Assassin (36 page)

“No. There are no such plans. I cannot risk the welfare of the entire nation for a single life. Were Ambassador Kelly in my position, you can rest assured he would make the same decision. Is that all, gentlemen?”

Alex Hawke leaned forward across the table, his hard blue eyes locked on those of the president.

“Sir. I understand the extreme gravity of the situation. And the sense of urgency. But whatever we do, we’ve got a moral obligation to get Brick safely out of there, Mr. President.”

“I’m under enormous cabinet pressure to take this madman out now, Alex. And they’re absolutely right. The B-52s are warming up their engines.”

“Brickhouse Kelly is a great statesman, sir. He almost single-handedly brokered the current Mideast ceasefire. A war hero. The father of five fine young boys. We’ve got seventy-two hours, sir. I strenuously urge you—”

“I am well aware of all that,” the president said sharply, shoving his chair back from the table. “I certainly don’t need to be reminded by you that—”

“I’ll get him out if I have to do it myself, sir.”

The president and Alex stared at each other for several long moments, the president considering his reply. The president could count on one hand the number of men in the world who could publicly challenge his authority and get away with it. But, finally, he had to smile. Alex Hawke was certainly one of them.

“Then I’m goddamn glad somebody invited you to this tea party, Mr. Hawke. You’re probably the only man in this room who might actually be able to pull something like that off.”

“So, you would have no objection, Mr. President,” Hawke interjected, pressing his advantage, “to an independently mounted hostage rescue operation?”

His question was met with a wry smile.

“Let me put it this way, Alex. If someone can get up to the top of that goddamn mountain and get Brick Kelly out of there in seventy-two hours without compromising the American mission or the security of the republic, I assure you neither Secretary de los Reyes nor I would have any objection.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Then, with your permission, Mr. President,” Conch jumped in, “I’d like to put the Hostage Rescue Team at DSS under the joint control of Chief Patterson and Commander Hawke. Effective immediately.”

The president looked at her sharply; then at Hawke. It was no secret in Washington that Conch and Alex went way back and they shared a lot, including their love for Brick Kelly. Hell, he loved the man himself. But he had no doubt that, sometime earlier this morning, there had been a little
a priori
collusion between his two friends.

If Hawke could save Brick Kelly, God bless him. If not, he knew Alex Hawke would probably die trying.

“Done,” the president finally said, getting to his feet. “Good morning then, gentlemen. Appreciate your coming on such short notice.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. President,” Jack Patterson said, also rising. Then, looking at Hawke, he added, “C’mon, Alex, let’s saddle up. We got a long way to ride and a short time to get there.”

But Alex Hawke was looking at the beautiful Secretary de los Reyes still seated across the table. She gazed at him with her soft brown eyes as Hawke said, quietly, “We’ll get Brick out, Conch.”

“I don’t doubt that for one minute, Alex.”

“You wanted to see me, Mr. President?”

“Yes.”

Hawke had joined the president in the small sitting room used by the prime minister’s family on the top floor of Number Ten. McAtee was standing by a window, looking down into the garden. He turned around and faced Alex. He seemed to have aged since the earlier encounter in the Terracotta Room.

“Good show down there.”

“You wrote the script, sir. My role was fairly believable. Stereotypical, one might say.”

“Alex, listen. The spooks on both sides are in total agreement for once. There are at least a hundred of these goddamn suitcase nukes unaccounted for out there. Hell, they may already be on the way. They may already be inside U.S. borders. Homeland Security doesn’t know. Much as I love Brick, if it were up to me I’d blow the shit out of this bin Wazir right this goddamn minute. But to placate the other side of the aisle, I’ve got to try to cobble together this goddamn European coalition. Thank God for Anthony Tempest and the Brits. True grit, that man.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Look me in the eye and listen to this, Alex. The Nimitz Carrier Battle Group is on station in the Indian Ocean. The fire control systems aboard those cruisers and destroyers are keyed to launch Tomahawk land attack missiles in exactly seventy-one hours and forty-eight minutes. Coalition or no coalition. It would take an act of Congress to alter that launch schedule. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I pray even
that
timing is soon enough to catch this little bastard holding all his high cards.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I don’t have that option. I need to
know,
Alex. Just exactly, precisely, where those bombs are and what the living hell this maniac is up to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I need to know now. You get yourself inside this palace of his, you find Brick still alive, fine. I pray to God that will be the case. He’s a great American. But you’ve got one job and one job only. Get this bin Wazir up against a wall and make him tell you exactly where all those goddamn Pigskins are and what the hell he plans to do with them. Got it?”

“Got it.”

The president suddenly looked very, very tired. But Alex Hawke had one more question.

“Why the hell kidnap Brick, sir? Instead of taking him out like the others?”

“I’ve got a leak, Alex. A bad one. Inside Langley.”

“Tell me.”

“I had two candidates slotted to succeed Ted Sann on the seventh floor. Ambassadors Evan Slade and Brick Kelly. Six weeks ago, there was a top-secret meeting at the ‘Farm’ down in Virginia. Sann briefed both candidates on our imminent Middle East operations. This is need-to-know, so I can’t reveal the players. But we’ve got hard intel that Country A is ramping up for a nuke strike against Country B. We are going to preempt A without B’s knowledge in hopes of averting an all-out regional war. Somebody who shouldn’t have been there was in that room with Sann at that meeting. So far, we haven’t got him. Anyway, these bastards have penetrated the highest levels at Langley.”

“So they murdered Slade’s family up in Maine? To what end?”

“They obviously expected Slade to be there at the house. It was a long-planned family vacation. At an isolated location where they could prime Evan to talk by murdering his family one at a time in front of him. A standard tactic. Evan changed his plans at the last minute and sent his family ahead without him. But the sleepers pretty much kept their plans intact. Then Evan shot himself before they could get to him and get anything out of him. So now they’ll go to work on Brick by threatening his family with the same courtesy they showed the Slades.”

“Jesus.”

“Yep. The Queen invited the whole Kelly family to stay in a royal apartment at Kensington Palace for a week. Safe enough there. Brick, of course, has no way of knowing that. Still, Brick won’t talk, Alex. No matter what they threaten or do to him. They’ll figure that out pretty fast. So—”

The president looked up to see Hawke halfway out the door, pulling it closed after him.

T
HE
S
MELL OF WOMEN
. S
NAY BIN
W
AZIR INHALED DEEPLY, A
shiver of pleasure tripping lightly down his spine at the fragrant memory. His linen shirt was still soaked with sweat, sticking to his skin. An hour earlier, at the climax of his oration, the temperature outside, in the lush gardens of the Bambah Hotel, was nearly ninety. For the hour he spoke inside the great room, it was well over one hundred.

Snay giggled. Earlier that evening, he’d ordered the staff to light the furnace and turn up the heat. Filled to capacity with over four hundred nearly delirious young women, the great room had been redolent with the moist heat of pungent femininity. It was as if some great mound of exotic fruit had been placed there in the hall and had begun to ferment.

The women were screaming. They were on fire.

Having ignited them with his facile tongue, Snay now stood back from his podium, head bowed, and let them burn. They chanted. They raved. Had they been able sweat blood, they would have done so.

“Death! Death! Death!”

He whipped out his silk handkerchief and mopped his brow. Finished, drained, utterly spent, bin Wazir allowed the delicious scents and sounds to wash over him. He lifted his gaze to the rafters. To row upon row of crimson banners, faded over these many years to the color of old blood. Ten minutes became twenty. Half an hour passed. Still, pitched cries and moans issued from the mass of writhing bodies.

Ah. It had been glorious. It had been vindication. A bulwark erected against the slights and humiliations he had endured at the hands of his enemies for so very long. A kind of purification. A kind of redemption. He smiled.

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Prophet.

The wails of his disciples still reverberated within his brain as he stood now, in the shadows of the moonlit palms at the water’s edge, looking up at his beautiful Bambah on the hill.

The pink hotel was quiet now, her public rooms and long dank hallways devoid of ringing echoes, darkened. But not desolate, oh no. The old hotel was humming with restive energy, waiting to be unleashed. A small yellow chin of moon hung in a black sky peppered with silver stars. The gardens were still, save the gentle rustle of the palms. The only other sound Snay could hear was the singsong wish-wash of the surf at his feet.

He fired up a Baghdaddie and listened to the night.

Even Saddam up on the verandah was silent, although Snay knew the wily old dragon was not sleeping. The women had excited him as well. Caressing his snout, looking into those gleaming yellow eyes, Snay had seen something most familiar. There on the verandah, saying good-bye to his aged beast, it came to him just how much alike they were, he and the Komodo.

Ravenous, primitive creatures. Feral. Equipped with sharp claws. Yes, all that and one more trait they shared: they were both poisonous. A light burning on an upper floor winked out.

Sleep, little flowers.

Almost all the hotel’s lights had been extinguished. His
fleurs du mal
were deep in slumber now. In a few hours they would rise up and begin their epic and final journey. Praise Allah, what joyous havoc this old dog was about to wreak upon this world! He threw his head back and laughed at the sheer outrageousness of it all. For some moments, he cackled and capered about in the soft white sand, a fat white devil in the moonlight.

What was the name they had all called him, friend and foe alike? Tippu Tip had told him one night, many years before. Confessed it in a drunken stupor, the two of them buckled against a piss-stained wall in some dank alley in Africa, roaring over some horrible blood-soaked deed just done.

The Dog. Yes, that was it, the name they all said behind his back. The Dog.

Soon the whole world would learn that this Dog had a very jagged set of canines. He looked at the phosphorescent glow of his watch in the darkness. Almost one. What was keeping Tippu and his all-important passenger? It was late, and there was much to be accomplished before the sun rose over Suva.

At that moment, from up at the top of the drive, the engine of the ancient Daimler reluctantly turned over. He took a deep breath and allowed himself a brief moment of relaxation, perhaps the first in weeks. Months of intense planning were nearly finished. No detail of this stage had escaped him, from the sublimely technical and logistical, to the most ridiculously mundane. He’d had the most fun with the inexpensive western-style female wardrobe (he’d ordered it all online from a Land’s End catalog!) and even choosing the supple leather shoulder bags each woman would carry tomorrow.

Bags to hold the American city maps he’d ordered over the Internet from something called Triple A. Very good maps, indeed! Maps, and, of course, the precious Pigskins.

He’d even designed the New World Travel logo for the bags himself: a blue and green globe enwreathed in olive branches, suspended from the beaks of two doves. Then, he’d written the perfect slogan:

We come in peace.

He watched the Lucas headlamps of the Daimler snake down the drive, the twin yellow beams intermittently streaking through the black trunks of the palms. A moment later, the mammoth black car rolled to a stop beside him, hissing and pinging. He waited for the usual death rattle but Tippu somehow managed to keep the ancient motor at idle. He heard a heavy click and a man seated in the shadows of the rear seat pushed the door open for him.

“Good evening, Snay,” the man said in his peculiar accent. The wiry old Indian had a high-pitched girlish voice and was prone to fits of giggling. “Get in, get in! You are good, I am hoping? Yes?”

“Very good, thank you,” Snay replied settling into the deep leather cushions. The car listed to one side under his weight. He eyed the other man carefully.
Snay?
The manner was far too casual and he didn’t like it. The doctor was an ugly little bugger. A lank ponytail of greasy grey hair was stuck to the back of his balding head. A pair of thick black spectacles perched on his beaky nose, magnifying two already enormous buglike eyes.

He always kept his fingers laced protectively over his little potbelly, as if it were a pot of gold, a repository of precious coins. No, bin Wazir thought, irritated, there was little to admire here but the brain.

Tippu noisily engaged first gear and they rumbled down into the thick jungle.

The Indian, Dr. Soong, was always in a hurry to get his words out, as if his mind had a constant backlog of bottle-necked sentences.

“I am having no idea you are such a fiery orator, my dear Snay! Such stimulation! All those beauties! Oh my word! Not a dry eye in the house. Or a dry anything else, for that matter, I am suspecting. Hee-hee.”

“You were there? You were not invited, Doctor.”

“I slipped in a side door, you see, and sat at the rear. Look at my jacket! Soaked to the skin. You are having boiler problems, yes? The old place is finally falling down around your ears! You must—”

“And no one stopped you? You just came in and sat down.”

The little man seemed delighted at bin Wazir’s evident irritation.

“Yes, no one. Very aphrodisiacal qualities, your speech produced, Snay,” he said. “Oh, yes. Labial engorgement! I checked a few of them, you see, when I gave them their vaccinations. Don’t worry, said I. It’s all right. I am a doctor! Tee-hee. Most amusing, what?”

“So. All is in readiness?” Snay interrupted.

“In a manner of speaking. Most excellent, your lecture about my little Pigskin bombs. Pity I am having so much trouble with them, you see.”

“Trouble?” Snay sat forward, his pulse rate zooming. If this little shit was—“What kind of trouble?”

“They are not working, you see,” the man giggled. “Not working.”

“Not working.”

“No. Not.”

“Tippu Tip,” Snay said, speaking evenly into the speaking tube, “Pull over when we get to the cage. I want to show the doctor the baby lizards.” Blood pounded at his temples. He stood on the threshold of triumph. Nothing must interfere—

“The dragons? No-no, it’s not necessary, Pasha. I am only trying to tickle you. Tee-hee. No problem, Snay, no problem. Please be—”

“Some minor adjustments, then? The Pigskins?”

“No. Not really minor, no.”

“No? No!” Snay lunged for the man and instantly had his hands around the fellow’s scrawny neck, yanking him sideways, his thumbs already applying sufficient pressure to crush the doctor’s rattling windpipe.

“Stop!” the little man managed to get out.

“You think you can fuck with me?” the enraged Pasha screamed into his left ear. “Who will protect you now? The Americans and British have killed all your Iraqi friends, your playmates Ouday and Qusay! Pulled your glorious benefactor Saddam out of one rathole and tossed him into another! And sent the rest crawling under rocks! The Saudis, the Iranians, even your own countrymen have disowned you. Even the bloody Pakis hate your guts! Now, you tell me that everything is in readiness or I’ll kill you right here!”

“Let me go! I can’t breathe! I will talk!”

Snay hurled him back into his corner like a sack of chicken bones. The little masochist. The problem was, he liked it. It was one of the great secrets of his success and long life. Since you couldn’t hurt the man, you were at his mercy. The threat of the dragons was another matter.

“You’ve got thirty seconds before we arrive at the Komodos, you ugly little wog. Start talking.”

The doctor had his hands at his throat, massaging his cruelly bruised flesh.

“Patience? Allow me to finish? My God, you are a madman. You are now a personage of great responsibility. You must learn to control these murderous impulses. Why, the Emir himself was saying to me just the other day that—”

Bin Wazir felt hot beads of perspiration popping out at the corners of his eyes at the mere mention of the Emir. Failure now was unthinkable. Unacceptable. “Tell me what I want to hear. Or I’m feeding you to the dragons.”

“It’s the bombs are the problem. Well. Who would believe it? Not the bombs, but the fissile matter inside. The design is flawless. Feel free to call me a genius, everyone does. But! But, but, but—and here is the problem. There was unfortunately this last-minute problem with the fissile material. It was not the specific grade I paid for and—”

“Fuck! You’re dead. Tippu! Pull over!”

“Wait! Wait! Let me finish! I am not stupid, you know. I had a much better idea, you see! Ready-made. No delays. No problems. Simpler. Keep driving, I beg you, let me explain.”

Tippu braked the big car on the verge opposite the dragon cage, got out and stamped around the side. He opened the doctor’s door, reached in and grabbed his ponytail, lifting him a foot off the seat. The African looked at his master, waiting for instruction. “Ar kill him?”

“Please!” the man screeched, “Let me show you, Pasha! In the big suitcase! Open it!”

“What is in the suitcase, you miserable worm?” Snay had assumed the two polished black metal cases contained the doctor’s personal effects for the flight across the Pacific.

“The perfect weapon, dear boy! Genetically altered smallpox,” the doctor cried. “Designed it myself, I did. Impervious to the American vaccine! Nothing can stop it! Let me go and I’ll show you.”

“Bugs. Fucking bugs, I knew it.” Snay said. “Where are the bombs? I want to know now! One hundred million dollars worth of suitcase nuclear bombs, bought and paid for. Now where fucking are they?”

“You have them! They are yours! They are all stored down in your catacombs, Pasha. Inside the Blue Palace! When I return, I will make certain adjustments to make them more stable and—”

Snay could not listen to one more word, such was his fury. He nodded at Tippu and the African whipped the man out of the open door and started through the underbrush toward the cage.

“I paid a hundred million for some fucking bugs?” bin Wazir said, trotting alongside Tippu Tip, leaning down and shouting in Soong’s ear as he was being bounced along like a desperate puppet. His feet were dragging through the grass, clawing for purchase.

“A plague! A pox!” Soong cried out. “An infinite plague. Much, much deadlier than the Pigskin! The bombs, they would only kill a million perhaps. But this—NO!”

They came to the cage. The dragons were hurling themselves against the bars, thrusting glistening tongues through the bars; long and black, darting. Tippu pulled a heavy ring of keys from his robes and handed them to bin Wazir.

“I’m going to open the cage, now, Pundit,” he said, his words barely audible over the voracious roars of the Komodo dragons. They were snapping in anticipation at the steel cage rods with their viciously curved incisors. A few bones were scattered in the dirt, the remains of the British MI6 agent.

“Pasha,” the doctor said in a strangled voice, “If you kill me, you are finished. You must know this! It is over. Everything. The Emir has told me many times that if we fail in this, we both will wish we were dead long before our heads roll. Please. I beg you.”

Snay bin Wazir looked at the wizened little elf in disgust. Finally, realizing the incontrovertible truth of what the man was saying, he told Tippu to release him. As fervently as he wished to rip off this disgusting weasel’s head and toss it into the cage, the fact was, he had no choice at all. In order to make tomorrow’s absolutely critical deadline 35,000 feet above the Pacific, Snay’s newly refurbished 747 had to be wheels up before sunrise. Three hours from now.