization.’

  He’s put us in our place, Barnes thought.