The Assassin (28 page)

“I think we need to inform the French government of what just transpired,” Jake Grafton said, “and get those two women out of the country. My recommendation would be to bring them to the States, collect the other members of Winchester’s group and put them in a location where we can trap whoever will come after them.”

“How do you know anyone will come after them?”

“Marisa Petrou told Carmellini that Abu Qasim plans to kill them all.” Grafton didn’t mention that Marisa had said that he, the admiral, was also on Qasim’s list.

“He’s doing a fine job, so far,” Wilkins said acidly.

“Not a safe house?” Molina asked.

“We want Qasim to find them. I was thinking the Winchester estate, in Connecticut. We’ll use some security, not too much. Qasim must see this as an opportunity, not a trap.”

“Has the thought occurred to you, Grafton,” Wilkins said, “that you may be doing precisely what Qasim wants you to do?”

“Yes, sir. I think it very probable that he wants us to gather all these people in one place so he can kill them in a spectacular manner.”

That comment caused Sal Molina to lose control of his face for a moment. He found himself staring at Jake Grafton.

“And you’re going to do it?” Wilkins growled.

“To kill a tiger, you need a goat.”

“What if this Marisa Petrou is a double agent?”

“If she tells Qasim where she is, that might be a plus,” Grafton said.

“The eternal optimist,” Wilkins said acidly. Sarcasm was a poor weapon, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Did she or did she not kill her husband?” Molina asked.

“She might have.”

“She might have killed Zetsche, or helped.”

Grafton nodded in acknowledgment.

“She might be an assassin,” Sal Molina said, eyeing Grafton carefully.

The admiral nodded again.

“So how are you going to keep Winchester and his pals alive if she is? All she has to do is poison the soup.”

“Carmellini and I will be inside with them. We’ll keep an eye on her.”

William Wilkins snorted.

“Your comments, Mr. Director,” Sal Molina said politely.

“I wish you people hadn’t told me about this,” the CIA director said. “I would rather have just read about it some morning in the Washington Post as I drank my coffee. I would have had my heart attack there on the spot and quietly died.”

Then he rose from his chair and walked out of the room.

The silence that followed was broken when Jake Grafton said, “He’s right, you know.”

“I do know,” Sal Molina said forcefully. His icy composure cracked again; his face fell, and he reached up and rubbed his forehead. “If this blows up, as William so eloquently predicted, I’ll resign and take full responsibility.”

“I just want to do my time in a country-club prison,” Jake Grafton said with feeling, “with the stock fraud artists, Ponzi schemers and inside traders. Those drug dudes are bad company, so I’m told.”

“What about Tchernychenko?”

“He refused to take serious precautions. He has two competent bodyguards, he said, and he promised to call Gnadinger, pass on a warning.”

Molina said a cuss word.

“We’d better get cracking,” Grafton said, “before Abu Qasim kills them all.”

chapter FIFTEEN

I received a series of calls on my cell phone from Jake Grafton as I drove past Paris and headed for the ferry to England. We were a few miles northwest of Paris when Grafton informed me that the U.S. ambassador to France, the French intelligence service—the DGSE—and the French police had been told about the murders that morning at the Petrou chateau. The police demanded that Marisa and Isolde Petrou return to the chateau. With Grafton’s concurrence, I kept driving northwest. I started watching for police cars—and saw them everywhere. They took no notice of us … yet.

Nor did anyone seem to be following us. I spent so much time looking in the mirrors I almost crashed twice.

Twenty minutes later Grafton called again. The French police, he said, were now only demanding that the Mesdames Petrou not leave the country. The police had found four bodies and six people alive, huddled in the basement, where they had fled after a masked gunman had killed the butler and one of the maids. He also told me the Swiss banker, Rolf Gnadinger, had been found dead the day before yesterday on the stoop of his house. Stabbed to death with an icicle, apparently. The Swiss police were investigating.

When Grafton hung up, I informed the women. “You’ll need a new butler, maid and day security man,” I said. “Bet you have a hard time finding new people.”

Marisa didn’t say a word, which didn’t improve my mood. The problem here, I decided, was that Jake Grafton had given me only background without telling me who was really doing what to whom. These women probably knew enough to write a book. The old woman hadn’t said ten words to me, and Marisa only went in for cryptic comments to be passed on to Grafton. I felt completely out of the loop. The darkness was stygian.

A black Porsche got behind us and settled in. I changed lanes, and he did, too. Not that I could see the driver, because the windshield was slanted too much and the sky reflecting on it made it opaque.

I sped up. He stayed right with me.

Fearing the worst, I slowed down. A minute later the Porsche passed me—the driver, a woman, was using me to clear the road of police looking for speeders. I had been doing ten over.

“And Rolf Gnadinger is dead. Murdered. On his porch, apparently.”

“Rolf?” That was Isolde.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Isolde Petrou had been hit hard today, and she winced as she took this body blow. Marisa turned and looked at her. They stared at each other for a long moment before Marisa turned around.

In the next call Grafton said the coast was clear; I could take the ladies to England. “Roger that.” I flipped the phone shut.

“You’re off the hook,” I informed Marisa in a nasty tone of voice. “You won’t have to spend tonight in jail.”

She turned her head and gave me The Look. She had, of course, heard my side of the calls, which mainly consisted of a series of grunts and yessirs. In keeping with my role as loyal, obedient slave, I hadn’t asked any questions.

After checking again for tails, I glanced at Marisa. She was examining her hands. Probably looked the same as they had this morning, I suspected. Her face looked thinner, though, and drawn. The second time I looked, I could see some of the hairline scars, little white lines, that the plastic surgeon had apparently been unable to eradicate from her adventure in Paris last year.

“So,” I said conversationally, “is Abu Qasim your father?”

“He says he is.”

“Well, he oughta know. He was there at the conception or he wasn’t.”

Silence followed that flip remark. Okay, okay, that was ill-advised.

“Do you believe him?” I asked, glancing her way again.

She took a moment to reply. “I used to. It doesn’t matter now.”

“There’s such a thing as DNA testing, you know.”

Those brown eyes swiveled my way. I met them and then put my attention back on the road, where it belonged. Every so often I glanced her way, trying to decide if she was part Arab. She was a lovely woman, perhaps a shade darker than your average French chickadee, but so were a lot of women. Dark brown hair, almost black, those big brown eyes, perfect lips. No hook nose—nothing like that. Just a nose. Actually, a nice nose.

“It’d be nice to know,” I said after a while.

“No,” she said softly. “It would not.”

Isolde Petrou leaned forward and put a hand on her shoulder.

Eide Masmoudi didn’t tell his fellow spy, Rahwan Ali, about the bottle of binary poison in his pocket. In his life as a spy he had learned that a secret is a secret only as long as no one knows it. The fact that Jake Grafton knew about the poison didn’t count—he had supplied the stuff. Anyway, Eide thought he knew Jake Grafton, and the admiral would never tell a soul. Rahwan wouldn’t, either, for the simple reason that his life was also on the line. Still, if he didn’t know, he didn’t have to carry the secret around. The other thing Eide had learned was that secrets had mass and radiated energy. The more powerful a secret, the more it radiated, like a glowing pile of plutonium, and when a secret reached critical mass, the possessor had to tell somebody.

Eide was surrounded by young men, Muslims from the mosque, who couldn’t keep secrets. They lived in rented flats, as many as could be packed into a small apartment. The mosque was the center of their lives, where they worshipped, where they hung out, where their friends were. They told everything they knew to their comrades, every hint they picked up, everything they heard, everything anyone said. After all, they were involved in a great quest, were planning glorious deeds that would earn them entrance into Paradise. So of course they talked to each other, incessantly. The mullah, al-Taji, and his lieutenants, knowing this, told them as little about the planning of the glorious deeds as possible. Still, the young men got hints, and they speculated. These speculations and hints were the raw intelligence Eide and Rahwan passed to Jake Grafton, and he forwarded them on to his opposite number in MI-5.

Eide’s secret was giving off light and heat in his pocket—he thought everyone could see it. Could see the bulge in his trousers, could feel the heat, could see his guilt. Could see in his face that he was a traitor to jihad, their holy war against the infidels.

Not that he believed in jihad, because he didn’t. His mother’s death— murder—had convinced him. Jihad was an evil, a betrayal of Allah.

Still, the sooner he got rid of this bottle, the better. And the sooner he got out of this mosque, this gathering of the Devil’s disciples, the better.

He thought about getting out a lot now. Going back to America, back to Brooklyn. Back to the friends he had known all his life, the mosque where he had grown up, the cleric there who had been his friend and mentor ever since his father died in a construction accident, eight years ago. A year after his father’s death, his mother was murdered.

He had watched the television in horror as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. He knew she was in there, on the fifty-second floor. That was where she worked.

He remembered that day as the most horrible of his life. He had stayed glued to the television … and his mother never came home.

They never even found her body.

Later, in the days that followed, when the police would let spectators pass, he had gone to Ground Zero and stood looking. That was the horror the jihadists wanted, that they planned and plotted and schemed for as they dreamed of murder and Paradise, with houris who would give them sexual pleasure beyond their wildest fantasies. Because they murdered infidels—and fellow Muslims if they happened to get in the way.

Shit happens, the people in Brooklyn said.

Yeah, Eide Masmoudi reflected. Indeed it does. And simpleminded fools who have no idea of the harm they are causing make it happen.

Still, the bottle was hot in his pocket. He was going to kill a man with it.

That was no small matter.

Nor was the fate awaiting him if the holy warriors who followed al-Taji found out—or even suspected—he had been the agent of the great man’s death. In their anger they would torture and murder him as fiendishly as they could. They were like children, or savages, assuming that torture and murder of their enemies would solve the problems they saw in their world. When you hate enough, they thought, you can change the world. Hate was their motivation and their salvation. Hate enough and Paradise awaits.

Allah would watch over him, Eide thought. His life would go as Allah wished. God is great. Allah akbar. Put your trust in Allah and go forward. At least the holy warriors had that right; in fact, that was the only thing they had right.

All he needed was an opportunity. So far it hadn’t come.

Let it come soon, he prayed.

Jake Grafton had two men shadowing Huntington Winchester, so it was a simple matter to call them and find out where he was. New York City, they said, in an office building on Madison Avenue, across the street from Madison Square.

The helicopter that had brought him from Washington deposited him at the West 30th Street Heliport. He went to the street and hailed a taxi.

So that was how he came to be sitting in Madison Square when Huntington Winchester and two people, a man and a woman, came out of the building across the street and paused to shake hands. There was a limo waiting for Winchester, but before he could get into it, one of Jake’s men spoke to him and nodded at Grafton, sitting on a bench across the street. After speaking to the limo driver, Winchester jaywalked and joined the admiral on his bench. The two attorneys, if that was what they were, managed to flag down a taxi and climb in.

“Lawyers?” Jake asked, nodding toward the departing taxi.

“I’m putting a couple of their kids through Harvard,” Winchester said. “Divorces are the cost of socially sanctioned sex. Hell, everyone I know is divorced, getting divorced or wishes they were divorced.”

Jake Grafton, who had been happily married for many years, didn’t bother to comment.

“That man over there who spoke to me and pointed you out—he works for you, doesn’t he?”

“For a few days. I needed to keep tabs on you, and the folks at the FBI were kind enough to help.”

“He’s an FBI agent?” Winchester was incredulous.

“He’s still standing over there. Go ask to see his credentials.”

Winchester waited for a break in traffic and jaywalked again. The FBI man glanced at Grafton, who nodded, then produced his credentials for Winchester’s inspection.

When Winchester returned to the bench, he dropped beside Grafton and said, “Why didn’t you just call me?”

“We’ll get to that,” Grafton replied. He stood and glanced behind him to see who might be listening. That glance was not lost on Winchester. “Let’s take a walk,” the admiral said.

They walked through the park, and there was another limo waiting on Fifth Avenue. The driver held the door open for Grafton and Winchester as they approached.

“My wheels,” Grafton said, and motioned for Winchester to get in first. When they were rolling south down the avenue, Grafton said, “We can talk here.”