Assassin ah-2

by Ted Bell

  The Pasha clapped once, and the four guards took off at a stately pace, the sedan chair headed down a series of marble halls, the only sounds the music of the crystal jets in the many splashing fountains. From far away floated the notes of a Persian flute and the distant jingle of tambourines. In one of the great arched halls, a number of the Pasha’s concubines were dancing for their own entertainment.

  The sumos carried the Pasha past endless doors plated with beaten gold and inset with jeweled hyacinths and chrysolites. Their bare feet padded silently over silken rugs embroidered with silver stars and crescent moons. A tapestry depicted fleets of golden dhows with silvered lateen sails ghosting upon the mirrored Nile. Brilliantly colored songbirds flew freely about in the many vast courts of the Blue Palace, held captive only by the thin-meshed golden nets hanging high above.

  Finally, the regal party arrived in the small gardens strictly reserved for the Pasha’s principal wife, Yasmin. The four sumos carefully lowered the sedan chair and, after bowing deeply to the Pasha, retired discreetly to enjoy a few hours of free time in their private suite of rooms.

  They were no longer kept chained like disorderly slaves or the political prisoners down in the catacombs. The Pasha had enslaved them by creating a sumo paradise within the walls of the palace: he paid them in gold and diamonds, made them wealthy beyond measure, he had given them their pick of the most beautiful women in the seraglio, put legions of servants at their command.

  Still, Snay bin Wazir saw the sumos were not happy. Being a keen observer of human nature, the Pasha quickly surmised the source of their unhappiness. They missed the fame and adulation accorded them in the streets and sumo shrines of their homeland.

  So the Pasha had constructed a great hall in the manner of the most magnificent sumo shrines of the Nara Period of the eighth century. It was a soaring affair, with gilded sandalwood beams rising high above the dohyo, the Ring. There were bouts every week, and enthusiastic attendance was mandatory. Everyone from the captain of the imperial house guards to the lowliest minion was obliged to attend, and every seat was always full.

  The Pasha took great delight in the emotion on the faces in the crowd. Some were faking, he knew exactly who, and made a mental note, but most were honestly enthralled when each of the wrestlers, with great dignity, performed the opening dohyo-iri ceremony. First, the clapping of hands to attract the attention of the gods. Then the upward turning of the palms to show the absence of weapons. And finally, the climactic act of bringing each foot down with a resounding blow to drive all evil from the dohyo.

  In time, the sumos each acquired a devoted following and were treated with great respect and even reverence inside the walls. They had become celebrities within the Pasha’s great mountain sanctuary. That the Pasha allowed any but his own radiance to shine was a source of great puzzlement and gossip in the barracks, where the guards lived, and amongst the women in the seraglio.

  Although they would never dare say it, most thought this diverting chapter in the Pasha’s life could only end in tragedy. Lights that burned too brightly within this palace tended to get snuffed out. There was but one sun permitted in this solar system.

  In addition to defending the Pasha at the cost of their own lives, if necessary, and bearing him about daily in his chair, the four sumos had been schooling their new master in the fifteen-hundred-year-old sumo arts. Snay bin Wazir, heartless, powerful, and full of guile, was a willing and able student. Kato himself said that bin Wazir had already achieved such a level of proficiency as to make him competitive against the top ranks of rikishi in Japan. He had only to refine his techniques and one day he might rival them in grace and skill and artistry.

  Snay had made it plain to the four rikishi that if he were ever able to defeat any one of them, the penalty was instant banishment from the palace. It was a fate only Ichi desired. No amount of wealth or women could salve Ichi’s broken heart. Night and day he longed for Michiko, an angel who’d come to earth to bless him with peace just before his abduction. While his honor forbade deliberate loss in the dohyo, in sumo parlance a feigned Tsuki dashi, it did not, he’d come to feel, forbid the death of a master who held him captive and whom he did not honor.

  And so, every morning when the sun rose over the high palace walls, and the thin mountain air was crystalline with light made radiant by the snowy mountain peaks looming above him, Ichi would walk alone in the gardens, consult his heart, and listen carefully to the song of the splashing fountains. He waited for the pure and innocent voice of Michiko. Surely one day the waters might whisper the secret way in which Ichi might escape his prison and find his way back to her heart. And so return to the source of the sun.

  Chapter Five

  London

  “ANOTHER PINT OF STOUT, THEN, CHIEF?” DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Ross Sutherland asked Congreve above the hubbub at the bar. The two men had dashed out of the Prince Edward Theatre, escaping before the final curtain had even touched the boards. They then made their way through a cold, drenching rain to the nearest pub in Old Compton Street. Ducking inside the Crown and Anchor, they were now more or less comfortably situated at the bar.

  “No thank you. I really should be pushing off, Inspector,” Congreve told his companion, glancing at his watch. “Time to knit up the raveled sleeve of care, I believe.”

  “Not your brand of poison, that musical, was it, Chief?”

  Someone, Ambrose Congreve couldn’t for the life of him remember who—his pal, Fruity Metcalfe, perhaps—had recently told him he would enjoy an enormously popular musical entertainment called Mamma Mia.

  He hadn’t.

  “I’m aware that many actually enjoy the sort of thing we’ve just had the misfortune to witness. A blatant, sugar-coated confection, cynically calculated to appeal to the LCD.”

  “LCD?”

  “Lowest common denominator.”

  “Shoe fits, I suppose. I rather enjoyed it, myself.”

  “Rubbish! It was about a wedding, for God’s sakes, Sutherland. A wedding! How could anyone, now that I think about it, I think it was Sticky Rowland, suggest something about a bloody wedding? Confound it, man! Is there not an ounce of, of, what’s the word, left in this world?”

  “Propriety?” the junior New Scotland Yard man said, not quite sure it was the word Congreve had been searching for.

  “Propriety, exactly. Decency! It’s been only what, two weeks since the—since Victoria’s—wedding. Well. What’s a chap to do but turn to drink? I will have another pint if you don’t mind.”

  Sutherland caught the eye of the Crown and Anchor’s portly barman. “Half of bitter, please, and another pint here,” he said, looking at Congreve out of the corner of his eye. The old boy was positively morose, he thought, putting another fiver down. Having caught his own reflection in the smoky mirror above the bar, Sutherland was startled to see how weary he himself appeared.

  Inspector Sutherland, a man in his early thirties, was, like his companion, on semipermanent loan from the Yard to Alex Hawke. Ross Sutherland, a Scot from the Highlands north of Inverness, stood somewhere just short of six feet. He had a lean, lanky frame, with a healthy, ruddy complexion, a pair of keen grey eyes, and straw-colored hair kept close-cropped like his brush-cut American cousins at the CIA. Were it not for his broad Highland accent, and an occasional fondness for loose tweed jackets, the former Royal Navy flying officer turned Scotland Yard inspector might easily be mistaken for an American.

  But the face he now saw reflected looked gaunt, even haggard. Hell, they’d all been through it. The horror of Vicky’s death, the outrageousness of it, had taken an enormous toll on anyone and everyone who cared for Alex Hawke.

  Other than Hawke himself, Congreve seemed the hardest hit, both personally and professionally. MI5, MI6, and the Yard were all over it and doing all they could. To Congreve’s great chagrin, however, they had rebuffed his every effort to get involved.

  “What exactly am I supposed to do about this, Sutherland,” Ambrose said now,
ignoring his freshly arrived pint. “Sit on my bloody hands and do nothing? Good Lord!”

  “Aye. It’s frustrating.”

  “It’s a bleeding outrage, is what it is,” Congreve said, properly browned off now, “We both still work for Scotland Yard, unless I’m very much mistaken. Has someone from Victoria Street told you differently?”

  Sutherland stared morosely into his half bitter, feeling every bit as frustrated as his superior. “Hmm. It would seem that we are surplus to the Yard’s requirements, Chief.”

  Ross and Alex Hawke had a long history together. During the Gulf War, when Alex was flying sorties for the Royal Navy, Ross had been right behind him in the after cockpit, serving as Commander Hawke’s Navigation and Fire Control Officer. Kept the boss from getting lost in the desert and lit up the juiciest targets, basically.

  Near the end of that conflict, after a particularly nasty skirmish in the skies over Baghdad, they’d been brought down by a SAM-7. Both men had ejected from the burning fighter, landing in open desert about thirty miles south of Saddam’s capital. Captured and imprisoned, they’d barely survived their treatment at the hands of the Iraqi guards. Sutherland, more than any other prisoner, had been beaten senseless during daily “interrogations.” Hawke, seeing his friend near death, saw no hope but escape from the makeshift hellhole.

  That night, Hawke had killed a number of guards with his bare hands. They’d fled south across the desert, navigating by the stars, searching for the British or American lines. For days and nights on end, Hawke had carried Sutherland on his back. They were wandering in circles, staggering blindly over the sand-blasted dunes, when an American tank unit under the command of U.S. Army Captain Patrick “Brick” Kelly had finally spotted them.

  The same Brick Kelly who was now U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James.

  Sutherland sipped his half-pint and considered Congreve’s question. Why had they been rebuffed by the Yard at every turn? As one of Hawke’s inner circle, he wanted immediate action and he’d seen precious little.

  “They won’t let us near it,” Ross finally said with a gallows grin, “because they think we’re too close to it.”

  “Too close? Too bloody au fait?”

  “Let me rephrase it, sir. They imagine our emotions might cloud our judgment.”

  Ambrose Congreve scoffed at the very notion, picked up his pint and drank deeply. He looked past the patrons of this somewhat grim establishment to the sheeting rain swirling about the streetlamps and clawing at the windows.

  “Not even allowed to inspect the crime scene? Turned back at the very edge of the woods where Stokely discovered the shooter’s lair?” he asked the air. “Me? Ambrose Congreve? Words fail me.”

  “Aggro?”

  “Beyond aggravation, Sutherland. Well and far beyond. Do you suppose the scene tape is down at this point?”

  “We’re two weeks in.”

  “Tape is down, then. Forensics and scene-of-crime officers will be long gone.”

  “What are you thinking, sir?”

  “I’ll bloody well tell you what I’m thinking. Are we all even here?”

  “Surely you don’t intend to—”

  “Pay a little nocturnal visit to the crime scene? That’s exactly what I intend, Sutherland.”

  “You can’t be serious. In this weather? At this hour of the night?”

  Congreve drained his pint, slipped off the barstool, gathered himself up, and leaned into Sutherland’s face, his eyes alight with something akin to, if not merriment, then certainly mischief. It would not have surprised Ross to see him actually twirl the tips of his waxed mustache.

  “Good God, he’s serious,” Sutherland said.

  “Never more so. The rain seems to have let up nicely. We’d best be pushing off. We’ll just nip round to your flat and pick up your Mini. Oh, and your murder bag, of course.”

  “Nip round?” Sutherland said, glancing over his shoulder at the rainlashed windows of The Crown and Anchor.

  It was well after midnight when Sutherland whipped the racing green Cooper Mini S through a roundabout, did a racing change down into second, and then accelerated into a narrow lane leading to the tiny village of Upper Slaughter. Curtains of rain and standing water on these country roads made driving a bit of a challenge, but Ross had every confidence in his car, having raced it successfully at Goodwood and other venues in far worse conditions. A crack of lightning illuminated a road sign as he roared past. Three miles to the village proper, meaning the church would be coming up on his left any moment now. The hedgerows were high and solid on both sides of the lane and Sutherland leaned forward in his seat, looking for some familiar landmark.

  “I’m well aware of the fact that you think we’re chasing wild geese, Sutherland,” Congreve said, breaking his silence and peering through the bleared windscreen. “But, now that we appear to be gaining on them, could you ease off the throttle a bit?”

  “Sorry. Force of habit.”

  Sutherland slowed and Congreve sat back in his seat. He looked over at Ross and smiled. “Sporting of you to do this, actually.”

  “Not at all, sir,” Sutherland said, downshifting as they went into a tight right-hander. “You were right about this trip. I feel better about the thing already. No matter what we find or don’t find. Thing is, I keep asking myself, why Vicky? Alex has no end of enemies. But, Vicky? Ach! It’s right senseless then, isn’t it?”

  Ambrose Congreve said, “She was shot through the heart with a sniper rifle. At a range where the power of the scope used made the margin of error miniscule. Vicky was the target. It was deliberate and it was meant to hurt Alex as much as humanly possible. I’ve made a list of every single person or entity with reason to inflict such agony on Alex Hawke. You and I are going to go through that list one by one until we find—hold on, here’s your turning just ahead on the left.”

  Ten minutes later they were slogging up the muddy hillside in their green gumboots and yellow macs, the beams from their powerful flashlights stabbing through dense veils of rain. Forward visibility was less than five feet and the storm seemed to be gaining in intensity.

  “Bloody weather front seems to have beat us up here,” Congreve cried, the two of them having to shout to be heard above the downpour and constant rumble of thunderclaps.

  “We’re almost there. It’s up on the brow of the hill, just beyond this graveyard,” Ross shouted back.

  An arc of lightning momentarily lit up the little cemetery with stark white light and Congreve managed to avoid a substantial head-stone which would have sent him sprawling. The ground angled fairly sharply upwards now, and Congreve’s torch caught the fluorescent yellow crime scene tape the SOCO chaps had strung from tree to tree. The footing in this porridgy muck was treacherous and it was all a man could do just to stay on his feet.

  “I’m sure scene-of-crime officers have cleared away all the land mines,” Ambrose shouted ahead to Sutherland who was leading the way now, almost to the tapes. He was not at all sure. He’d only just recalled that this entire area had been chockablock with antipersonnel land mines the day of the murder. He guessed they’d all been removed; still the thing was a bit dicey.

  “Only one way to find out,” Sutherland said. He ducked under the tape, waiting on the other side for Congreve.

  “Bugger it,” Ambrose muttered to himself and, slipping and sliding, made his way up to Sutherland who held the tape up for him. He ducked under, having retained all four limbs, and was surprised to find the rain considerably diminished. Looking skyward, he saw the dense canopy of trees overhead and was thankful for the respite. He swung his light in an arc, looking for one particular tree.

  “It’s over there, sir!”

  “One thing we needn’t worry about,” Ambrose said, picking his way carefully through the gloom of the sodden forest, “Is mucking up the crime scene. This one is already about as mucky as one could ask for.”

  “Yes, I believe this is our tree here,” Sutherland said, moving t
owards the base of a massive oak, his light playing about the trunk. Congreve was running his fingers over the rough surface of the bark.

  “Spikes,” he said, his eyes tracking the beam of his torch into the uppermost branches of the three-hundred-year-old tree. “The kind British Telecom linemen and tree surgeons wear. See the trail of small punctures leading up? You can still see the freshly punctured bark.”

  He turned from the tree and looked at Sutherland. There was that familiar glistening in the eyes, a slight flaring of the nostrils, and Ross knew the boss had picked up the scent.

  “Question. When were the roads into the village sealed, Superintendent?” he asked Sutherland, eyeing the soggy, leafy ground around the base of the tree.

  “Twelve noon Friday, the day before the wedding. After that, no one except villagers and somebody with good reason to be here got through.”

  “And the date the church location first leaked to the papers?”

  “First Sunday of the month.”

  “So, he had two weeks to scout the location, pick his spot, rig his mechanism, lay his minefield, and get into position.”

  “Surely he didn’t spend two weeks up a tree.”

  “What’s on the other side of this hill?”

  “The village proper.”

  “He spent the last two weeks in the village. Posing as a tourist with a good reason to be in these woods from time to time. Bird-watcher. Watercolourist. Naturalist or something. He’d have binoculars, a sizeable knapsack of some kind. Bring in his gear and explosives one bit at a time. We’ll check all local lodging tomorrow, see if anyone remembers a chap like that.”

  “I keep thinking about that high-speed motor,” Ross said. “I mean, why bother with the blooming thing? Why not just spike up and spike down?”

  “Speedy getaway, Ross,” Congreve said. “Had all the time in the world to get up high enough for a clear shot. But he’d be expecting a rush up the hillside after the shooting. He’d want to get down that tree in an awfully big hurry.”