Assassin's Silence

by Ward Larsen

  The captain hung up the phone and headed for the door, seeming done with his preparation. Umberto made his move. “Would you like to see the weather forecast?” he asked, holding up a ream of papers he’d printed out.

  “No, I have already done that. Besides, there are only two kinds of weather here—heat and rain. The only forecast I need for that is a window.”

  The captain walked outside into the gathering morning light.

  Undeterred, Umberto followed him, trotting to keep up with the man’s brisk pace across the tarmac. “How long will you be airborne?” he asked.

  “At least two hours are necessary for a full systems flight check. Engines, avionics, pressurization. To certify airworthiness everything must operate properly.”

  “Very well,” said Umberto. “I will make sure Miguel is ready with the stairs when you return.” He was pleased, thinking he’d put that well—an oblique suggestion that he himself had no pressing duties. The captain only walked faster.

  Sensing his opportunity slipping away, Umberto relented to the direct approach. “Will you take a passenger?”

  The captain drew to an abrupt stop. “What? Certainly not! We have work to do and you would only be in the way.” He turned and strode away.

  Umberto was crestfallen. He stood dumbstruck for a moment, but then scurried after the man. When they arrived at the airplane the copilot was waiting at the foot of the boarding stairs.

  “He wants to come with us,” the captain said, “but I told him it would be impossible.”

  Umberto looked plaintively at the second pilot. He had spoken to the man only once, and on that occasion found him to be abrupt, bordering on rude. Umberto was equally put off by the man’s unprofessional appearance—he kept a ragged beard and his shirt was old and tattered, certainly not appropriate for the second-in-command of such a magnificent aircraft. All the same, the copilot eyed him now with a degree of empathy.

  “Surely you can understand,” Umberto pressed, his gaze fixed on the younger man, “there is little excitement here in Santarém. To ride in such an aircraft, it would be the thrill of my life. I think I could guarantee you free beer tonight at my cousin’s bar—all you can drink.”

  The copilot smiled, first at Umberto and then at his superior. “Actually, Captain, I think we might have room for one more. Remember the sidewall seat in the cargo area. I was originally thinking one of the mechanics might come along to help conduct systems tests in the cargo bay, but perhaps Umberto would do. He’s been a great service to us, and clearly he is a capable man.”

  Umberto watched as the two exchanged a look. The captain, though appearing unmoved, gave a grudging nod and climbed the stairs without another word.

  When he was gone, a buoyant Umberto embraced the copilot. “Thank you! Thank you! I promise I will be useful!”

  Behind the black mask of his beard, the copilot smiled back. “I’m sure you will.”

  * * *

  The big jet began moving less than an hour later.

  The preflight checks went well, as far as Umberto could tell, and soon he was belted into a webbed seat along the sidewall of the forward cargo area. Looking aft he saw the tunnel of the fuselage—other than the big tank between the wings, the bay was completely empty, which made the aircraft seem more cavernous than ever. The big jet’s engines rose to a crescendo, and the takeoff acceleration pushed him sideways into the nylon webbing.

  Soon they were airborne, and Umberto gripped the rails of his seat as the ride became bumpy. The cockpit door was open, yet from where Umberto sat neither pilot was in view. He could, however, see a sliver of sky in the forward windscreen, and through the circular portal in the entry door across from him wisps of white cloud skimmed past at terrific speed. His senses were overloaded by the sights and sounds—it was every bit as exhilarating as he’d imagined.

  They’d been in the air no more than ten minutes when the captain called out from the front. “It will be turbulent for a time! Keep your seat belt fastened!”

  Umberto shouted that he would, quietly hoping that things eventually settled enough to allow what he truly wanted—to see the cockpit during flight. What a sight that would be!

  Soon blue sky filled the port window, and the turbulence improved considerably. The big jet droned smoothly, and Umberto waited with all the patience he could muster. After what must have been half an hour, he could take it no more. He called out in a loud voice, “Sir, must I still remain in my seat?”

  His words seemed lost in the big tube, muted by the hiss of rushing air. He wondered what caused that noise. The wind outside? Or was it the pressurization system? He had so many questions.

  “Can I come up with you?” he called out.

  No reply.

  Could the pilots hear him? He had no idea, but he sensed his chance slipping away. For the second time that day, Umberto acted on impulse. He unbuckled and stepped cautiously toward the cockpit door. Rounding a bulkhead he saw the flight deck, bright sun streaming through the windshield, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. When they did, what he saw concerned him. The captain was there, half-turned in his seat. The man was completely ignoring his instruments, his gaze fixed on Umberto. Even more disturbingly, the copilot’s seat was quite empty.

  The little Brazilian stood still, confused. “But where is—”

  It was a question Umberto Donato never finished.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The worst news of the day came just after noon.

  9847 Old Cedar Lane.

  Slaton stared at the address for a very long time. He stepped through the accounts and saw it in each one, a second administrative alteration: not only was ownership being tied to his name, but it now reflected the address of a certain suburban Virginia residence. The house where his wife and his son were likely eating breakfast at this moment.

  Had someone realized he was watching? Was it some kind of threat?

  Struck by an urge for fresh air, he picked up his half-full mug and went to the window. Very carefully, Slaton surveyed the nearby chalets, cars, and sidewalks before venturing onto the balcony. He leaned on the rail and a sharp breeze bit his exposed skin, countered intermittently by rays of warmth as the sun battled broken cloud layers. He should have appreciated the spectacular scenery, the steep mountainside and conifer forest, all dressed in white and accented by crisscrossing dots of color that were skiers carving their way downhill.

  Slaton saw none of it.

  The men from Malta once again. But who were they?

  Soldiers. That much was clear, notwithstanding the fact that the original squad of four was now down to two. Ben-Meir was Israeli, the one he’d downed in Mdina Polish. The others certainly had military backgrounds—until service in the name of honor and country had been replaced by a calling of greater liquidity. Yet whatever scheme Slaton was caught up in, it was not authored by a group of hired commandos. He sensed logistics and support, someone who could recruit soldiers and sign paychecks. An unseen planner and quartermaster.

  Slaton watched a skier in a red jacket at the top of the mountain. It was a woman, he was sure, moving fast but with control. She floated left and right down the mountain, carving past the slower dots effortlessly like an alpine snowflake on a breezeless day. He envied her freedom, and appreciated the single-mindedness with which she went about her task. Watching the red jacket curve downhill Slaton was mesmerized, and soon one word settled in his mind.

  How?

  How did they track me to Zurich?

  He had escaped the assault in Mdina by the thinnest of threads, then disappeared into the alleys of Valletta. He’d quietly arranged passage on a tramp steamer, and from there jumped into the cold Mediterranean. Finally, he’d traveled hundreds of miles under identity documents he knew to be pristine. Yet there they had been, lying in wait near the steps of Krueger’s office within an hour of his landing at Zurich International.

  How?

  The red jacket reached the bottom and was lost in a sea
of brightly colored parkas. Slaton paced across the balcony, and as he looked out across mountains glistening in the sun, he deconstructed the attack in Zurich. He recalled every detail as best he could, hoping to spur something new, something useful. And it did come.

  The plumber’s van.

  He envisioned it parked in front of Krueger’s office, and recalled the name and logo emblazoned on the side: LASZLO INSTALLATIONEN. And below that: SINCE 1940.

  Slaton hurried back inside and typed the name into the computer’s search engine, along with “Zurich.” The answer came immediately. Laszlo Installationen was nowhere to be seen, not today, and certainly not in 1940. Which meant the van was a well-devised cover. Fictitious companies were always preferable. To steal a legitimate plumber’s van guaranteed police involvement, not to mention the chance of surprise requests for warranty work from neighbors, or that another employee might spot the vehicle and recognize a fictitious work crew. Well-planned lies were always preferable. The only catch—they took time to manufacture.

  Taking things further, Slaton knew it defied probability that Ben-Meir and his crew had planned a break-in of Krueger’s office, and that he had simply stumbled in at the wrong moment. The timing was too perfect. Which left but one option—a preplanned hit on Krueger’s office, the timing of which was based on his arrival. They had tracked him to Zurich. Once again, how? He was confident in the efficacy of his false identity, and from the airport he had gone directly to Bahnhofstrasse.

  He was missing something.

  He shifted in the seat, and a stab of pain caused him to glance down at his thigh. Slaton noted steam venting under the door of the master bathroom, Astrid in the shower. He went to the second half-bath and closed the door. Easing off his trousers, he pulled away the bandage and gauged his wound under the brilliant Hollywood lights. The gash was still there, and underneath the inch-long cut was a large lump. A foreign body lodged in the muscle tissue. Slaton had assumed it was a chip of stone or wood, or in the worst case, a deformed slug from a low-velocity ricochet.

  Or?

  An old thought echoed in his head, one that had first settled three days ago in a battered rooming house in Valletta. Given such a team—experienced and heavily armed, with a well-designed plan, and facing an unarmed and surprised target—how on earth am I still alive?

  He then remembered the words he’d heard the crew-cut man utter into his microphone: “No contact. Do we pull back yet?”

  Yet. As if a retreat was planned. As if their objective had already been met.

  Slaton put it all together, and suddenly saw everything in a new light—a light that shone with disquieting clarity. There was a way to prove the theory.

  The question was how to go about it.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The distress call came one hour after takeoff, or as eventually noted by investigators, 10:21 a.m. Brasília Standard Time.

  “Mayday! Mayday!”

  Lucas Da Silva bolted upright in his chair. An air traffic controller for five years, he had heard those words on only one other occasion, a breathless plea from a student pilot who’d wandered too near a thunderstorm. The ever-steady Da Silva had managed to calm the young man and guide him to safety that afternoon, earning a plaque of commendation, and more meaningfully, a case of quality rum from the pilot. In spite of that favorable outcome, Da Silva had never forgotten the tone he’d heard on the radio that day—the naked, visceral helplessness of a man staring fate in the eye. Now he was hearing it again, only this time from a big jet, undoubtedly piloted by an experienced, professional crew.

  A bolt of adrenaline shot down his well-caffeinated spine, and Da Silva replied, “This is Atlántico Center. Say call sign and nature of your difficulty.”

  An extended silence followed, and soon both questions were answered by his radar screen. Two hundred miles northeast, at the edge of the Atlántico Flight Information Region, Perseus Flight 10 was falling like a stone.

  The terrified voice crackled again over the radio. “Perseus Ten! We have structural damage! We are—” Static interrupted the transmission. “We are in an uncontrolled descent and going down. Mark position!”

  “Roger, Perseus Ten! Your position is noted. What further assistance can I give to you?”

  The next transmission was garbled and completely unintelligible.

  “Perseus Ten, say the number of souls and fuel on board.”

  Da Silva waited. He watched the altitude readout sink through ten thousand feet. Soon after, it went blank. He keyed his microphone. “Perseus Ten, the nearest emergency field is Val de Cans, one hundred and ninety miles on a course of one-niner-five degrees.”

  Silence.

  “Perseus Ten, this is Atlántico Center, how do you hear?”

  Da Silva repeated the question twice more, and on the second try he realized his supervisor was looking over his shoulder. The two exchanged a head shake. As was his duty, and with a trembling hand, the supervisor initiated the crash response.

  * * *

  A Brazilian Air Force helicopter, diverted from a training mission, was the first on scene ninety minutes later. The aircraft homed in on an emergency beacon and discovered a partially inflated life raft that was otherwise empty. With only enough fuel to remain on station for a matter of minutes, the crew came to a hover over water nearly eight thousand feet deep and carefully plotted the coordinates of a modest debris field.

  It took the Brazilian Navy another hour to reach the drifting crash site. A Marinheiro class corvette, V19, arrived on scene, and without waiting for orders the nine-hundred-ton patrol vessel used its high-tech navigation suite and motivated crew to begin a search for survivors. They found the empty life raft, and also seat cushions, a yellow suitcase, insulation, and a dissipating oil slick that covered roughly a hundred yards. Everyone kept looking. The first casualty was spotted by a sharp-eyed lookout, a traumatized body that was quickly and respectfully recovered.

  In those critical first hours little else was found, and soon an Air Force meteorologist gave bad news to those commanding the rescue operation. An unusually severe weather system was developing off the northern coast of Brazil, and forecast to churn unabated for a full three days. Sensing scant hope and measureable risk, the governing authorities made the safe call and, in a decision that would soon be revisited, ordered all search teams to stand down. Ships set new courses for home port, and aircraft returned to their bases as the search for survivors from Perseus Flight 10 was put on indefinite hold.

  Though no one knew it at the time, it would take less than twenty-four hours to identify the recovered body as being that of the caretaker of Santarém–Maestro Wilson Fonseca Airport, a middle-aged man by the name of Umberto Donato who had reportedly hitched a ride on what was meant to be a maintenance test flight.

  Less apparent, particularly in those frenetic first hours, was the significance of his untimely end.

  * * *

  Slaton walked with a pronounced limp, and was leaning on Astrid when they entered the only clinic in Klosters.

  “I’ve had an accident,” he said to the receiving nurse in French.

  “I can see that,” she replied as she brought up a wheelchair.

  Slaton dropped into the chair with exaggerated heaviness.

  He and Astrid were both wearing ski gear, complete with boots, jackets, snow pants, and goggles around their necks, all taken from the equipment closet of Krueger’s chalet. Slaton’s ensemble was oversized, but the poor fit was indistinguishable in such typically bulky outerwear. They’d gone to great lengths to build their appearances. Their ski boots were covered in snow, and clots of white peppered Slaton’s hair. A chunk of ice was jammed into the cracked amber goggles hanging around his neck, and his right hand was missing a glove. The final prop, carried by Astrid, was a bent ski pole with a broken tip—the last inch was snapped off cleanly, an effect that had taken Slaton three attempts in levering the late Walter Krueger’s poles into the gaps of his wooden deck.

&n
bsp; The paperwork was minimal—unbridled tort law having yet to take hold in Switzerland’s winter playground—before the nurse wheeled him into an examination room and poised over a clipboard. “Where are your injuries?”

  “Where are they not?” he replied with a good-natured grimace. “I was going too fast on the east run and went over a ledge. I’m sore everywhere, but my leg is the worst.” He pointed to a tear in his pants that was oozing blood, this manufactured by reopening the original wound, and necessary in any event to erase four days of healing. “I tangled with my pole—the tip jabbed me in the leg and broke off. I can feel something in my thigh.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  Together they gingerly removed Slaton’s pants and thermal undergarment, also sized for Walter Krueger’s ample frame, and a doctor soon arrived. He was a gentle old man with silver hair, and wore a turtleneck sweater under a loose lab coat. With one look he declared an X-ray was in order, and it was undertaken with predictable efficiency. The results were telling.

  “There are no broken bones,” he declared, “but you do have an object lodged in your thigh.” The doctor held the ghostlike picture for all to see, his pen pointing to something that might well have been the tip of a broken ski pole. For his part, Slaton was happy the X-ray image had a narrow field of view, as there were other bits of shrapnel lodged in other recesses of his body that defied simple explanation.

  After some back and forth, it was agreed the best course of action would be to remove whatever it was on the spot. The procedure was straightforward, beginning with a local anesthetic and ending with six stitches.

  “The wound will be sore for a few days,” said the doctor. “I can give you a prescription for pain medication.” Slaton had no intention of taking opiates, yet for appearance’s sake he gratefully pocketed the prescription.