The Assassin (46 page)

I eyed those tables. Of course, no one knew who was getting which plate. Then I saw that the head table was being served directly out of the kitchen by guys and gals who looked suspiciously like Secret Service. They were leaving nothing to chance.

The president’s progress was slow. It seemed that he knew a lot of these folks, or pretended he did. He took his time at each table, and someone was always standing up to take a picture or two. Grip, smile sincerely, pose, say a few polite words, then do it all over again. Obviously this was going to take a while.

He was finished with the first row and starting on the second when the waiters began serving the main course. He was going to shake hands all through dinner. I guess he didn’t like Chicken Cordon Bleu any more than I did.

I slurped water and watched the crowd and the president, trying to take it all in.

Soon, Qasim thought, and tried to concentrate on what the lady on his left was saying. Something about her daughter who was attending Smith College. “These young ladies at Smith … they talk about a ‘third sex,’ and wear tails sticking out of their clothes, date each other and just do what all. Of course, my daughter would never do such nonsense.”

Qasim didn’t know what to say. He glanced at the president, who was shaking hands twenty-five feet away.

He was rescued by the woman on his right, who leaned around and spoke to the Smith mother. “They didn’t behave like that when I attended Smith,” she declared. “So much bad behavior, nowadays. These young women—what can they be thinking?”

“An excellent question,” Qasim murmured, but the ladies paid no attention.

A half hour or so into this production, I was aware that Marisa, seated on my right, had stiffened. She was staring.

I glanced at her face, which was a mask of concentration. Her attention was focused on a table in the middle of the room.

I looked that way. There were a dozen tables that she might be looking at.

“Marisa,” I whispered, to get her attention. “What do you see?”

She didn’t take her eyes off whatever she was looking at, nor did she answer me. My stomach tried to turn over. My instincts said this is it, yet I saw nothing out of the ordinary. People, just a sea of people …

She pushed back her chair and stood, walked behind my chair and started for the middle of the room. “Excuse me,” she said mechanically to the folks around us and started off.

I got a glimpse of a pistol butt in her right hand, partially concealed in the folds of her dress. Holy damn! Where had that come from? Adrenaline whacked me in the heart. I uncoiled from my chair and started after her.

The Secret Service agents standing here and there gave us a glance. One or two shifted nervously, but then they saw the red tag dangling from my neck and relaxed. They were really focused on the president and the people around him; they were still fifty feet away to our right.

Marisa crossed into the center of the room, threading her way between tables.

Me—I was so damn worried I almost peed my pants. If she pointed that shooter at the president, I was going to break her neck before she pulled the trigger.

I was surveying the tables ahead as she walked. Of course, just when I was near panic, she turned ninety degrees to the right and headed for a table beside the one the president was standing at.

“When I shake hands with the president,” Qasim asked the Smith mother, “would you take my picture?”

“Of course,” she said, looking at the camera. “Is it on?” “Oh, yes. Just aim and push that button right there.” “My daughter has a camera like this. I can manage.” Satisfied, Qasim took another look at the president at the next table, then glanced around, one last time. To his horror, he saw Marisa walking toward him. Tommy Carmellini was right behind her.

Jake Grafton caught my eye. I mouthed the words “She’s got a gun,” and he nodded, once. His expression didn’t change. My gaze left him, and I tried to scrutinize faces at the tables we were approaching.

Then I saw that someone was watching us, one of the men seated at the next table the president would visit. When he saw Marisa coming toward him, he couldn’t look away. He looked maybe fifty or fifty-five, with salt-and-pepper hair and a Vandyke goatee. Wearing a tux and red cumberbund. Trim, middle-sized, with a roundish face, and sitting down.

Now the president shook the last hand and turned toward the seated man’s table. Marisa ignored him. Her focus was on the man with the Vandyke, and she was walking quickly, right into the glare of the spotlights.

She walked up to the table so she was on his right, maybe three feet from him. He was turned, looking right at her, when she raised the pistol and shot him in the chest.

The report was like a cannon shot. Women screamed and men dove for cover. Abu Qasim lunged for her and grabbed at the pistol. He got her left arm instead, but she ignored his grasp and, with the gun against his chest, shot him three more times as fast as she could pull the trigger. The slugs literally hammered him out of the chair onto the floor.

Marisa would have shot him a couple more times, I think, but I reached around her, pushed her sideways and grabbed the gun out of her hand. Had to, or the Secret Service agent ten feet in front of me who was in the process of drawing his pistol would have shot her dead.

So she went to the floor beside Qasim while half the people in the place screamed or shouted and everyone scrambled for cover. It was the damnedest scene I have ever witnessed.

I put the pistol in my trouser pocket and bent down. Qasim was dead as a mackerel, glassy eyes staring at nothing. Not even much blood around the bullet holes. He had died within a few heartbeats after the first bullet hit him, right in the pump, it looked like. How he managed to grab her, I don’t know.

Marisa was ashen, holding her arm, which was bleeding from a long scratch.

What on earth?

I seized her arm, looked at the wound, then opened Qasim’s right hand. He was wearing a ring with a sharp point on it.

Grafton materialized at my elbow. He, too, saw the ring with the sticker.

Marisa was gasping. “My arm …” she managed. “It’s on fire.”

“The bastard poisoned her,” I said. “Like he was going to do to the president.”

Grafton stood and shouted. “Get back, give us room. We need a medical team and stretcher, right now!” When Grafton shouts, you can hear it in the next county, even over all that noise.

Two teams of paramedics came running. Secret Service agents with drawn pistols had surrounded the president, who was trying to force his way through them toward Marisa, Grafton and me. The agents weren’t letting him pass.

The place was pandemonium, with screams, a million shouted conversations, Secret Service agents with guns shouting orders and the master of ceremonies at the podium bellowing into the loudspeaker microphone.

Over all this hubbub I heard someone ask Grafton, “Who’d she shoot?”

And I heard his answer. “Abu Qasim.”

I glanced up and saw that Jack Yocke had forced his way through the knot of people. He had asked the question. He had a camera in his hand. Before anyone could do or say anything, he snapped a couple of photos of Qasim and Marisa while the docs were injecting Marisa with something in a hypodermic needle.

Secret Service agents began pushing people away from us. Some of them had submachine guns in their hands, I saw, and they were herding people out of the room.

In five minutes, while the medics worked on Marisa, they cleared the room of everyone except law and the president, who was standing nearby having it out with his bodyguards.

Marisa ignored the paramedics. She was looking only at Jake Grafton, talking to him. “I had to help him,” she said. “He threatened to kill Isolde if I didn’t.”

“I thought it was something like that,” he said.

“She’s the only … the only …” She went into convulsions, her muscles contracting spasmodically. Her back arched off the floor.

When she was able, she managed, “It’s better like this. I’m tired of living.”

She was having great difficulty breathing and couldn’t control the contractions of her facial muscles. Whatever the poison was, it was really horrible stuff.

“Who killed Jean Petrou?” Grafton asked.

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Jean met with Qasim. I saw him. He sold us out. Made a deal with the Devil himself … for money. He was that kind of man. Immature, self-indulgent, without scruples. Yes, I killed him, and I’m glad I did.”

“We’ve got to get her to the hospital, right now,” one of the medics said. Without further ado they lifted Marisa onto a stretcher.

I elbowed the doctor out of the way, bent down and grabbed a hand. She latched on to me as if I were a life ring. “Oh, Tommy, I—“

She gagged … her tongue protruded, then she tried to breathe and couldn’t. The medics hustled her out. I was going to go with her, but Grafton stopped me with a hand on my arm. “There’s nothing you can do, Tommy.”

The president came over and stood looking down at the body of Abu Qasim, the open mouth and the lifeless, staring eyes.

He put a hand on Grafton’s shoulder, almost as if to steady himself, then passed a sleeve across his brow and turned away.

Huntington Winchester was standing there, being restrained by an agent. The president reached for him and draped his arm around his shoulder, and the two of them walked away, leaning on each other.

chapterTWENTYFOUR

We were still in the middle of the ballroom watching the paramedics put Qasim’s body on a stretcher when two agents brought Jerry Hay Smith in. The spotlights were off, and presumably so were the television cameras.

Grafton faced him. “The Washington Post is going to run a story in the morning about the CIA operation that resulted in the death of Abu Qasim. You’re a part of it. If you deny a single word or try to give a different version, I’ll have you prosecuted for revealing classified CIA operations. Do you understand?”

“You can’t shut me up like that!”

“Want to try me?”

“You son of a bitch!”

Grafton merely looked at Smith and spoke coldly. “Don’t fuck with me, little man. I don’t have the patience or stomach for it. You’ve been warned.”

Grafton jerked his head at the agents, and they led Smith out.

“Where’d she get that gun?” I asked Grafton. I kept my voice low.

His answer gave me my second biggest shock of the evening. “I left it for her,” he said softly, “taped to the underside of the table.”

“You what?”

“You heard me.”

I was skeptical. “The Secret Service didn’t find it?”

“I told them it was there so they would leave it undisturbed.”

I gaped.

“Had to clear it with the brass, who said hell no, but the president said to do it.” Grafton shook his head. “He isn’t the wisest man who ever sat in the Oval Office, but he’s got his share of guts.”

“But why did you do it?”

“That was her price for spotting Qasim here tonight. She wanted to kill him. Didn’t want to watch someone else do it—she wanted to kill him herself.”

“Just like she killed her husband,” I muttered, still reeling.

Grafton shot me one of those looks, as if I were slow on the uptake. “You didn’t buy that fake confession, did you? Isolde Petrou poisoned her son. Marisa told her what he’d done, proved it to her, so Isolde sprinkled digitalis on his food.”

“But—“

“You were there. When Marisa saw Isolde about to pour the stuff on Jean’s food, Marisa pretended to recognize someone in the kitchen. That was a diversion, so you wouldn’t notice what Isolde was doing.”

“Isolde,” I said, trying to process it.

“Pretty fast thinking on Marisa’s part,” Grafton said with a hint of admiration.

“But why cover up for the mother who murdered her son?”

He gave me another of those looks. I was really earning them today. “She’s dying—what did you expect her to say? She loves Isolde as a daughter loves her mother. And she knew what Jean was. She was probably thinking of killing him herself; then her mother-in-law beat her to it.”

I was in the Secret Service command center with Jake Grafton when the reports began coming in. Robin Cloyd was manning the desk. She hadn’t gone to the dinner but had been stationed here at the nerve center as Grafton’s ears.

Abu Qasim had come to the fund-raiser under the name of Samuel Israel Rothstein, from Brooklyn. He had a driver’s license in that name in his wallet, along with credit cards. In the hours that followed, investigators visited the address and showed photocopies of the license to his neighbors, all of whom identified Samuel Israel Rothstein. But as the hours passed, the investigators discovered that Mr. Rothstein only went back a couple of years. Where he had lived before he moved to the flat in Brooklyn, no one knew.

“So he was planning this for two years?” I asked Grafton.

“Probably more than that,” Grafton said thoughtfully. “Setting up a false identity, giving to political candidates … I suspect we’ll find he devoted a great deal of time and expense building an identity in preparation for the day in the distant future when he might get a chance to assassinate the president.”

“Where do you think he got the poison?”

“From Surkov, of course. Surkov had contacts in Russian intelligence and was selling passports and identity papers. He could also have supplied the poison. Since he then knew far too much, Qasim killed him. Dead tongues don’t wag.”

The reports dribbled in. I got out of the way. Grafton and the police, Secret Service and FBI honchos huddled and conferred and did their thing. Someone mentioned that the Secret Service had taken possession of the television videos, which weren’t going to be released to the media.

Grafton came over at one point, and I said, “Why not do a DNA test on Qasim and Marisa, see if they really are father and daughter?”

“Would it matter?” he asked.

Seeing the look on my face, he smiled gently and said, “Go home. You’re done. Take Callie and Amy back to Washington. I’ll be home in a few days.”

I nodded, got up, shook his hand and turned to go.

“Thanks, Tommy,” he said.