The Assassin (Max Doerr Book 1) (11 page)

“By
‘a few assignments,’ how many do you mean?” Doerr came to the point.

“Four.”

“I
will do two operations. Then I go after Samuel.”

“You
will have to do three ops. That’s the minimum.”

“Okay,
three,” Doerr said.

“But
before any of your operations begin, you will have to come to the Virginia
training center for a week. You will be trained on tactical shooting and deadly
force decisions. I don’t think you have to relearn anything. So consider it a
vacation. And at the end you will get the details of your first assignment; it
will be in Paris, and the second op will be in Amsterdam. You will be working
directly for me, just like before.”

“Okay.”

“And
one more thing.”

“Yes.”
More strings
, Doerr thought.

“Keep
the news about Samuel’s disloyalty to yourself. Only a few people at the top
know that Samuel doesn’t work for us anymore. As you know, we don’t advertise
this sort of thing, and we try to take care of it ourselves. Otherwise, the FBI
would be arresting somebody from our agency every day.”

“No
problem. I know,” Doerr said glumly. “Do you know what Samuel is up to these
days?”

“The
last I heard about him is that he has joined hands with the cartels in Mexico.”

It
made sense to Doerr, who hadn’t been able to think of a reason why he had removed
the DEA chief, but he had a reputation of being tough on drug smugglers. “One
more question, Lazarus. Where are his buddies, Victor and Len?”

“They
left the agency right after Samuel did.”

Doerr
sighed. “Thanks.” He hung up. The strings of confusion untangled themselves and
took shape in his mind; everything made sense to him now. Samuel, Len and
Victor left the agency to do freelance work for the cartels, which was much
more profitable than being government employees. Samuel duped Doerr into
killing the top drug enforcement man with a single shot. The DEA administrator was
known to be tough. He was arming DEA agents with advanced firearms and
deploying more of them to the border, and the result was a twenty percent drop
in drug shipments from Mexico to the US. Doerr knew all that.

The
cartels abhorred that. Samuel must have been paid a bundle for the hit.

Doerr
felt excited about really rejoining the CIA. Losing his son was the hardest
thing he had ever had to deal with, and to be moving forward felt good.

Finally,
a ray of hope was coming. He knew that the moments of happiness could be
fleeting, so to share the joy, he called Gayle immediately.

LAZARUS
WAS RIGHT. The training at Langley was a cakewalk. Doerr was lumped with nine other
trainees, and all ten of them were kept in the guest house of the training site
in rural Virginia. The trainees met over a brunch on their first day.

Most
of them were young, certainly younger than twenty-five; there was only one guy
who was a little older. It reminded Doerr about the time when he had trained
with the CIA back in the mid-nineties. He had been twenty-two years old, fresh
out of college. He had trained at a Pennsylvania training site sandwiched
between two hills. The only way in was a dirt road that connected to a local street,
just off the I-80 highway. His mother had been healthy back then. Initially, he
had told her that he was joining the Army. After two weeks of training, his
mother had insisted repeatedly that she wanted to visit him at the training
center.

“Why
can’t I come?” she had argued. “I have a friend in North Carolina. She goes to
her son’s Army training center all the time.” At that point, Doerr had to tell
her that he was with the CIA and not the Army, and no civilians were allowed to
visit the training site.

Doerr
sat in the cafeteria of the new training center on Sunday night. It was seven
p.m., and there was only one server there, a woman who looked to be just older
than thirty.

“What
is good at this time of the day?” Doerr asked her.

“Grilled
chicken sandwich is good. Or you can go with macaroni. We have pizza, too.”

“I’ll
have macaroni and a bottle of Snapple.” Doerr paid with cash.

Ten
minutes later he sat at the table, munching the stale macaroni. The next day,
the training would start. He took a sip from his Snapple bottle, and the older
trainee came and sat next to him.

Doerr
chit-chatted with the guy through his dinner and later went to bed early.

The
first day of training was on marksmanship. Doerr was more experienced in many
areas than the trainer, who was little taller than Doerr, may be six-six or
six-eight. But he was skinny and weighed no more than a hundred and ninety, may
be two hundred pounds. In the morning the training was on how to shoot a pistol
when the target was at a distance of more than a hundred feet, what to do when
there were innocent bystanders, how to avoid civilian casualties.

In
the afternoon, they were taught how to maintain firearms. “A poorly maintained gun
is as dangerous to the shooter as it is to the target,” the trainer said. There
was an embarrassing incident when the trainer unassembled an assault rifle and
he wanted to show Doerr and others how to reassemble it. But the trainer was
having trouble putting it back together. The magazine release button just would
not fit. 

“If
it doesn’t work,” the coach said smartly, “you have to disassemble the firearm
and start over.”

The
trainer took the rifle apart and tried to fit it back together again, and he
failed. Doerr waited for a while, and then he had to take over and show them
how it was really done.

The
trainer smartly said to the other men, “When you are stuck with something, get
some help from your coworker. That’s the lesson here.”

Doerr
saw the older trainee trying to suppress his laughter.

AFTER
COMPLETING HIS so-called training, Doerr boarded a plane to Paris, where the
first operation was to take place. It was a bright morning when he arrived.

Doerr
walked out of the elevator and was walking fiercely to his hotel room. He felt a
little edgy, given that he had been out of real,
legitimate
action for a
while.

His
target, Al Hashemi, was a known terrorist with connections all over the world –
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, the UK, France and many more.

Doerr
had gotten rid of many in the past that were on their way to harm America. Their
vile faces were frozen in his memory like the cereal boxes on the grocery store
shelves. He could read them, count them, and sometimes those faces appeared in
his dreams.

Doerr
reached his hotel room, swiped the card, opened the door and closed it behind him.
He opened his bag and assembled the M16 rifle and clamped the telescopic sight
to it in just forty seconds, a perfection achieved by practice. 

He
waited and waited at the window. But two hours later, there was still no sign
of Al Hashemi.
What happened to the bastard? I was told he would be out
within an hour.

After
the long wait, he had to do something.

He
picked up his phone and dialed the hotel number, speaking to the hotel clerk in
French. “I will be arriving at the hotel in ten minutes. I’m meeting with Al
Hashemi. Can you please let him know, urgently, for me?” It was all lies. He
was already in the hotel, in his own room.

“Wait
a second,” the operator answered. “Let me call him.”

A
minute later the operator came back on the line. “Sir, he is not answering.”

“What’s
his room number?” Doerr said.

The
operator paused, but Doerr was insistent. “Please, ma’am. His father just died.
I have to inform him as soon as possible.” More lies.

“You
should contact him directly. We can’t give out that information.”

“Please
understand. His family wants to talk to him right now. The only way I can speak
to him is if I go to his room.”

“He
is in 447,” the operator said grudgingly.

Now
Doerr had the man’s room number. He disassembled his rifle and put the parts
back into the duffel bag and took out his Glock and a fresh silencer from the
suitcase. The gun went to his right pocket and silencer in his left. He took
the elevator to the fourth floor and passed the janitor; soon he stood in front
of room 447. The polished wooden door was shut. Knowing the janitor might be
watching him, he didn’t risk touching the handle. He knew it would not open
anyway.

He
kept walking, taking the stairs down to the ground floor. The hotel clerk
behind the desk was an old black man, in a suit, with a serious face. Lights
from the powerful wall lamp reflected from his rimless glasses. Doerr observed
the clerk for a few seconds and decided to head for the bar. Once seated, he
ordered a glass of Bordeaux and a sandwich. He sat on a stool and then shifted
his position, the silencer in his left pocket making him uncomfortable.

He
savored the wine and kept a close eye on the hotel clerk. By the time he had
eaten half of his sandwich, a new hotel clerk appeared, an elderly woman. He
pressed a button on his phone and whispered, “Is the bird still in its nest?”

“Yes,
confirmed. The bird still in nest,” the voice at the other end said.

After
paying the bill, he rushed to the hotel clerk. She was a heavyset woman, nails
polished in a shiny red, her makeup done perfectly. Doerr could not locate a
single wrinkle on her red dress.

He
put on the cutest smile he could as he approached the clerk, “Are those real
diamonds in your earrings?” He knew the colorless stones were far too large to
be worn by a hotel clerk unless she was also the owner or wife of the owner.

“No,”
she said with a big smile, “they’re imitation. How can I help you?”

“The
thing is,” he reached inside his pocket as if searching for something, “I lost
my room key. Can I have a duplicate?” He tried to put up the look of a kid who
had just stolen a Snickers bar.

“Room
number?” the lady asked.

“447.”
The room number of the man he was about to kill.

“Okay.”
She took a quick look at the computer, swiped a card on the machine and handed
it over.

“Thanks,
sweetie.” He gave her another smile and rushed to the elevator. As he walked to
room 447, he screwed the silencer to the barrel of his Glock surreptitiously.

Facing
the door, he looked once to the right, then to the left. A middle-aged man
carrying a suitcase was walking toward him. Doerr didn’t care; he inserted the
key and opened the door rapidly, slipping through the gap and closing it behind
him even more quickly.

Al
Hashemi was a rather short man. He was only five feet five, or maybe even
shorter – seven or eight inches shorter than Doerr. His brown beard was as long
as his face.

But
the man looked strong; his deltoids looked like large rocks. Wearing a white
tunic that covered his entire body, except his face, he was sitting on the bed.
As soon as he saw Doerr, he extended his hand to the table on his right, trying
to pick up the Beretta that lay there in plain sight. Doerr was sure the gun
was loaded, and he was ready with his own Glock. In a split second, Doerr took
the shot, but he missed the mark, hitting Al Hashemi in the neck instead of the
head.

Strong
like a bull, Al Hashemi clutched his neck with his left hand and pushed himself
with his legs, reaching again for his gun.

Doerr
was momentarily distracted as he stumbled on some clothing left on the floor.
He raised his gun, but it was late. A bullet came out of Al Hashemi’s Beretta,
and it hit Doerr’s hip, shattering his bone. Doerr dropped to the ground, his
vision blurring with the pain, the magnitude of which he had never felt before.

Propping
himself up on one arm, Doerr squinted through the pain and fired one more shot,
which struck Al Hashemi between the eyes. Hashemi slumped, his body crumpled on
the bed. A soap advertisement was showing on the muted TV.

Al
Hashemi didn’t really have a chance against his trained opponent. But this
time, Doerr was hurt. Doerr tried to stand up, but the pain in his hip was too
great. The agony was spreading through his entire body.

He
dropped his gun to the ground, took his cell phone from his pocket, and pushed the
redial button. “Bird is down in nest 447. Send a cleanup crew.” After a pause,
he said, “I’ve been hit.”

The
crew arrived shortly, one after another, wearing different disguises – a total
of seven of them. Doerr was taken to the safe house in Montrouge and given
preliminary care, but the X-ray revealed a badly damaged bone. Under the cover
of night, he was taken to a local airport and was airlifted to a
state-of-the-art American hospital in Kuwait City.

The
lead doctor told him, “You are lucky, Mr. Doerr. Normally we would recommend
amputation when there is this much hip bone damage. But, because you have such
an athletic body, we think we can save your leg.”