The Assassin (23 page)

Eide eyed the admiral. “You’re the case officer. I take the risks.”

“Don’t fuck with me, kid. I make the rules and give the orders. You’ll bleed same as everybody. We’ll use you later on something else. We’re not retiring you—you’ll get your chance to make a difference. There’re thousands of these sons of bitches out there running around loose, and we need all the help we can get. Now tell me, yes or no?”

Eide took his time. Finally he took the bottle from Grafton’s hand and pocketed it. “For my mother,” he said.

Jake Grafton nodded.

Eide Masmoudi walked out of the men’s room.

For his mother, Jake thought, who was murdered in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, by suicidal fanatics. A man couldn’t have a better reason to fight.

Rolf Gnadinger was still at his office at the bank in Zurich when he received a telephone call from Oleg Tchernychenko. Gnadinger had financed numerous oil field deals for Tchernychenko and Huntington Winchester in the last ten years. They were willing to pay top rates— and did—in return for loans granted with a telephone call and closed within hours. Speed was the name of their game, and Gnadinger had made millions for the bank because he was willing to play. He was willing because he trusted both men, who were solid as rocks.

After the telephone encrypters were turned on and had timed in, Oleg said, “I had a visit yesterday from Jake Grafton. He told me this Abu Qasim villain is real and evil as a heart attack. He believes Qasim killed Alexander Surkov and Wolfgang Zetsche and may have murdered Isolde Petrou’s son, Jean.”

“Have you talked to Hunt?” Rolf asked. Yes. He is plainly worried, but put a good face on it. These deaths are evidence, he said, that our war against the terrorists is hurting them. ‘Money well spent,’ was his phrase.”

“I have taken precautions,” Rolf assured Oleg. That was a lie, one that came readily to his lips. He was being more watchful than he used to be, but that was the extent of it. The truth was that he didn’t want to think of someone hunting him. To kill him. He refused to even look at that vision from the ancient, primeval past. After all, he told himself, I am just another face in the crowd.

“So have I,” Tchernychenko responded. “I’m too good a client for you to lose. And truth be told, I don’t want to go to the trouble of breaking in another banker.”

They said their good-byes and hung up. Gnadinger spent a sober moment staring at the telephone. Then his gaze wandered to the portraits on the wall. The chief operating officer of the bank rated a big corner office, with lots of wall space, which he had filled with portraits of his predecessors.

He studied them, one by one. He had joined the bank in the mid-1960s, about the time the furor over the money the Holocaust Jews deposited in Swiss banks began to bubble. His predecessors had been officers and employees of this bank, or other Swiss banks, when those deposits came in during the late 1930s and early 1940s. They met the German Jews, shook their hands, accepted their money. Then the Nazis murdered them. The banks kept the money.

That is, they kept the money until the survivors and relatives of the Jews got organized and raised a huge stink. Even then, the banks held on to the bulk of the funds by demanding records that the officers knew didn’t exist.

The portraits were of the men who refused to return the money. Gnadinger glanced at every face. When he was young, Gnadinger wondered what those men thought about themselves in the wee hours of the night when they were alone with their consciences . . . and with God, if indeed He had survived the Holocaust. Gnadinger had watched for decades as they wrestled with their consciences, or refused to do so, assuring any who asked that they were absolutely certain they were doing the right thing, the right thing for their banks, the right thing for Switzerland. They were right, right, right! Except for the stinky little fact that they weren’t.

Hitler murdered the Jews, seven million of them, whole families, whole clans, and the Swiss banks profited from that stupendous crime.

The Islamic terrorists were out to do it again, those new Nazis, who prayed to Mecca five times a day and murdered infidels when they weren’t on their knees with their foreheads on the carpet.

Rolf Gnadinger had no intention of winding up like one of those men in the portraits.

He finished the paperwork on his desk, arranged it neatly in piles and in-baskets and files just so, the way the secretaries knew he would arrange it. He had climbed the banking ladder by being logical and detail-oriented, and he was now. Even his anxiety couldn’t force him from the habits of a lifetime. He finished his workday around six thirty in the evening by signing some late-afternoon correspondence, then capped the pen, put it in its place in his drawer, locked the drawers of his desk and rose from his chair.

It had snowed early this morning, but this afternoon had been unseasonably warm, with sunshine and slush in the streets and melting icicles. He stood at the window for a moment looking at nature’s handiwork, which hadn’t intruded into the quiet offices and corridors of the executive suite.

He donned his coat and arranged his hat just so, then opened the door and left his office. He nodded at his secretary as he glanced at his watch. He was leaving right on the dot, at his usual departure time, not a minute too early nor a minute too late. Timing is everything in life, a wise man once said.

Gnadinger rode the elevator down from the executive suite to the main floor of the bank, where he found the tellers finishing their accounting and filling out their day sheets. The guard at the door touched his cap as Gnadinger approached, then turned to unlock the door.

Well, Oleg was right: He needed a bodyguard. Tomorrow he would call the security service that had the bank contract and ask for a man with a gun. If the man was competent, no one would realize he was an armed bodyguard. The banker reminded himself to demand a man who looked and dressed as if he belonged in Gnadinger’s social circle. No tattooed or pierced persons, please.

The uniformed guard opened the door for Rolf; he stepped outside into the evening gloom. The temperature was still well above freezing. The sidewalks were shoveled, the icicles on the building were dripping copiously, and slush filled the gutters.

He looked around nervously. Away from the safety of the office, outside in raw nature, with water and wind and slush and people moving randomly, Oleg’s warning about assassins seemed more real, more possible.’

He set off along the sidewalk toward the parking garage that held his car as he glanced warily at pedestrians and passing cars.

Really, in the twenty-first century, in safe, civilized Switzerland, in this ancient old city by the lake, the nightmare of killers and murderers and religious fanatics seemed like something from one of those trailers for a horror movie that he would never watch. A lot of people did watch the horror films, of course, to be titillated, because even they could not accept at a gut level the fact that the evil depicted on the screen might be a part of the world in which they lived.

The banker paused at the door to the garage. Took a deep breath and opened it. The stairwell was empty, the overhead light burning brightly. He climbed the stairs, his leather shoes making grinding noises with every step, noises that reverberated inside that concrete stairwell.

His car was on the third level, right where he always parked. In fact, the parking place had a number and was reserved for him: The bank rented it by the year.

No one was in sight amid the cars when he came out of the stairwell. About half the spaces were empty. He forced himself to walk calmly toward his car. He already had the keys in his hand, his thumb on the button of the fob that would open the locks.

His eyes moved restlessly, looking for a lurking figure, anything out of the ordinary. Of course he saw nothing.

Fear is a corrosive emotion, and Gnadinger knew that. In time he would become more and more jumpy, more and more nervous, as the acid of fear worked on his nerves. He knew that, too.

Approaching the car Gnadinger pushed the button on the fob. He heard the click, audible and distinctive in that concrete mausoleum, as the door locks released.

Then he realized that someone might have put a bomb in his car. He stopped, stood frozen, waiting, wondering what he should do. He realized that he was holding his breath, waiting for the bomb to explode.

It didn’t, of course. He stood there in that ill-lit, dingy garage until he felt foolish; then he opened the door to the car, the interior lights illuminated just as they should, and he climbed in. Closed the doors and locked them and put on his seat belt. Inserted the key into the ignition.

The bomb might be wired to explode when he turned the ignition!

Several seconds passed before a wave of disgust washed over him and he turned the key. The engine caught immediately and the vehicle’s headlights came on automatically. So did the CD player, from which emanated the lively tones of classic jazz, which he had listened to on the way to work this morning.

As he put the transmission into drive and inched out of his space, Rolf Gnadinger chastised himself for being a fool. Oleg had spooked him, and his imagination had done the rest.

Yet the killer or killers might come one of these days. Someone had murdered Tchernychenko’s aide, and Wolfgang Zetsche, and Isolde Petrou’s son. Someone from the Kremlin? Perhaps the Kremlin had ordered Surkov’s murder—he had immediately assumed that when he first heard the news, but why would the Kremlin want Zetsche dead? Or young Petrou, a French diplomat?

Terrorists, he thought. Yes, indeed. Fanatics. Throat-slitters. Suicidal bombers and mass murderers.

He needed a professional bodyguard, he told himself again. Someone trained to be watchful for all these threats. The bodyguard could worry about all this stuff and Gnadinger wouldn’t have to.

The traffic was moderate at this hour and threw up sheets of spray that the wipers had difficulty with. Gnadinger kept busy punching the windshield wash system every few moments.

His neighborhood of renovated older homes was also quiet. Only a few cars passing on the streets, no pedestrians. His house was empty tonight. His wife was in Rome on a shopping expedition with their daughter, who was grown with children of her own. They had planned this trip for months.

And today was the maid’s day off. The maid was from somewhere in North Africa—he didn’t know where; the employment agency had sent her, and his wife had dealt with them. What the maid did on her day off, where she went or whom she talked to, he had no idea.

He pushed the button to raise the door on the two car-garage, the new one that he had had built after he and his wife bought the house ten years ago. The old one was a ramshackle wooden affair, ready to fall down, and he had gotten tired of looking at it. The new one had the same facade and design as the old house, so it looked as if it had been there forever.

Much better, he thought as he walked out of the garage and lowered the door with another button on his key fob.

Fifteen paces took him to his front door. As he walked he eyed the icicles hanging dangerously from the eaves. He needed to have the maintenance people remove those tomorrow.

As he looked for the door key on his ring, he heard a noise behind him, very slight. Startled, he turned immediately.

A man coming at him, with something in his hand! Before Gnadinger could react, he jabbed the thing downward into Rolf Gnadinger’s chest.

Stunned and amazed, Gnadinger glanced down and saw the butt end of an icicle protruding from his chest. He grasped it, tugged futilely . . . and looked into the face of the man who had stabbed him. The man smiled.

Rolf Gnadinger could no longer stand. He felt himself sinking toward the ground, too weak to remain upright. His vision became a tunnel. Through that long, long tunnel he saw the man walking away. Then the tunnel closed completely and the darkness became total.

Harry Longworth and Gat Brown were dirty, cold and bored. They had been sleeping in a hole, eating MREs and pooping in another hole for ten days now, and they were thoroughly sick of it. The cold, the wind that never stopped and the blowing dust didn’t help.

“One more day of this,” Harry Longworth said. “Then tomorrow we call for an extraction and hike to the pickup point.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Brown retorted. “Let’s call this morning and start hiking tonight. Get picked up tomorrow afternoon and by tomorrow night we’ll be in a bath, eating real food and drinking real beer. A tub full of hot water, real soap, aaah.”

“Pussy.”

“If I had some I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“If nothing happens by this time tomorrow, we call then.”

The men were hidden on the side of a canyon that wound its way into the mountains. The crest of a rocky ridge was a thousand feet behind them. To their left the Hindu Kush rose in peaks covered with snow.

They listened to the weather on their shortwave radio every day. If snow was forecast, they would have to leave. They had had a window of dry air, though, cold as the devil, with not a cloud in the sky or a flake of snow. They huddled in their hole, watching, shivering, enduring, cursing, telling each other the same old lies.

Below them, against the far wall of the canyon, sat a cluster of six houses and barns, ramshackle affairs made of stones and wood and cinder block. Smoke rose from several chimneys. When the wind was just right, they could smell the smoke and the aroma of cooking meat. Of course, they couldn’t risk a fire. Although it was wide, the canyon wasn’t particularly deep. On its floor were flats with grass for goats and small gardens.

They were there to watch that village complex. So far, for ten days, nothing of interest had happened.

Beside them on a bipod was the .50-caliber sniper rifle, complete with scope. The darn thing weighed thirty-one pounds and shot 1.71 ounce slugs a half inch in diameter and two and a half inches long.

Brown lay on his back as Longworth kept watch. Occasionally Longworth glanced through a spotting scope at the village, but mostly he just watched. They were hidden in an acre of leafless brush, and the view outward was restricted. Ten days ago they had ensured they had a good viewing hole through some judicious pruning of branches. Not much, just enough.