Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (12 page)

It was all over in twenty seconds.

“That’s all right,” Ghazi said. He too had lost sight, just as in the other trials. He’d experimented with a number of different dyes before succumbing to the fact that a visible-light experiment was beyond the scope of his resources. It would have been useful in determining a precise measurement of fall rate. As it was … one did what one could.

The girl stopped filming and handed over the camera. Ghazi gave the primary reel to the boy.

The two children looked at him expectantly. “Can we do it now?” they asked in near unison.

Ghazi smiled. It was always their favorite part. “Yes, let’s.”

He pulled a switchblade from his pocket, flicked the release, and the razor-sharp blade snapped into place. Ghazi turned the knife in his hand and presented it to the girl, handle first. She took it and severed the string from the main spool. They watched the big raft of balloons, free of the liquid mass in the container and untethered, soar upward into a flawless sky.

“I wonder where it will end,” said the boy.

“That is the joy, is it not?” Ghazi replied. “The wonder of what might be.”

The balloons kept rising, and soon the happy bunch of silver dots became a less magical dark blob as it rode the upper level winds toward Iran. Ghazi had never calculated how high they might go, but he remembered the pilot, Tuncay, remarking that he had once spilled coffee in his lap when a large, brightly dressed bundle of silver had appeared unexpectedly in his windscreen at thirty-five-thousand feet. Mylar was a wondrous invention, with incredible tensile strength and excellent chemical stability. The kind of thing Ghazi himself might have invented had he ever been given the chance. Unfortunately, chemical engineers in Iraq found little opportunity to pursue inspiration with research.

“All right, off you go,” he said. “And remember—if the wind is calm tomorrow, come at the same time.”

The children trotted away, their sharp eyes still locked on the sky, mesmerized by what was now no more than a tiny dot. Wondering.

“Malika!” Ghazi called.

The girl forced her eyes downward, and Ghazi held out an empty hand. She smiled broadly and ran over with the still open switchblade. Ghazi took it and held it like a teacher directing a pointer at a student. “And remember, tell no one of our games. It is only for us.”

“Of course, Mr. Ghazi!” She scurried away and took her brother by the elbow, and soon the two were running a winding path over the brown-grass berm in that carefree manner reserved for children.

Ghazi grinned with satisfaction. It would have been terribly difficult to conduct the trials on his own—yet he had found a way forward. Indeed, he doubted there were two more reliable assistants anywhere in Iraq.

He closed the knife and slid it into the backpack at his feet. Unzipping a second compartment, he withdrew a small box the size of a shoe, attached to which was a sensor on a coiled cord. He turned the machine on, performed a calibration sequence, then walked south along the levee. He angled toward the southern field where, given today’s gentle winds, the liquid mist would have come back to earth. Two days earlier a westerly gust had arrived unexpectedly, ruining his measurements and sending an entire batch of his low-level source material across the Shatt Al Arab and into Iran. It ruined the morning’s work, but there
was
a certain irony in it.
Back from whence it came.

Just before reaching the hot zone, Ghazi made sure the children were gone, and he took a last look for any other wandering souls. The time of year helped. In summer, when the groves were busy and the harvest near, he would never have been able to use this place. The only options then for uninterrupted testing would be the surrounding marshes or the western desert. And the marshes, of course, were wholly incompatible with the design of his experiment.

Convinced he was alone, Ghazi took his one precaution. He pulled a disposable respirator from his pocket and placed it over his nose and mouth. Holding the sensor in front of him with both hands, he looked rather like a man divining for water. Which, in a wholly unapplied sense, was very near the truth.

For thirty minutes he walked back and forth over the levee. He stopped now and again to record readings that could later be plotted and compared to his previous data points. He was nearly finished when a truck appeared in the distance. Ghazi set aside his work and dropped quickly behind the levee. The vehicle was not military, but a large western-built pickup truck—most likely a contractor from one of the oil facilities in Rumaila. He never found out because the truck kept going.

Relieved, Ghazi went back to work. Ten minutes later he was walking back to the farmhouse. With the backpack on his shoulder he kept an easy pace, determined to enjoy the lovely morning. Ghazi was startled when a clutch of plovers scattered from the brush, and he paused to watch them wing skyward.
Asiaticus
or
alexandrinus
? he wondered. Whatever the case, he hoped they would fly far from here. The isotope he was using for his tests was not particularly high-level, but it was persistent enough. Ghazi pushed the idea from his head, lest his mood darken. If felt good to be working again, to have purpose to his day, and he resolved that when he reached the farmhouse he would brew a pot of the good English tea and pray.

Or perhaps just the tea.

Since leaving home, and the watchful eye of his devout mother, he had found himself increasingly distanced from Allah. If he was a Muslim now it was because he felt a need to be something. His transformation had begun at university, as was so often the case. There he’d discovered that he liked beer and dancing, and that he very much liked women. Ghazi still prayed on occasion, but blasphemed more often, and like most Iraqis he thought the country’s clerics were cracked. Of course, the clerics themselves could afford the luxury of being pious—they had jobs and wives and no end of food on their blessed tables.

Upon reaching the farmhouse, Ghazi filled a pot with water and set it on the stove. As he waited for the boil, he unpacked his gear, taking particular care with the delicate scintillation counter. He glanced at his prayer rug, gave a short sigh, and left it untouched. Instead Ghazi went to the makeshift desk, and with warm sunlight streaming through the window he opened his notebook and began to correlate another morning’s data.

FIFTEEN

South of Porto Pino, on the southern shore of Sardinia, rests an errant horse-shaped peninsula known as Capo Teulada. It is a jagged and bleak place, accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicles or seagoing watercraft, and then only useful in the more pleasant summer months when families gather for seaside lunches and young lovers ensconce themselves in quiet coves. There are no villages or townships and, if one discounts the small herds of bony goats, there is not a single permanent resident, this a consequence of the sandy, infertile soil, and an unfailingly rigorous topography.

Fittingly, Capo Teulada meets the surrounding Mediterranean in all her obstinacy with an imposing shoreline, ranging from vertical cliffs to bramble-encrusted coves. Tenacious birds nest in thorny plants, and the bitter winds of winter alternate with an iron summer sun. Yet for all Capo Teulada’s shortcomings, none are apparent when viewed from the sea—particularly when one’s vantage point rests a mere twelve inches above the surface.

It was some years ago in France, provisionally situated in a windswept safe house on the northern coast of Brittany, that David Slaton had taken up surfing. For the first week of his residence he’d stood on the high hills watching waves that had built for a thousand miles reach in from the Celtic Sea, and he’d seen the clean point break raking the angled peninsula. So it was only natural, when he came across an old fiberglass twin-fin in a woodshed, that Slaton had put himself to the test. He by no means mastered the art in the following weeks, yet relished the physical challenge. He also found the waves a much needed diversion from his appointed mission—plotting the demise, by ballistic means, of a Hezbollah bomb-maker ensconced in a villa some three kilometers south. The man was an oddity—a radical Shi’a demolition expert who actually survived to middle age, and who, suffering either a loss of religious zeal or a conversion to capitalism, had gone private, and earned enough handsome paydays to see him through his days in comfort. Unfortunately, as Slaton knew better than anyone, there were certain lines of work from which one could never retire, and in time the man’s only earned pension came by way of a 168-grain boat tail round.

Now those swells of Brittany were a distant memory as Slaton paddled toward Sardinia on a dead-calm sea. On the waxed fiberglass surface in front of him was the double-wrapped trash bag containing his jacket and street clothes—which after an hour at sea might or might not be dry—along with his remaining money and identity documents. Effectively, all his worldly possessions encased in 4-mil plastic. The wetsuit he was wearing had come from the same storage closet as the surfboard, and while it was too large and leaked at the seams, the neoprene did enough to keep his core temperature at a safe level on the frigid February sea.

He smelled the briny air, and heard nothing more than the soft lap of waves against the board’s rails. He estimated he’d jumped ship roughly six miles from land, a distance he hoped to negotiate in slightly over an hour. The muscles in his back ached, and twice he stopped to rest, the second time floating still on a silent sea as the sun breached the horizon. The radiant heat recharged him, and he felt warmer as the scalloped shoreline came near.

There were no signs of life along the desolate coast, and Slaton steered for a thin stretch of sandy cove. As the water became shallow, the gentle swells built into modest three-foot waves, but Slaton made no attempt to stand for the ride to shore. Even if there was no obvious peril involved, a life in the dark arts had taught him many lessons. Chief among them—style points were for dead men.

Keeping to his belly, Slaton skimmed ashore on a gentle roll of white water. He carried the board above the tide line, and in a dense stand of thicket exchanged his leaky wetsuit for nearly dry clothes. The wetsuit, surfboard, and plastic bag he buried in a depression, covering everything with sand and driftwood.

He hiked north until he found a road, and dawn had gone to morning when he reached the first town. It was a sleepy place called Sant’Anna Arresi, and by then his hair was dry and his pace quick—with the exception of the wound on his thigh, his injuries had largely mended. A hired cab took him to Iglesias, and there he waited thirty minutes for the train to Cagliari.

He spent time in front of a mirror in the station restroom washing salt from his face and finger-combing his hair, and he dumped half a pound of sand from his shoes into a trash bin. Slaton took a crusty roll with butter and a steaming cup of coffee as he waited in the platform café, and before noon that day he was at the Cagliari Airport, queuing up to the Alitalia counter.

He exchanged pleasantries with the ticket agent, a striking woman with black hair, olive skin, and inarguably Roman features.

“Your destination, sir?” she asked in the English he’d initiated.

Slaton took pause.

It was the all-important question, and the one that, ever since landing in a heap at the foot of the bastions of Mdina, he had imagined others were asking.

Where would he go?

Did his pursuers know about the banker in Zurich? Did they know about his family? Part of him wanted to rush to Virginia and build a fortress around his wife and child. But might doing so place them in the line of fire? He made his decision.

“Zurich, please.”

“Business or coach?” queried the smiling woman.

“Business,” Slaton said, thinking,
More euros, fewer questions
.

He handed over the credit card and passport in the name of Eric Risler, thankful for his foresight in establishing the credit account. It was difficult to go anywhere these days without a valid credit card—one of the curses of an increasingly Web-constrained world.

“You have spent time at our seaside?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?”

She held up his passport and Slaton saw it was damp along one edge. “Oh, yes. There’s probably some sand in it as well. The mark of a good holiday.” He smiled, and so did the agent. It was hardly a concern. In truth, the imperfection gave the document greater authenticity. When she handed it back, along with a boarding pass, Slaton knew the legend of Eric Risler had held up perfectly—as a fifty-thousand-euro forgery should.

“Enjoy your flight, sir.”

“Thank you.”

Within an hour Slaton’s circumstances had risen measurably. He was in a wide leather seat on the airplane and scanning his complimentary copy of
La Repubblica,
a second cup of coffee and cloth napkin on the tray in front of him. Nothing in the news drew his eye—always a relief, as the gray dealings of his life had more than once been reflected on the front page—and so Slaton folded the paper and pressed a switch, and the big seat contorted into a comfortable reclined position.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but it was quite hopeless. He felt like a detective facing a baffling case, his few scraps of evidence misconnecting like stray shooting stars. The Pole he’d killed in the stairwell. Ben-Meir, a former Mossad operative. Who would assemble such a group? Men who administered money in Zurich? Others who administered death from Damascus or Gaza? Those in the latter factions certainly had motive, given Slaton’s long and lethal past, yet neither the tribes of Palestine nor the madmen of Tehran would dispatch hired guns to Malta. They would use their own killers. Nothing seemed to correlate, and it left Slaton facing the most bleak question a man can ask.

Who would benefit from a world without me?

The most honest answer that came to mind was a bitter and disturbing one, and a revelation that did nothing to resolve his dilemma. The clearest beneficiaries were two innocents who were, at that moment, situated tenuously across an ocean to the west.