Assassin's Game (25 page)

At 09:59 the train pulled away.

When he drifted to sleep minutes later, the
kidon
was four hundred miles removed from his entry point in Germany. He had virtually no chance of being traced. His belly was full. And he had thirteen more euros in his pocket than when he’d started.

TWENTY-NINE

The boarding of the 10:15 ferry was nearly complete. Standing in an alcove at the back of the terminal, Christine Palmer—doctor of internal medicine, mother-to-be, and fugitive pirate—stood wondering if the gangway would be pulled punctually.

The clock near the ticket booth read 10:07. The crowd of passengers was larger than she’d expected, and on a Wednesday morning she guessed most were commuting to work, a few perhaps heading into town to shop or meet dental appointments. The voyage from Styrsvik, Runmarö Island, to Stavsnäs would last no more than ten minutes. Indeed, Christine could see the receiving dock barely a mile away, a dark shadow floating on the mist-shrouded bay.

10:08.

Not wanting to cut it too close, Christine decided to make her move. She went to the automated ticketing kiosk and pulled out a credit card imprinted with the name Edmund Deadmarsh. She purchased a one-way ticket, and as soon as it spit from the machine Christine hurried to the boat. An attendant took her ticket with barely a glance, and she scampered across the metal boarding steps as the last passenger. She veered into the covered lower deck, where virtually everyone had sought relief from the cool marine air, and took a seat in the middle of the largest group—three women her own age amid ten preschool children. A playgroup headed to the mainland, she supposed, likely for an outing to a museum or an amusement park. She smiled at the children and nodded to the mothers.

Three minutes later, right on schedule, the Waxholmsbolaget ferry pushed back from the pier and began churning across the bay for the short passage to greater civilization. Christine watched Runmarö slip behind, descending into the mist much as
Bricklayer
had disappeared into the sea last night along the island’s deserted southern shore.

The children were being children, running through the cabin and squealing happy sounds, while their mothers chatted amiably and looked equally content. Christine leaned back and put a hand to her belly—her ribs were still tender from her flyer onto the boat in Stockholm. She tried to imagine what challenges these women might face today. Finding nutrition in fast-food lunch menus? A knot on a tiny forehead from a wayward playground swing? It caused her to wonder.

Will David and I ever find such a carefree day in our lives?

Christine looked out over the water. She’d spent one day with David on a stolen sailboat, and hour by hour she had watched him change, a year’s worth of transformation lapsing before her eyes. He’d become increasingly alert, listening and watching, expecting threats from every distant vessel and passing aircraft. She recalled the old gun, worthless as it was. David had found it, searched it out. Within an hour of arriving he had probably located every knife and flare gun and blunt instrument on the boat, and had each item stowed in a tactically advantageous position.

Have I lost him so quickly?
she wondered.
Or did I never really have him to begin with?

The ferry began to maneuver, arrival on the mainland imminent. Christine moved quickly toward the boarding ramp, and was the first passenger to step ashore.

*   *   *

The Stockholm Police nearly succeeded.

The transaction on the flagged credit card was immediately highlighted by the Swedish Security Service. SÄPO forwarded the information to National Criminal Investigations, who in turn sent an advisory alert to the Stockholm police—Edmund Deadmarsh had just purchased a ferry ticket on Runmarö Island, and his arrival at Stavsnäs was imminent.

Within minutes, four units of the local constabulary were making best speed to the ferry terminal at Stavsnäs. The first unit to arrive bounded onto the curb at 10:29, and two officers rushed out and began searching for their suspect: a light-haired American man who was likely armed and certainly dangerous. Hands on their holstered weapons, neither the driver nor his partner took notice of a departing cab in which an attractive, and very alert, auburn-haired woman was staring out the back window.

*   *   *

Sanderson arrived at the bunker-like building of Air Navigation Services of Sweden, run by the government-held LFV Corporation, and at the main entrance found himself staring at an imposing security keypad. There was a call button, and Sanderson pushed it and stared squarely into the camera lens over the door. He got an immediate answer.

“Can I help you?” a disembodied voice rang through the speaker.

“Detective Inspector Sanderson, Stockholm police. I’m here on urgent business.”

“One minute.”

Expecting the door to open any second, Sanderson reached into his overcoat for what he’d snatched out of his desk yesterday. Years earlier he’d taken a summer posting as a liaison officer to Interpol, a relatively pleasant three months in Lyon, France, in which he sorted through the felons of greater Europe. On returning to Stockholm, Sanderson realized that he’d not surrendered his Interpol credentials before leaving, and with little thought had simply shoved them into a desk drawer. The document, of course, had long ago lapsed, but the small print of the expiration date left virtually no chance of this being noticed. And like all policemen, Sanderson knew that when it came to establishing authority, attitude and volume were far more persuasive than paper and ink.

So it was, when the door opened moments later he flashed his old ID at the security guard and barged ahead, barking, “I have to identify all aircraft that were over the city yesterday at midday. Who must I talk to?”

A clearly flummoxed guard said, “That would be the air traffic manager, sir.”

“Well don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open, get him!”

*   *   *

Minutes later Sanderson was talking to a very capable woman named Rolf.

“We keep records for a running sixty-day period,” she explained. “After that everything rolls into a long-term storage database.”

Rolf led him to a dark room where air traffic controllers were busy behind workstations. All wore headsets, and their faces were illuminated by multicolored displays as they guided aircraft with chattering instructions.

“What time yesterday are you concerned with?” she asked.

“Eleven thirty-two in the morning.”

She looked at him questioningly, then began typing at a vacant console. “And you’re looking for an aircraft that was over the city?”

“That’s right.”

The screen in front of them blinked to life, and then settled to a black map display that was highlighted with concentric arcs and lines. Seconds later, this background was overlaid with scattered alphanumeric symbols.

“I see six aircraft over the city.” She pointed to a pair of white squares that were tagged with data blocks. “These two are airliners. They are at high altitude and moving fast.”

“No, I’m looking for something else. An aircraft that stayed over the city for a period of twenty or thirty minutes.”

Rolf tinkered with the display, going forward and back in time until her finger settled on one square. “This one. It was circling the downtown area for thirty minutes, very low and slow. I’m not sure why—nobody would have been sightseeing given yesterday’s weather.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Sanderson agreed. “What kind of airplane was it?”

“A Cessna,” she replied.

“Where did it go next?”

This took longer, but Rolf did her magic. Elements on the screen began to disappear, and soon all that remained was a line representing the track of their targeted aircraft. It had spun two irregular circles over the city before meandering south.

Rolf said, “It departed on a southwesterly track, roughly a two-hundred-and-ten-degree magnetic heading. Twenty miles south we lose the signal.”

“Can you find out where it went after that?”

“With the radar, not likely. This aircraft was flying low and there are hills in that area. But I can tell you who it was.” After no more than a few keystrokes, she said, “Sierra Three Two Five Papa. I’ve seen the call sign before, but not here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Smaller aircraft usually navigate around or under our busy airspace.” More typing. “It’s a Cessna 180 seaplane owned by Magnussen Air Charters. They’re based in Oxelösund. I have the address and phone number if you like.”

“Yes, very much.”

Five minutes later Sanderson was back in his car, and consumed with newfound excitement. He started the engine and was about to engage the gearshift when he paused. As his hands gripped the wheel, the phone in his pocket seemed inordinately heavy. He knew he ought to call in his findings to the command center. But would anyone listen? Would anyone act? Possibly. Yet the information would have to go through channels, bounce across a half dozen desks and email inboxes. By then the lead might go cold. That was what Sanderson told himself, anyway.

He put the car in gear, pressed his foot down hard, and minutes later was accelerating onto the E4 headed south.

THIRTY

The first attempt on Ibrahim Hamedi’s life had earned him a lone bodyguard, a man who doubled as his driver. After the second attempt he never left home, or the compound in Qom, without a sizable convoy. The composition of his escort varied based on setting. Military vehicles were preferred for desert travel, but today, snaking through the baffling maze that was south Tehran, he made due with three armored limousines. Hamedi was in the lead car, which seemed to him counterintuitive from a security standpoint. But then, he was no expert. With awkwardly reassuring logic, he had long ago relented that Farzad Behrouz would take every possible measure to cover both their asses.

A motorcade of armored Mercedes was not an unusual sight in certain quarters of the city. In the working-class neighborhood of Molavi it stood out like a circus train. People stopped on the sidewalks and stared. Hamedi looked back through bulletproof glass and saw a distantly familiar place. The street was little different from a thousand others in south Tehran. In a long-settled victory of pragmatism over style, endless strings of tan tenements were crammed shoulder to shoulder, their earthen walls seeming to lean on one another like rows of dominos whose fall had been interrupted. He saw wires for electrical and phone service strung overhead like so much spaghetti, and from the main lines illegal shunts snaked brazenly through windows up and down the street. The scents were as ever, the urban tang of people and the stench of refuse, all cut by cinnamon and saffron drifting from kitchen windows.

Hamedi studied each face that passed, looking for any that seemed familiar. Mohammed, his best friend from grade school, or Simin Marzieh, the first girl he had ever kissed. He was sure they were here somewhere—assuming they were still alive. Hamedi had escaped these circumstances, but he was a rare exception. He did not delude himself that it was a matter of having worked harder to get ahead. Hamedi was the one
inside
the armored Mercedes because he could multiply six-digit numbers in his head at the age of five, and because he had earned his PhD in particle physics at the age of twenty-two. Hamedi had been given a gift from God, and he had not wasted it.

He craned his neck as they turned onto his old street, and soon he saw the building. It was a five-story affair, a weary testament to the color beige baked hard by fifty summers. Then he saw his mother. She was there at the threshold of her first-floor unit, sweeping the front step as he’d seen her do a thousand times. This was her never-ending crusade against the dust and wind, one that she would never win, and probably didn’t care to. “It is the battle that is important,” she would say. Even from a distance, Hamedi thought she looked different from when he’d last seen her, the back more bowed and the hair a lighter gray. The sharp olive eyes, however, he knew would be unchanged.

“Park across the street,” he ordered.

The driver nodded, and a bulky man in the passenger seat murmured something toward his collar. There were six more men in the other cars. The last time Hamedi had come here, a year ago, he’d been alone. That, he knew with certainty, was something that would never happen again.

The cars eased to a stop across the street from his old home. When Hamedi got out, the two men from his car followed and fell in step. “I don’t suppose I could ask you to stay here,” he said.

The guard in front, a heavy slab of a man in an ill-measured suit, said, “I am sorry, Dr. Hamedi, but you know our orders.”

“Very well,” he said. “But give us a little peace.”

As they crossed the street his mother kept sweeping. He was sure she’d seen them—nothing happened anywhere on the block without her knowing about it—and so this was her greeting.

Hamedi stopped at the foot of the steps. “Hello, Mother.”

She looked up at him with the same severe look he’d seen last November. Had it been there ever since? he wondered.

“I suppose you want tea,” she said.

Hamedi looked up and down the block. He saw at least twenty people staring at them, gawking from the street, faces framed in nearby windows. “Yes, that would be nice.”

Without another word, she turned into the house.

*   *   *

The two bodyguards followed them inside, but kept their distance. One took up a position at the front door, and the other at the back. His mother said nothing else until she emerged from the kitchen with the familiar tray: one teapot, two chipped china cups, and a bowl of honey.

“And what blesses me with this appearance? Surely you have important work to do.”

“How have you been?” he asked.

“I am as always—fit and alone.”

“You miss father,” he said.

“It’s been six years. Time has its way. But it is more difficult when one has no other family.”

“You have friends.”

“Oh, yes. And I will have more tomorrow when word gets out that my son, a man of such standing, has been here to visit mercy on his old mother.”