The Assassin (22 page)

“No, sir,” Grafton said forcefully. “Lincoln did not say that there was no difference. He asked if he had to leave the hair on the head of the agitator untouched. He did not answer the question, he merely asked it. Now I tell you, if we try to kill everyone who disagrees with us politically or on religious grounds, we are going on a fool’s errand. We’ll be up to our armpits in blood, to no avail.”

“Maybe that is where we should be,” Tchernychenko said heavily. “The time has come when we must take sides and chose a course.”

“We cannot murder everyone who disagrees with us,” Jake Grafton said curtly.

“I wished the Islamic fascists believed that,” Tchernychenko shot back, undaunted. “On the other hand, Putin understands he cannot kill everyone, but he can kill the people who irritate him the most. Corpses make wonderful examples.”

I was sitting in a stuffed chair in the big room across from the main entrance, well back from the light, dozing, when I sensed that someone had entered the room. I tightened my grip on the Springfield as I pried niy eyelids open. It was Jake Grafton. Tchernychenko was behind him.

“Hey, Tommy, time to go.”

I came erect and pocketed the pistol. We collected our driver, said our good-byes and stepped out into the windy night. The temp had dropped some while we were there.

As we rode away in the car with Speedo behind the wheel, driving on the wrong side of the road, Grafton said, “Did you get the bugs in place?”

“Every room in the joint,” I muttered, “including the one you spent the evening in. Best job I’ve done in years.”

“And the retransmitter?”

“Stuck it on the side of the house. Leaned out a second-floor window. No way to hide it, of course.”

Grafton didn’t say anything. Each bug would transmit a tiny signal to the retransmitter, which could boost the signal and broadcast that signal and up to thirty-one others at once, to the satellite. The satellite could send the collected signals to Langley or Fort Meade, whichever seemed to have less work, or both. There the signals would be monitored and recorded for study by computers and humans at a later date.

I sat looking out the window into the black Scottish night. Blacker than the doorway to hell. Blacker than the Devil’s heart. Black and formless. Black, black, black.

After the plane landed at a London airport and the engines were secured, Grafton motioned me to remain in my seat. He went forward, said something to the pilot, then came back and sat down across the aisle from me as Speedo and the crew filed off the plane. The lights and air-conditioning, powered by an auxiliary power unit in the tail of the plane, stayed on.

When we were alone in the airplane, he said, “The key is Marisa Petrou. She knows this bastard better than anyone else alive, and I’ve got a hunch she knows what he’s planning.”

“What is that?” I asked, to prompt him.

“Oh, he wants to kill Winchester and the others, me, you … and the president. He wants to assassinate the president.”

I gaped.

“Qasim wanted to kill him last year in Paris,” Grafton explained, “and I doubt if he’s given up on that dream. Qasim believes that decapitating the head villain, the Devil incarnate to their way of thinking, would shake Western civilization, maybe crack the foundations, as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand did in 1914. Baldly, Qasim wants to trigger a world war. He thinks Islam will rule triumphantly when it’s all over, in a century or two. Death to all the infidels. The victory will be Allah’s.”

His eyes swiveled to me again. “We’re going to kill him first,” he said, not so much to me as to himself. He was taking a vow. Then he repeated it, and I could feel the cold steel in his voice: “We’re going to kill him first.”

The moment passed. Staring off into space, he took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, then looked at me again.

“Tomorrow morning I have a job for you. Then, tomorrow afternoon I want you to go back to France, find Marisa and stick to her like glue.”

This was the second time he had given me this order. Of course, he was the one who told me to get out of Germany. “She won’t like it,” I pointed out.

“Figure something out.”

“Okay,” I said, as if hanging out with unwilling females were one of my many skills.

“This time, if you must shoot someone, bring the women with you.”

“What about that Russian back there?”

“It’s impossible. He refuses to use good sense. He commutes back and forth to London, thinks three or four bodyguards will keep him safe.”

“It would take fifty men to properly guard him.”

“I have precisely two. I have them watching the estate, looking for anyone sneaking in. That’s the best I can do.”

“Who are they?”

“You don’t know them.”

“I know most of the people in the Company’s Europe operations,” I said brightly.

“You don’t know them,” Grafton repeated.

“There’s still a whole hell of a lot I don’t know,” I said reasonably, trying to be a good soldier. Or sailor. That was the only way anyone on this earth was ever going to get anything out of him.

“What else do you want to know?”

“Maybe you ought to tell me if Isolde’s chauffeur was a bad guy or an innocent bystander whom I just happened to murder.”

He smiled a little bit and said softly, “That I don’t know, Tommy. You did the best you could. We’ll all have to live with it that way.”

I felt like a fool and must have reddened. My face seemed hot. “Sorry,” I said.

“Keep swinging at the strikes,” he muttered.

He got out of his seat and led the way up the aisle toward the door.

It was a gray, rainy dawn—the English are good at these and do them often—when I rolled out the next morning. My roommate, the up-and-coming GM junior executive, was still in his room, presumably asleep. I made coffee and stood at my window looking at the world, which from this perspective consisted of four brick buildings identical to the one I was in.

I decided they should find the architect responsible for this masonry crime and cut off parts. Still, the neighborhood was nicer than most of Manhattan, the areas that people live in, and the streets had less garbage piled up. Cities, I decided, were an acquired taste.

I was trying to keep my mind off terrorists and murders and Jake Grafton. Even so … A glance at my watch got me going.

A half hour later I hailed a taxi on the main street a block from my building. The hackie spoke English, the taxi was clean, and he knew how to get to the address I gave him.

If prostitution is the oldest profession, then espionage is the second oldest. Man’s desire to know other folks’ secrets is certainly as old as the desire for sex. And every spy needs a handler, so he—or she—came along at the same time as the spy.

The case officer, or handler, is the spy’s contact with his world—the world he grew up in or the world he chooses to serve, for whatever reason—when he is in enemy country. In addition to putting the spy in place, supplying him with the tools of the trade and telling him what information to get, the case officer must be the spy’s emotional support, his anchor, his source of strength and resolve. Some spies need more moral and emotional support than others, but all of them need some of it. Providing it is the case officer’s most important function; without that support, the spy won’t be very effective or stay in place very long.

As Eide Masmoudi’s and Radwan Ali’s case officer, Jake Grafton met with both men periodically, as seldom as he could, yet as often as he thought they needed him, and whenever either of them asked for a meet. Communications went through the courier, Kerry Pocock, who was a regular visitor to Harrod’s gourmet food department.

One might think in this day and age cell phones would be the communication method of choice, but they weren’t. People would see the agent talking on the cell phone, which recorded every number called or received. Sooner or later a suspicious person could examine the phone. However, both men did have cell phones, and both had memorized emergency numbers to call, just in case. But once they called one of those numbers, they had to dispose of that phone immediately.

Spy-handler meets were dangerous. London, and all other European capitals, were buzzing with Muslims, most of whom were not religious extremists or terrorists in any sense of the word. Yet since the villains looked like everyone else, one had to make sure the meet was as private as possible. In addition, it had to fit into the spy’s day and lifestyle in a way that wouldn’t arouse suspicion.

Jake Grafton and Eide Masmoudi were meeting today in one of the men’s rooms at Harrod’s. MI-5 supplied a van and tradesman’s coveralls, which I donned. I parked the van in the back of Harrod’s at the loading dock, off-loaded my service cart with mops and pails and signs, and went inside.

I started in the men’s rooms on the first floor and worked my way up in the building, keeping an eye on the time.

I was in a third floor men’s scrubbing out a toilet when Jake Grafton came in. I went out into the hallway, made sure my out of service signs were prominently placed and got busy scrubbing the door. Two minutes later Eide came down the hallway. He was a little guy, maybe 130 pounds, with dark skin and big eyes and black hair. Although he was wearing trousers and you couldn’t see them, I knew he had a set of really big balls. Our eyes met, I nodded once, and he went into the men’s room.

As the minutes passed, I worked on that door, then began mopping the hallway. Spilled some water to give me something to work on.

People came to the end of the hallway and looked at me and the out of service signs and went away. I usually glanced at them, then pretended to pay no attention. The customers were wearing coats, usually, and Harrod’s employees were not.

I got the floor clean and stopped to inspect it. By golly, here was a career possibility for me if the spook business ever went south. Then I dumped more water on the floor and set about mopping it again.

Jake Grafton listened to everything Eide had to say before he produced a computer-generated picture of what Abu Qasim might look like. “This man—have you seen him?”

Eide took his time studying the picture, a three-by-five on photo paper. “Perhaps,” he said. “A man in the mosque, last week. Then again …”

Grafton pocketed the photo and produced a small bottle with a screw cap. It held about an ounce of liquid. He held it so Eide could see it. “Some evening, when the sheikh is dining in the mosque, I want you to pour this in whatever he is drinking.”

“He drinks only water and tea.”

“Whatever.”

“What is it?”

Jake Grafton took a moment before he answered. “It’s a chemical that will combine with another chemical that is already in his body and cause his heart to stop. The two chemicals combine into what the chemists call a binary poison.”

Eide was dubious. He didn’t reach for the bottle. “Is this stuff poisonous?”

“Not unless you have that other chemical in your system, and you do not. Nor does anyone else who could be reasonably expected to eat at the mosque. Al-Taji does. The chemical in this bottle will kill him.”

“Where did he get the first chemical?”

“During his trial he drank water, along with the other people at the defense table. The first half of the binary cocktail was in the water and was absorbed into the fat cells in his body. It is still there, and will be for some weeks before it becomes inert or is flushed from his system.” And this second chemical will combine with the first?”

“Yes. By itself, it’s harmless. Also tasteless. You could drink all of it and it wouldn’t harm you. This amount is enough to treat about ten gallons of liquid. It will only prove fatal to someone who has that first chemical in his body. Together they are a binary poison.”

“If an autopsy is performed, will this poison be found?”

“Very doubtful. Conceivably it could be, but only if the toxicologist knew precisely what he was looking for.”

“You are asking me to kill Sheikh al-Taji.” That wasn’t a question but a statement.

“Yes.”

Eide Masmoudi searched Jake Grafton’s face. He knew al-Taji was a terrorist, a killer who plotted murder of the innocent—he had been writing the reports for Grafton. Masmoudi believed men like the sheikh perverted Islam, insulting the Prophet and everyone who believed. Even worse, they betrayed Allah.

“To pervert the holiest of holies is a great crime,” he whispered. Still he did not reach for the bottle. He stood there staring at it.

“If you use this,” Jake Grafton said, “you and Radwan will have to leave the mosque.”

“That wasn’t the original plan.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Jake admitted, “but I’m the case officer, and I can change the plan. I’m changing it. These people are beyond paranoid— they’re criminal psychopaths. They’d kill a dozen innocent people hoping that one of them is guilty. Hell, they’d kill a hundred, just for the publicity. I don’t want you and Radwan to take a risk like that. If you agree to use the poison, you two are out of there. As fast as your feet can take you.”

Eide Masmoudi was a very brave man. He took his time framing his next question. “If this poison, this binary chemical, works as you say it will, al-Taji will merely have a fatal heart attack. Is that correct?”

Grafton replied, “The doctors tell me his heart will probably stop while he is asleep.”

“He isn’t the only villain in that mosque. The place is full of throat-slitters and holy murderers. They pervert Islam. They make it into something evil, a crime against man and Allah.” He searched for more words, then said, “They’d kill the queen of England if they had half a chance. Anybody. They’d murder anybody who’d get them in the newspapers.”

Jake Grafton nodded. “And they’ll kill you if you give the slightest hint—the tiniest hint—that you are scared or worried or have something to hide. They’ll kill you believing that if you’re innocent you’ll wind up in Paradise, so your murder really isn’t a sin. Isn’t that right?”

Eide acknowledged that Jake Grafton had stated the case correctly.

“So if you take the bottle,” the admiral continued, “you and Radwan are leaving.”