The Assassin (Max Doerr Book 1) (4 page)

“Your
son might have murdered my son, and he won’t say where he was that night!”

“And
you think that makes him a killer! You know I can have you charged with assault
right now?”

Doerr
knew the man was right. Exhaling heavily, he walked away.

Gayle
returned home from work in the evening. She pushed through the door and could
not wait to get out of her pants suit. The summer was hot, and by the end of
July there were many hundred-degree-plus days. Her whole body was sweaty from
walking to and from the train stations. After switching into shorts and a sleeveless
top, she headed for the bathroom. On the way, she heard the beep from the
phone. There was a message. She ignored it, continuing to the bathroom to wash
up. While checking her face, she noticed a wrinkle on her forehead. Was that
due to age, tension, what? She rubbed her hand over it and tried to straighten
it out. It came back as soon as she released it. A sigh followed. Things seemed
to be going downhill for her. After Billy’s death, Max had changed a lot. He
hardly talked; he didn’t want to go out, not even on weekends. He had immersed
himself in his books, newspapers, and magazines. He had been cutting out pieces
from newspapers and magazines and storing them in a manila folder. She had seen
him doing that before, but now he was doing it almost compulsively.

Is
he going crazy?
She asked herself.
Losing a kid is hard, even
harder if it’s the only child.

She
knew he wouldn’t go to a shrink to talk about it, so trying to talk him into it
was pointless.

She
came out of the bathroom and opened the fridge to make a sandwich, the phone
still beeping. She put the bread and the mayo down on the kitchen counter and
hit the play button on the phone. It was a message for Max, from a man who
introduced himself as Samuel. And the message was strange too. “I’ve got a job
for you that will make a lot of people happy. The pay is very good. Call me.”

The
caller id was ‘unknown.’ She kept wondering – who was this guy? What was the
job? She had never met a friend of Max named Samuel. In fact, she had met very
few who Max called friends. On their wedding day, only two of his friends had shown
up, and one had left embarrassingly early.

Gayle
made her sandwich, sat on the sofa, and started eating. Outside, it was getting
dark.

She
had met Max three years ago at a friend’s place. “What do you do?” she had
asked after small talk.

“I
work at the CIA,” he hushed.

“Yeah?”
She had been sure it was a joke. “What are you working on right now?”

“We
aren’t supposed to say. Maybe I’m working on you,” Doerr had said and flashed a
cocky smile.

From
the way he had talked and behaved, she had been sure he did some kind of professional
job. By the time their relationship got serious, she knew he was working as an
editor, working mostly on crime stories, of which there was no shortage in the
city.

One
day she had visited him at his newspaper office. He sat in a tiny cubicle;
three phones, two computers and a pile of papers lay on his table. Numerous
pieces of papers and pictures were pinned to the fabric panel of the cubicle
wall. But he never wanted to talk about his work.

“What
is there to talk about? My job is all about killers and thieves,” Doerr had quipped
once. “Let’s keep them out of our lives.”

WHEN
DOERR GOT out of the sports arena, it was already eight thirty. He took the
subway train on Line Six. The city duelers were carrying themselves back to their
houses, apartments and condos on tired legs, to bury the frustrations of the
day and hoping for a better day to come. For Doerr, it would take another forty
minutes to get home. Gayle’s sleeping face swam in his head.

The
lumbering train reached his destination; the station was empty, except for the
people who had just got off, and they left as quickly as the departing train.
Sauntering across the platform, Doerr found himself alone, and it felt good.
Most people would feel uncomfortable to be in a deserted New York station at
this hour, but not him. Empty places gave him security. Solitude was not only
longed for, its security was trained into the intelligence recruits right from
the beginning. Solitude meant no shadow, no shooter, no follower – no nothing.  

As
he walked down a narrow road that could barely accommodate one sedan, he
remembered how his job had started. He had been in his senior year at Cornell
University. On a rainy day, he had been practicing for his hundred-meter track
race, alone. He had run four laps when a man appeared. The man looked odd, a little
short, wearing a shiny suit. The size of his barely contained belly was
exceeded only by that of the umbrella he was holding.

Doerr
stood up from his crouching position, curious, maybe a little cautious, but
certainly not afraid. He had no reason to be. He was a strong, muscled man, who
many in his class feared. The bulky man had walked up to him and introduced
himself. “Hi, young chap, I’m Ted. I’m a recruiter from the CIA and looking for
able men like you to serve our great country.”

AS
HE KEPT walking toward his apartment, he felt the ache in his chest again.
Billy’s death crushed him from inside. The killer might well have been an old
enemy from his former profession, and there was no shortage of enemies in his
previous work. He had stepped on so many thugs, terrorists, agents, politicians,
and lobbyists. He thought it was best not to divulge the details of his past
work to Gayle, to protect her. Hiding things in his marriage was painful to
him.

Words
reverberated from one side of his heart to the other. He could never tell Gayle
the details of how many men he had killed, how many could be looking for him.
It would scare her; their relationship might change. It could dry the core of her
love, but holding so many details inside himself was painful too.

Three
minutes later, the brown-painted, sixteen-level apartment building appeared in
his view. He made the decision; he would tell her everything. How he had worked
at the CIA for thirteen years and why he had to leave: everything. He didn’t
care about anything anymore. He glanced at his watch; it was ten p.m. Gayle
would be sound asleep. There was no point in waking her up. He would maybe tell
her next weekend, or the weekend after, but certainly not tonight.

Standing
in the nearly dark hallway, when he opened his apartment door, he expected a
dark living room; Gayle always turned the lights off before heading for bed.
Instead, he was almost blinded by the large halogen lamp standing next to the
door, and he squinted around looking for Gayle. She was sitting on the sofa,
her face gloomy.

Doerr
asked, “Are you having to work in the middle of the night again?”

Gayle’s
IT work at the bank often required her to work late at night and sometimes
through the night entirely. That usually happened when there was a problem with
the banking software or when a new version of the software was being installed.

“No,”
Gayle said and stood up. “I just wasn’t getting any sleep.”

“Why,
dear?” Doerr touched her cheek. “Are you okay?”

“Can
I ask you something, Max?”

“Sure.”

“Have
you always been truthful to me about everything?” She stood inches away from
him, her eyes fixed on his. “Who is Samuel? And was Billy really your son?”

Doerr
sighed. “Okay, I must confess I have not told you lots of things, but I haven’t
lied to you. Maybe I should have told you about my previous job a long time ago,
and now
I will
. But can it wait till Saturday?”

“Tell
me everything now.” Gayle sat down on the sofa. “Come here. Sit down.”

Doerr
looked at Gayle. “Okay, just give me two minutes to change, and I’ll tell you everything.”
He headed for the bathroom. He changed into pajamas and then came back to the
sofa. The lights were bright, and Gayle’s eyes were peering at him.

“Okay,
just hear me out, all right?” said Doerr.

“Okay.”
Gayle scooted over slightly.

“When
I was a senior in college,” Doerr sat down and started talking, “a man named Ted
approached me. He was a recruiter for the CIA. He told me I would be a good
candidate for them. I had the right combination of muscle and intellect that
they look for; that’s what I was told. He said the money wouldn’t be good
initially, but that would change after a few years. I would have to go through
a year’s intensive training at Langley, followed by two years of apprenticeship
under a senior agent.

“I
always wanted to serve my country. As I was finishing my education, that urge
only got stronger. I wasn’t sure how I would do it, though. After Ted told me everything,
I wasn’t sure if joining the CIA was the right way to go. I thought about it
for days. My dad had died from cancer, and I couldn’t discuss it with my mom. Being
their only child, I knew Mom would have freaked out. Ted forbade me to discuss
the matter with anyone, anyway. After a week, after swearing my buddy Frank to
secrecy – I asked for his opinion.

“Frank
said, ‘You’ll get killed, dude, and no one will even know.’” Doerr continued.
“Strangely, that statement gave me courage and enthusiasm. My father was in the
Marines, and I wasn’t afraid to die.

“The
first year of training went fine. It was fun, I made lots of friends, and later,
that came in handy. I had to shadow a senior agent for only a year before
getting an independent assignment. My first assignment was in Belarus. I got
bored within three months, and they sent me to Libya. And that was when the
real action started.

“Within
three years I was promoted to senior agent; I had my own team, but I liked to
do the field work myself. Lazarus West, my boss, said to me once, ‘I never saw
a senior agent so young.’ I was twenty-six. One of my skills was sniping down
targets, and I was quite good at that. Some said I was one of the best snipers
they produced. Some called me ‘the assassin.’”

“I
remember you said you worked at the CIA, the first day we met,” Gayle said. “I
thought that was just a joke.”

“No,”
Doerr corrected her. “I was truthful. The day I saw you first I was sort of
spellbound, and the truth came out naturally. Maybe I should have told you
everything in detail back then.

“But
I wasn’t allowed to tell you everything, and even now I can’t tell you all the
details of my job, but I will give you the gist,” Doerr said, leaning back on
the sofa, legs stretched out in front of him. “It was 2008, a few months before
I met you, and our unit had been under attack for a while to cut our budget. It
made me very frustrated. I was heading two teams, one in Saudi Arabia and the
other in Syria. I had a total of seventy able, dedicated men and women working
for me directly or indirectly. I was told to wind down both, which was crazy.
We had spent years building relations with the locals.

“When
I gave an ultimatum to my boss that we had to keep both teams on-site, he
scheduled a meeting with Senator Kubrick. The senator had been reelected in
Ohio two years before. He was a member of the budget committee. We believed he
had a certain amount of budget at his discretion.

“A
week later, my boss, Lazarus, and I were headed for the Capitol. I had been
there before, begging for money for our agency. But this time it was different.
Not only were the jobs of many I knew in jeopardy, but I felt America’s
security was threatened by our own people.

“Anyway,
we all sat down with the senator to discuss the matter. I pleaded my case, and
the senator listened with respect, initially. I said, ‘My guys have developed a
unique knowledge, we don’t want to lose it; it will take a long time to build
it from scratch again.’ The senator’s demeanor changed, the smile on his face
turned into a frown. He said, ‘Listen, wherever there is government, there is
indulgence. There is always room to cut funds. I know this, and the American
people know this. We have already taken care of the terrorists. We are busting
their asses with drones and crashing their hideouts in Afghanistan, Syria,
Nigeria and everywhere else.’

“I
said, ‘With all due respect, sir, there are plenty of threats to America.
Hardliners swear their newborn kids to kill Americans the moment they see one.
We have–’

“The
senator was getting angrier. He interrupted me, ‘
I
know that there are
threats. I’m no fool. But the Saudis are friends, and I strongly feel that we
don’t need Unit Twelve there anymore. The president wants this to happen.’

“I
was shocked, my jaw dropped, and I asked, ‘Our president has personally taken
the decision to chop my unit?’ The senator replied, ‘Not directly. Didn’t you
hear his speech in Ohio? With budget deficit growing like wild mushrooms and our
government begging money from the Chinese Premier like a New York beggar, we have
to start cutting our spending.’

“I
was getting desperate and frustrated at the same time. I said tersely, ‘Mr.
Kubrick, you have over hundred million under your wing, and my units cost only
about two million each…’

“My
boss was only prepared to listen so far, and he frowned at me in disapproval
and said, ‘Max, we don’t know what he has or what he controls.’

“The
senator turned to Lazarus and said, ‘Let him speak. This is what our great
country is all about. We all can express ourselves without fear.’ Then I asked
the same question again. Why was there no money for my units? The senator
leaned back and replied, ‘We can’t spend and spend watching foreign countries,
especially the friendly ones like Saudi Arabia. It is time for us to focus on
domestic matters. One day before election, standing on a podium at Cleveland, I
promised the great people of Ohio that there would be a fast rail connection between
Cleveland and Columbus, one day. I
have
to keep that promise. You know
how long these fucking projects take? If we start this year, it will be
completed in 2014.’