The Assassin (18 page)

Grafton made a mental note: Jerry Hay Smith was going to be a problem.

Wolfgang Zetsche was in his late fifties, a brilliant, vigorous athletic man about five and a half feet tall, one with little patience for what he viewed as the lesser lights of the species. He listened to Marisa now with thinly disguised impatience, almost as if he were ready to interrupt to complete her sentences.

The room they were in was huge, a drawing room full of stuffed furniture and exhibits of artifacts and curiosities Zetsche had gathered on his many expeditions to far corners of the globe. He was currently between wives. The future Frau Zetsche number four sat in a chair near Isolde, her eyes fixed on Wolfgang.

Near the group was a television upon which the four of them had been watching the late evening news. Several minutes had been devoted to the murder of Jean Petrou, and several more to recent revelations in the still unsolved murder of Alexander Surkov. Now the audio was muted, although images of talking heads and policemen shimmered across the screen.

“Ha,” Zetsche said when Marisa paused for air, “you think an assassin could reach me here, in my own house?” He strode to a nearby desk and jerked open the right-hand drawer. From it he removed a pistol, a wicked black automatic. He pulled back the slide until he saw brass, then let it go home with a metallic thunk. He held it up where Marisa could clearly see it. “If those Islamic zealots want to come, let them come!”

He jammed the pistol into his pocket, then looked at Isolde, sitting in a nearby chair. “I am sorry for my manner, which is insensitive. I know you have come far in your hour of grief to warn me, but I need no warning. You have met the assistant butler and my personal chauffeur—they are trained bodyguards, expert in armed and unarmed combat. I will speak to them. The four of us are safer in this house with them than we would be alone in a bank vault. Trust me—it is true.”

Marisa glanced at the future frau to see how she was taking all this. Apparently she knew all about her fiance’s involvement in a conspiracy to rid the world of Islamic Nazis. The wonder was that Wolfgang Zetsche hadn’t been interviewed about it for a major newsmagazine.

It took me maybe three minutes to open both of the locks, three minutes listening to the wind in the treetops and water gurgling down an old downspout just a foot away from this entrance . .. and glancing around occasionally to ensure I was still alone.

I pulled the door open and had started to step inside when I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. I was wearing the night vision goggles set on ambient light, so I turned my head and looked. The ambient light presentation is green, for technical reasons that are a bit beyond me, so I saw green trees and green rocks amid a green world. Nothing was moving now.

A flip of the switch and the goggles reset themselves to display infrared images. Not a single image of a warm-blooded creature did I see.

Well, something had moved and caught my eye.

Or perhaps it was my imagination, the way I was turning my head. The field of view in the goggles is limited, and usually the clarity of the images is some degree of fuzzy, so sometimes an overactive imagination can lead you to think you see things that aren’t really there.

I stepped through the door and closed it behind me. Turned both bolt handles to ensure it was again locked, then adjusted the goggles on my head and took a look around.

I was in a hallway with stone walls, part of the basement, and a wooden ceiling. I looked up … no people visible. I felt something under my feet—a mat. For wiping shoes. I put it to its designed use.

Moving forward, slowly and silently, I searched the basement. It seemed deserted. Quickly found the hot water tanks—there were three— and the hot water pipes leading away to faucets all over the building.

As soon as I was sure I was alone in the basement and had a general idea of where the doors were, I crept up the stairs. At the top of the stairs I had a good view through the walls, which were apparently made of some kind of thin, painted particleboard. I saw dim, ghostly figures moving some distance away, through several interior walls, it seemed. I also found the fire, which was in a room where there appeared to be four people—three sitting, one standing. Two more people were in what I thought might be the kitchen area—I could see a heat source that might be a coffeepot or teakettle—and one or two people were upstairs; no, make that three.

The nearby hallways being empty, I opened the door as quietly as I could and sneaked through. There were lights in the hallway, dim night-lights mounted halfway up the walls. I raised the goggles to my forehead. The ceiling was at least twelve feet above the floor, and dark chandeliers dangled every few yards.

I opened the door to the room adjacent to the room with the fireplace. As I walked in, the light coming through the doorway revealed a giant bear standing on his hind legs, every tooth bared, about to rip my head off with his paws.

I recoiled, then realized the bear was stuffed. A leopard gathered to leap stood on a table in one corner; deer, elk, caribou and antelope heads shared the walls with shelves full of books. There were four stuffed easy chairs, a bar and a table for playing cards. A gun cabinet filled with hunting rifles and shotguns stood between the two exterior windows.

I pulled the door closed and checked in infrared in all directions to ensure no one was marching for this room. Then I hunkered down beside a bookcase and put a stethoscope microphone against the door that separated the two rooms. Fortunately the four people on the other side of the door were making no move to come this way: With only the one wall and some books between us, I could see their figures fairly well.

The earpiece had about ten feet of cord. I unwound it and slipped the earpiece into my right ear. I heard voices from the next room.

“… the person who betrayed us. Obviously someone did. We must find that someone.” A man’s voice speaking accented English, the lingua franca of our age.

“It might have been Surkov,” a woman said tentatively. That accent sounded French. Was that Marisa?

“If he had been the one,” the man said positively, “they wouldn’t have murdered him. Why kill your source of secret information? Oh, no! I think the traitor is one of us. Or perhaps Grafton.”

Grafton? ]ake Grafton? I thought that Grafton betraying the group, or any of them, was about as likely as me winning the Irish Sweepstakes, considering the fact that I had never bought a ticket.

I stood there amid the stuffed beasts in the Dead Zoo frozen into immobility, wondering what in the world these people were going to say next.

“This undertaking was always hazardous.” That was an older woman speaking, a French accent. I thought perhaps Isolde Petrou. “There are occasionally moments in history when a handful of determined people can make a difference. I do not know if this is one of those times, but I feel it is our moral duty to fight this great evil that is attacking the people of the earth. If they win, civilization will collapse and we will enter a new dark age. If we win, the adherents of Islam will eventually learn, as have the believers of all other faiths, how to live in a secular world, at peace with those who believe differently. The politicians wish to bury their heads in the sand, as usual. They will do nothing until the entire house is on fire. Huntington Winchester was absolutely right—it is the moral duty of those with the courage and means to grapple with this great evil.”

“I had thought,” the man said softly, so softly that I had to strain to hear, “that with the death of National Socialism in Germany, fascism was once and for all defeated. It wasn’t. The Islamic strain is even more virulent than the Italian and German varieties. My parents—you knew them, didn’t you, Madame Petrou?”

“I did.”

“They were Nazis in the thirties, rejoiced when Hitler took over, hated the Jews. Oh, yes, they admitted it later, when I was a boy. They were just children in the thirties, innocent, foolish and proud as all children are, but when they saw the devastation of Germany, when they realized that Hitler had murdered millions of people in concentration camps, then .. . they lived with the guilt of their earlier approval all their lives. I saw that guilt. It haunted them. This stain was on Germany, on Germans, this foul, evil, bloody stain . . .”

He paused and, listening but not seeing, I thought maybe he was trying to regain his composure. “We are all committed,” the man said forcefully. “We are all convinced we are doing the right thing. But there is a traitor among us and we must ferret him out.”

“Or her.” That was a female voice I didn’t recognize. Perhaps the future ex—Mrs. Zetsche.

“I am ready for bed.” Marisa.

“Of course,” the man said. “My bodyguards will be in the hallway all night.” So the man was Zetsche. He apparently rang a bell. In less than a minute I heard and saw someone enter the room. “Werner will escort you to your rooms. We will discuss this matter tomorrow at breakfast. Gute Nacht.”

They rose from their chairs in the living room and made their way toward the hallway as I wrapped up my cord and stowed the stethoscope mike.

I was walking around that trophy room in high dudgeon, tired, wishing I could spend twelve hours in bed, silently cussing and revisiting my decision to stay married to the green paycheck, when I got a glimpse through one of the windows of a man walking across the lawn. Just a dark figure, striding purposely.

Now what?

I thought about calling Grafton and giving him a piece of my mind, then decided against it. I checked the pistol in my waistband.

I d feel a lot better about all of this if I got busy and shot somebody.

As I climbed the stairs behind the four people from the living room, staying so far behind them I was out of sight, I was adjusting the gain and contrast knobs on the goggles. I was smack up against the limitations of the technology: I could see the four people in front of me, and I could count two more images of what should be people, faint images, merely blobs of color. In infrared, the lights in the. hallways looked like stars.

When the four people in front of me went into bedrooms—at least they looked like bedrooms, with hot water radiators for heat and attached bathrooms with hot water pipes—I looked for an empty bedroom beside them to hole up in. The building reminded me of an old hotel that had been renovated. How this architectural monstrosity survived World War II was a mystery. Maybe it was damaged and restored. I found an empty bedroom and went in.

With the door closed, I tried to find the other people who were in the house. Located three, this time. I was still diddling with the knobs when the goggles died. One second they worked, then the various heat sources faded away to nothing. Didn’t take me long to figure out that the battery was as dead as Adolf Hitler.

I sat there in the darkness cursing my luck. That didn’t do a lot of good, so I installed three stethoscope microphones so I could at least listen to the goings-on in the rooms around me and in the hallway. What I heard was two women in the bathroom.

Zetsche and his girlfriend were in the bedroom beyond the Petrous. All I could hear was murmurs, which might have been conversation or something else, such as television audio. Difficult to say. Of course, even if I did hear them, they would probably be talking in German, which wasn’t one of my languages.

I used the facilities myself, then settled down on a chair with the earphones in my ears. Without the goggles, this was the best I could do.

Before long the Petrou women fell silent. Conversation continued, still inaudible, for about an hour from the room beyond that; then it, too, faded away, leaving the big house in silence.

The night crawled along. Occasionally I heard measured footsteps— one of the bodyguards, I concluded, walking the hallways. Between footsteps there was no sound except the gentle patter of raindrops on the windowpanes. Amazing that the microphones picked that up so well.

One o’clock came and went. I tried to keep my eyes open by debating the issues. Was Marisa an assassin, was this really the line of work for me, and should I punch Jake Grafton in the nose the next chance I got? Unfortunately there were no clear answers; my eyelids got heavier and heavier and I slept.

For Marisa, nights were the worst. When the house was dark and silent her memories came flooding back, and her fears and anxieties and private hurts.

“Why won’t you tell me about my mother?” she demanded of her father during a rare visit. She had been a teenager then, thirteen or fourteen, sure that she knew the difference between right and wrong, sure of her ability to heal a broken world.

“There is nothing you need to know,” he said, in that condescending, self-righteous manner that she had grown to despise.

“I am not a child,” she retorted hotly. “Tell me the truth and I will live with it, as you do.”

“I am your father and you are still a child, a young woman. You must learn to trust my wisdom. I have made the right choice.”

“You ask for trust and yet you have none. Where is the justice and wisdom in that?” She had been tart in those days, argumentative. Her teachers even wrote notes to her putative parents, Georges and Grisella.

“I am a man and you are a woman. And I am your father.”

“What you are is a misogynist.” If he expected her to surrender, he didn’t know his daughter.

“What I am is a Muslim,” he retorted firmly. “I believe in Allah. I believe that the Prophet set forth the relationship between men and women in the holy Koran, and the relationship between father and daughter. I demand your respect and obedience to my will.”

“You may demand it, but you would be wiser to earn it.”

That was the first time she had seen him angry, out of control. “You would be wise to hold your tongue, child,” he said firmly.

For the first time in her life, she was frightened of him. The beast within had been revealed. He was like a prophet from the Old Testament, a visionary who saw only good and evil, and if you were not among the good, the obedient, then you were evil. It was in his eyes.