Stuart and Emily stood paralyzed by what they had witnessed. As if in disbelief at the speed and completeness with which death came, even their tears would not fall. Neither fear nor the instinct to self-preservation would connect their brains to their bodies, propel their fast legs as the priest moved toward them. The Walther’s magazine held fifteen rounds. So he had, he calculated, ten left.
“No,” Cynthia said.
“You should have kept the children out of here where they belonged. You should have kept them alive. I wouldn’t have come after you.”
“But we’d seen you.”
The priest hesitated. “I guess you’re right.”
He shot Emily first, then Stuart, as the boy, in an attempt at manliness that was both premature and final, lurched bravely toward him. It was not until Cynthia had bent over the corpses of her children, her palms in pools of their young blood, that she was shot from behind.
Chapter Three
The young man in the Lincoln Navigator watched the priest come out of the driveway onto the winding, tree-lined street at exactly the point upon which they had agreed. The image in his new ATN Viper Night Vision Scope was sharper than he had expected it to be, and even from the safe distance of five hundred meters, he could make out the frenzied desperation of an amateur. He had heard the gunfire—too much—from the direction of the house and could only assume that Wilhelm Claussen had put up more of a fight than had been anticipated. Perhaps the man he had outfitted as a lowly parish priest had permitted himself to be engaged in conversation. That was always a risk when you involved someone with a motive, especially one at variance with your own. Such people liked to give voice to their grievances before they did their work—a mark of stupidity! And what had happened to the silencer? Now that the murderer was in view, searching the traffic for the vehicle he expected to rescue him, it probably did not matter, but it might have done.
Sirens welled in the distance, a music he found reassuring. Patrol cars, their overhead lights alternating rapidly, converged on the Claussen house from both directions, blockading its entrance, illuminating it with search beams. In total it took less than ten minutes for the officers to make their discoveries and for support and reinforcements to arrive, which, the observer thought, was efficient by any standard and all the more so for a department no doubt unused to such things.
The young man hid patiently until he was sure no ambulance had been summoned. His sole remaining concern was for the wretched fellow he had stalked in a chat room for debtors, then contrived to meet in a clinic for the chronically indebted that convened in a moldy walk-up office above a packaged goods and check cashing store in South KC. He had chosen carefully. The man had been the sixth or seventh he’d approached on the Net and the second with whom he’d made physical contact. The first of those had struck him as too weak, too tentative. To that one he had revealed nothing of his plan, extending only empathy.
But the more the next man learned about Claussen, the more enraged he had become. The young man in the Navigator had parceled out information, usually clippings from newspapers and society magazines, over several meetings, gradually bringing the dots closer until the distraught man could connect them on his own, all at once recognizing that his despair was but a part of the price paid for his better’s sunny circumstances. It had always amazed the young man how incompletely most people understood the world in which they lived, how innocent they remained of the forces that determined their fate. In the end he had not been coy. Over an early supper in a roadside diner, he’d made his pitch. Wilhelm Claussen had hurt him, too, he explained. Never mind how, or the fact that he hadn’t the nerve or skill to do the job himself. Take out Claussen and the distraught man’s debts would be seen to. There would also be money for his boy’s medical expenses and more than enough extra for him to start over somewhere else. The getaway would be arranged, in a cul-de-sac half a mile from the Claussen house. As a down payment, in a black nylon shaving kit were one hundred one-hundred-dollar bills, already circulated and unmarked. The balance would be paid once Claussen was dead.
The prospective assassin had listened carefully, all the while eating as though famished. No doubt the charbroiled prime rib in front of him was the best meal he’d downed in a long while, though not ever, for a lingering gentility suggested he’d known better days. Waiting for his reply, the younger man knew he had made the correct decision to corrupt a broken man rather than hire a professional. It was a plan without loose ends.
He had arrived in the United States as Jonathan Cazeneuve, holder of a Kenyan passport, six weeks before. On that visit he had registered at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, bought tickets to two Broadway shows, and paid restaurant checks with a credit card in the same name. As Caswell Rubin, however, he had flown on to Chicago, and then, as Peter Steele, onward to Kansas City, where he’d had his first encounter with the man he hoped to employ.
At the debt clinic and in a nearby bar afterward, they had spoken three times: about the miseries of debt, the guile of creditors, the pressures and impossibility of life. The young man had grown stubble for the occasion, dabbed it with peroxide, and worn a theatrical wig. Lifeless chestnut flecked with gray, this had added at least a decade of defeat to his appearance. He’d tested it thoroughly, judging it sufficient to fool any surveillance camera beneath which he might inadvertently pass. As far as the candidate was concerned, Peter—no surnames having been exchanged between them—vanished into the city’s underside between their meetings. Who didn’t?
After two weeks Peter disappeared from Kansas City, as did Caswell Rubin from Chicago. As Jonathan Cazeneuve, he departed from New York, via London, for Nairobi. The next week, as Franz Schenkel, the crisp, dark-haired bearer of a German passport, he arrived in Washington from Frankfurt, took the shuttle into the city, and established himself at the hotel on Massachusetts Avenue that he’d listed on his landing card. After two days of regular comings and goings, as the dingy Peter Steele he had boarded a flight for St. Louis and there, once more as Caswell Rubin, rented the Navigator he’d driven across state. He had already manufactured an impressive inventory of identities. Caswell Rubin, in fact, had been fabricated several years before. A magazine subscription had been taken out in the name of a fictitious student on one midwestern campus. When, using that subscription list, a large bank had subsequently sent an offer of credit, their card had been accepted. Bills had been charged and paid regularly ever since. So the fictitious Mr. Rubin, alive in the consciousness of the financial world, would subsidize his part in the death of Billy Claussen with some of the same plastic that Claussen’s bank had grown fat promoting. The sweetness of that irony was not lost on the young man.
As he observed the situation from the Navigator, he felt a surprising zest, which disturbed him, for he did not think of himself as evil. About violence—means in general—he was agnostic.
When no ambulances approached and enough time had elapsed for him to conclude that none had been called, he backed out of the shallow slag driveway and made his way toward a ridgeline, maintaining a steady speed of thirty-five miles per hour, braking for all stop signs. Once on this higher ground, with the Claussen property perhaps five hundred yards below and behind him, he removed a miniature radio transmitter from the console compartment. No sooner did he press it than a small firecracker exploded in the distance, only a few feet from the dark, vacant mock-Victorian cottage beneath whose eaves he had last spotted his dupe. As intended, the firecracker broke enough glass to set off the house’s alarm; a highly pitched, undulating wail shattered the cool evening. Floodlights, sudden and bright, blazed from the cottage on every side, forcing the make-believe priest from cover and drawing the attention of the nearby police. All at once the stillness that shock had imposed upon the crime scene fractured, the routines of investigators giving way to the fury of a chase.
The young man continued for a short distance, then st
opped the Navigator at the vantage point he had selected on his first reconnaissance of this operation. Farther along an unobstructed route to town and practically unnoticeable, it was close enough to the drama that after powering up his infrared scope he could monitor the priest’s increasingly erratic flight. The man scurried north, then west, then north again, searching for the red Hummer Peter had promised would be at this cul-de-sac to evacuate him, the Hummer where he would find not only safety but all the money he would need to save his son and recover the lost ends of his own fraying life.
It took the police one and a half minutes longer than the young man had predicted to spot and gain on their quarry. Within another minute they had surrounded him, flushed him from a pathetic stand of forsythia that had gone brown and rigid with the season, trained their own lamps on him. Their K-9s barked. The murderer stood in the middle of the circular road, his dark shoes and trouser cuffs caked with mud, his clerical collar awry but still in place.
“Stop! He’s a priest!” one officer cried out.
“We can’t be sure,” said another.
“Put down the gun, Father.”
“Do what he says: Put down the gun, please!”
The priest remained still, his eyes looking past the police—surely for the Hummer, for Peter, for the freedom and anonymity that, if nothing else, had been his up until he’d shot the big tycoon, his daughter and grandchildren. Had he made a mistake? Maybe so, but it was too late now to rectify it. In life there was no going back. That much he understood.
So gradually he began to turn, as if the means of escape lay in the opposite direction. The police took aim. “Put your gun down, sir.”
The image the young man watched in his night scope, although too pronounced in its greens and reds, was of a weak, impressionable face upon which reality was dawning slowly but with finality.
When the confronted priest raised the Walther, inserted its barrel deeply into his mouth, and, without hesitating, squeezed the trigger, the wretch collapsed just as the young man had envisioned he would.
Without regret, satisfied with the efficacy of both his perception and his methods, he started the Navigator’s engine.
Manning a hastily established checkpoint at the foot of Billy Claussen’s driveway, Trooper Darnall regarded Trooper Larrabee across the darkened landscape, his voice and expression still incredulous. “I can’t believe it,” he said.
“I know. I mean, he seemed like such a nice guy,” Larrabee agreed. “Didn’t you think so? Imagine leaving all this behind you! Holy crap!”
“Believe me, it’s just the beginning,” Darnall replied sagely as the flashing lights of their vehicles intermittently illuminated their faces.
“You know something about him?”
“Just what everyone does.”
“Which is?”
“Come on, you’re kidding me? The biggest man in the state. Did you hear anything up at the house?”
Larrabee shook his head. “Nothing official. I was there only a minute or two.”
“Anything unofficial?”
“There were four of them: Claussen and, the sergeant thinks, his daughter and two young grandchildren.”
“Shit!” Darnall told him.
“The perp shot himself.”
“Who’d do something like this?”
“Why’s the real question.”
“Money or love or hate,” Darnall told him. “It’s always one of the three. First thing they teach you in criminology.”
“Okay, but who benefits if they’re all dead?”
“They’re not all dead. The old man has a son named Luke, one of those spoiled-shit playboy types. Been in the news.”
“For what?” Larrabee asked.
“Being an asshole.”
“It’s like it goes with the job description. You have a father who’s one way, a kid who’s the exact opposite. Can I tell you something? If I’d been born rich like Luke Claussen, I wouldn’t be an asshole.”
“You wouldn’t be you either,” his friend told him.
“Bullshit!”
“Forget it. My guess is this asshole’s a whole lot richer tonight than he was this afternoon.”
Chapter Four
Very little about him was immediately apparent. Beyond the simple statistics that appeared on most of his driver’s licenses and at least one of his passports, listing him as six feet one inch tall, weighing eighty-one kilograms or 178 pounds, having blue eyes and light brown hair, Philip Frost’s exact nationality, background and profession ordinarily eluded those observing him, which was as he preferred it. Whether he was about to enter Europe or the United States, for example, he was seldom offered an immigration form by flight attendants. Isabella Cavill, whom he had been seeing for almost a year, knew, in addition to his moods, that he was a Sagittarius, but even she had not been able to disentangle the multiple strains of DNA that made him such a fierce but cool lover, so generous yet distant, so incisive yet detached. In his erect carriage and the forward thrust of his walk there was something Prussian, yet when he let himself go he could bellow with the unforced, ingratiating laugh of an American schoolboy, tease with the subtlety of a cultivated Englishman—and take a joke, too, but only one that went so far and no further.
He had been born in New York to a Swiss-German father and a half-Danish, half-American mother but as a child had not been educated there. Instead, for reasons put down to his father’s job in the UN Secretariat and the constant and far-flung travel it necessitated, Philip had been sent to a minor English prep school then, at thirteen, to an elite institution just outside Geneva where he had numbered among his classmates one African and two Arab princes as well as the scions of at least a dozen well-known, worldwide industrial fortunes.
His four years at MIT had given him his first taste of life in the country of his birth. Why, after graduating, he had chosen the City of London rather than Wall Street in which to begin his quest had had more to do with fate than planning. At a seminar during his senior year, he’d paid rapt attention to a guest speaker who had latterly turned from the analysis of particles to that of markets: a quirky, donnish man with the arms of a stevedore. Ian Santal had come out of nowhere to Cambridge University a generation before and there made a name for himself as a man of science. “A man of the Left, then of the Right and, both those passions having flagged, now of the moment” was how he had described himself to the students, and it was the fact that such range was possible that had intrigued Philip. He had pursued Santal and Santal had hired him. It was—or at least at the time it had seemed—as simple as that. The firm’s trading rooms were in London, so that was where he’d gone, not because it was an agreeable city but because from it he could discern the clearest path to the future he coveted.
Could all of that—the firm’s rise, then decline following Santal’s departure, his own abandonment of finance for diplomacy, strangely at Ian’s instigation—really have been as long ago as it was? All but a decade now? On the ides of March (aware he was the only one among present company who would recognize the date), Philip asked himself that question as he looked westward upon the Sea of Azov, with the Crimea in the distance. It was the shallowest sea in the world, forty-six feet at its deepest point, a northern recess of the Black Sea near Europe’s winding border with Asia, accessible only through the narrow, gatelike Strait of Kerch that lay before him. It was not the season to be here, he thought, not the time of year when any but the most intrepid tourists would book into the new resort that in due course would replace the nuclear-missile installation that had once threatened Turkey and much of Western Europe. No, the tourists would come after the thaw and before the first frost, when the east wind no longer stung and the flat farmland was no longer winter white but a patchwork of mown green and yellow rectangles. They would pay top ruble, dollar, euro—whatever—in order to pa
ss time at a seaside so pristine, in a venue haunted by the alternate history it had by a hairsbreadth escaped.
None of that was his business. As leader of the American team assigned to assist the Russian military in the decommissioning of its surplus nuclear weapons, he was here to make this particular dream possible, not to realize it. His own dream was elsewhere, allied to that of the developers only tangentially. For the time being, it was his job to erase the past, safely and to the satisfaction of everyone, even as it was his intention to shift a piece of it, assets that were literally priceless, onto his own account. No scion of industry possessed such assets; nor did any African or Arab prince, though several were said to have sought them. No academic had ever controlled nor trader dealt in such commodities. He had to smile, even allow himself a laugh. As with all the most brilliant plans, the genius of Ian’s lay in its simplicity and patience. He had seduced the necessary parties long ago, had recruited Philip when Philip thought the reverse was taking place. Most of all he had guessed right: that in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise, Russia would require both practical help and geopolitical cover as it dismantled weapons systems that had become burdensome and superfluous. The task force at the top of which a man of Philip’s personal and academic pedigree fit so naturally had been named after the American senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, who had sponsored the legislation authorizing it. To Philip’s surprise it had survived myriad recurring strains in relations between Moscow and Washington to continue its work without major impediment. And now, as it oversaw the dismantling of this remote and redundant warehouse and launching site, the last piece of Ian’s puzzle appeared about to be set into place. What a puzzle it was! He had to hand Ian infinite credit even if it was he, Philip, who had refined it to his own advantage, given it a final twist, disguised it so cleverly that it could now be hidden, without fear of detection, in plain sight.
Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) Page 5
