Assassin ah-2

by Ted Bell

  Yasmin.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Cotswolds

  AMBROSE CONGREVE’S FEELINGS REGARDING THE SHOOTING of upland game birds were rivaled only remotely by his feelings as regards to fishing. He would as soon grasp a wriggling, slimy creature and wrench its lips from a fishhook as he would pluck a bloody pheasant from the gorse and stuff the still warm corpse inside his waxed jacket, which was precisely what he was doing at this very moment.

  A fishhook, the symbol used in logic to represent an “if-then” proposition, captured his sentiments at this moment perfectly. If you catch something, or shoot something, you’ve ultimately got to do something with the bloody thing.

  He was still amazed he’d managed to hit the damned bird. His gun, a fine prewar Purdey twelve-bore, one of a brace lent him for the occasion by Alex Hawke—Alex being an ardent practitioner of the sport and one-time runner-up for the King’s Cup—had not seen a lot of action today. The birds got up quickly, often too close or too far away to get off a shot, and, every time he mounted the gun to his shoulder, all he could see were dogs, beaters, and his fellow guns. He was so terrified of perhaps shooting any of them, that, until just moments ago, he hadn’t pulled a trigger all day.

  It was late in the day, and he was cold and wet and thoroughly tired of mucking about in the thickets of gorse and bramble in tight-fitting green gumboots. And more than ready to head home, shed these damp tweeds, and settle in for a cozy whiskey by the crackling fireside. His morning had gotten off to a rotten start, with Alex practically lecturing him, lecturing, for all love, about sporting behavior in the field. Not that he didn’t need such a tutorial; God help him, he hadn’t picked up a shotgun in years.

  On one of the many bookshelves in his small flat in London was a book he’d read and loved as a child. One of his favorites, actually, an extraordinary book by a man named Dacre Balsdon. Its title still spoke volumes to Congreve.

  The Pheasant Shoots Back.

  Congreve had been a successful young inspector at Scotland Yard when he first met Alex Hawke, age nine. The trail of a notorious jewel thief had led him to the smallest of the Channel Islands, a fog-shrouded place called Greybeard Island. In the course of his investigation, he visited the home where Alex lived in the care of his elderly grandfather, the chief suspect in the bizarre case.

  The very idea that one of England’s wealthiest men, an island recluse named Lord Richard Hawke, had pirated his own late wife’s jewelry in a daring daytime heist at Sotheby’s in London had drawn the young inspector to the matter. Congreve, with the assistance of his suspect, Lord Hawke, solved that case. Ironically enough, it was the butler who had done it. A fellow named Edward Eding, who had faithfully served in his lordship’s employ for decades, had masterminded the crime. In the process, priceless emeralds, tiaras, and Fabergé eggs belonging to Alex Hawke’s late grandmother were returned to the London auction house. And Ambrose Congreve’s burgeoning reputation as a master criminalist was solidified.

  The clever young detective and the aging inhabitant of the drafty old pile known as Castle Hawke thereafter became fast friends. Congreve became a frequent guest at the great house on a rocky bluff overlooking the channel; and he was to prove an important figure and mentor in the life of young Alex Hawke.

  Brutally orphaned at age seven, Alex was easily the most curious boy Ambrose had ever encountered. As Congreve would remark years later, “He questions the questions more than the answers.” So Alex Hawke had relied on young Detective Congreve and his aging grandfather, Lord Hawke, to teach him everything they knew of the nature of the world and its inhabitants.

  These early years of his childhood were spent covering even the most arcane of subjects; and for Ambrose to sit here now, silently feigning rapt attention while Alex Hawke, his erstwhile pupil, expounded on the art of killing small animals with high-powered weapons, was tiresome in the extreme.

  He had learned, at breakfast that very morning, that to wound birds by very long shots was almost a crime. And that to destroy game meant for the table by shooting birds that were too near was almost as serious an error. A man who can shoot, Alex had informed him later, as they bounced along in the mud-splashed Range Rover, picks off his birds in the head or neck so as to avoid damaging the body for the cooks and the table.

  “Look here, Alex, I must say,” he’d replied, “I haven’t picked up a field gun in thirty years and now you’re telling me I’m supposed to shoot the wee beasties only in the head?”

  So, whilst all around him guns had been blazing all day long, his beautifully engraved and checkered Purdey side-by-side had been notable only for its silence. The poor dead fellow he’d just stuffed into the game pocket of his waxed jacket was the result of a bit of bad luck on the bird’s part, brought down without benefit of dog or beater.

  Ambrose had just emerged from a remote covert where he’d gone to answer nature’s call, and was quite alone. He had paused for a moment, contemplating the notion of pulling out his pipe, watching, with some degree of pleasure, the spaniels working a distant field, when a crowing pheasant suddenly rose up from a nearby bramble patch, perhaps some fifty yards to his left.

  “My word,” he said aloud, and instinctively mounted the gun to his shoulder, sighting down the twin barrels. The bird’s low route of flight would bring him right past Congreve, neither too near nor too far nor too high. He swung his gun, aimed, and shot. Three pounds of flesh and feathers dropped on the spot. “My word,” he said again, walking toward the fallen prey. Despite his mixed emotions about the shoot and thoroughly dampened spirits, he’d been delighted to find that it was indeed a head shot, no damage at all to the body.

  Ambrose relished the moment of handing the bird over to Alex to add to the bag at day’s end. Head shot, you see, dear boy. Wouldn’t be sporting otherwise.

  There was one added bit of drama as they headed home, down the back roads of Gloucestershire leading to Hawkesmoor. In the rapidly fading sunlight, they were bouncing along the muddy, deeply rutted single country lane, Alex at the wheel, Patterson in the rear. Privet hedges lined both sides of the road, a good fifteen feet high. As they rounded a sharp hairpin bend, another vehicle, going ridiculously fast, came round from the opposite direction and both cars fishtailed, swerving to avoid a collision, skidding to a muddy stop, their front bumpers inches apart.

  “Christ,” Alex said, angrily eyeing the driver of the other car. “That was bloody close!”

  “Sketchy lot,” Congreve allowed, eyeing the men inside the vehicle. There were six thoroughly disreputable-looking chaps crammed into the offending car, a battered old Land Rover, all of them covered with mud and blood.

  “Poachers, by God,” Alex Hawke said, glaring at the driver and his passengers. “Let’s bust ’em, Constable. Here’s my mobile. Quick call to Officer Twining at the local constabulary and the game warden wouldn’t hurt.”

  When Alex started to open his own door, a gun protruded out of the other Land Rover’s driver’s side window. The face of a rough-looking chap appeared in the window above the barrel. “Move yer arse, damn yer eyes!” the ruddy-faced and red-eyed driver shouted, slurring his words. “Move yer bleedin’ arse out of me way!”

  “Moving smartly, old chap!” Alex shouted, opening his door and climbing out. “Very smartly, as it were.”

  “Wot’s up wit you, guv’nor?” the driver snarled as Alex approached the window, seemingly oblivious to the double-barreled twelve-bore aimed at his midsection. Congreve had seen the man load two shells into the chambers as Hawke approached him. He could hear Patterson in the back, spinning the cylinder of his old six-shooter, ready to step in.

  “No need for that, Mr. Patterson,” Congreve said, flipping the mobile shut and turning to the rear. “Alex will make short work of these sods. Couple of lads from the local gendarmerie on the way, at any rate. Should arrive in about two minutes.”

  “Wot’s up? I’ll tell you wot’s up,” Alex said, smiling at the inebriated poacher. “
The jig is up, for one thing. Poaching is illegal, as you know.”

  “Bugger off, mate, and get yer bleedin’ car out of my way then, before I—”

  “Before you what?” Alex said, grabbing the shotgun’s muzzle in his right hand. He ripped the gun out of the man’s grasp and flung it backwards over his shoulder in a single motion.

  “Wot the bloody—”

  Alex then tore open the driver’s door, grabbed the lout by the scruff of his neck, snatched him from behind the wheel, shook him like a rag doll, and then slammed him face down across the mud-spattered bonnet. From a sheath on his belt, Alex produced a stubby hunting knife, the tip of which he now inserted into the man’s left ear. He leaned down on the bonnet to whisper directly into his right ear.

  “What you’re doing is against the law,” Hawke said, quietly. “If I ever see you out here again, you’re going to meet with a very serious accident. Got that?”

  “Back in the car, lads,” Alex said, as the rusted-out rear doors swung open and two of the driver’s fellow poachers started to get out, guns in hand. “I’m not a qualified surgeon, and if I have to remove your friend’s ear, I might make a bad job of it. You gentlemen are under arrest. Cops should be here in a tick. Hear that siren? That’s them now. Sit tight. Shouldn’t be long, I don’t think.”

  “A good afternoon’s sport, wouldn’t you say, Tex?” Alex Hawke said, stamping the mud from his knee-high rubber boots and stroking the feathers of a dead bird he held in his hands. He’d arranged the shoot as a brief and much-needed respite in the middle of Patterson’s encampment at Hawkesmoor. Since Hawke and Patterson had arrived back in England ten days earlier, the house had become an absolute beehive of DSS intelligence operations and communications.

  Senior intelligence staff from both the United States and Britain were swarming about the place, and occupied most of a warren of rooms of the east wing’s upper floor. Hawke and Patterson had a briefing at six every morning with senior staff. Impromptu meetings were held throughout the day and night as necessary. No one was getting much sleep. A forest of the very latest electronic eavesdropping devices had been mounted on the rooftops, and the normally sleepy household was now a twenty-four-hour-a-day hubbub of activity. An intense hunt for the Dog was on but, so far it least, the Hawkesmoor spooks had met with only limited success. Hawke thought a few hours out in the field might rejuvenate them all.

  What outraged Hawke most was what he saw on television.

  Al-Jazeera, the Arab television network, had long been broadcasting images of gleeful celebrations over the deaths of America’s soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. A terrorist fires a shoulder-mounted missile and an Apache helicopter full of young American boys explodes in a ball of fire. A truck bomb explodes outside the American command post. People in the streets below erupt into cheers. Now, in the homes and coffee shops, a new reality show: the murder of American diplomats and their families. Each assassination was professionally filmed and edited. No grainy, shaky, hand-held images here. Every gory detail was shot in close-up. And so the grisly deaths of these innocent men, women and children were now broadcast daily for the rapt enjoyment of an increasingly bloodthirsty segment of the general population.

  Hawke, Patterson, and Congreve were stowing their gear and muddy boots in the gun room, having bagged sixty-some birds, not to mention six drunken poachers. The gun room was one of Alex’s favorite rooms at Hawkesmoor. In addition to the rows of mounted stags’ antlers on all four walls, a row of Georgian servants’ bells hung above a large oak armorial. The faded names beneath each bell had fascinated him since childhood. Blue Room, Water Room, Chintz Room, King’s Room, Priest’s Room, Dressing Room. Below the bells hung a warrant to execute Mary Queen of Scots in 1587.

  “Drinks are waiting in the library, m’lord,” said Pelham, standing in the doorway. “Dinner will be served promptly at eight, which is in one hour. You have an intelligence briefing at nine, sharp, and a video conference with Mr. Sann at Langley at ten.”

  “Thank you, Pelham,” Hawke said. “Ample warning. That gives Mr. Congreve here exactly sixty minutes to consume as much whiskey as he possibly can.”

  “Really, Alex,” Congreve muttered. “You do try my patience on a regular basis.” Ever since Hawke had stopped drinking whiskey, he’d been on this bloody holier-than-thou jag.

  “Just teasing you, Constable. To shore myself up.”

  “I stopped drinking once,” Congreve said, “Worst twelve hours of my life.”

  “If I may, Mr. Patterson,” Pelham continued. “Another courier arrived earlier, down from London by motorcycle, with a personal message for you. I’ve left the envelope by the telephone on the desk in your room, sir.”

  Ten minutes later, a showered, shaved, and much-refreshed Hawke stood with his back to the fire in the eighteenth century library. The room contained some three thousand volumes. Two globes, celestial and terrestrial, stood on either side of the hearth and, peering down from the ceiling cove above Alex’s head, were the marble busts of classical authors. As a boy, curled up and reading his adventure stories on a winter’s afternoon, Alex had always imagined them fiercely critical of his reading habits.

  All three men had briefing papers in their hands in preparation for a meeting immediately following supper. There had been some progress during the hours of their absence, but it promised to be a long night.

  “Look here. It’s been seven days since the last diplomatic assassination,” Congreve said. He paused and took a sip of his whiskey. “A hiatus. This bin Wazir is gearing up for something big.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not accurate, Chief Inspector,” Patterson said quietly. After a silence, Patterson drained his bourbon and looked solemnly at his two friends.

  “Matter of fact, we’ve lost another ambassador,” he said softly, the corners of his eyes glistening in the firelight. “Just this morning.”

  “God, I’m sorry, Tex,” Alex said. “I knew something was wrong. What’s happened now?”

  At that moment, Pelham entered the library. “Dinner is served, m’lord.”

  “I’ll tell you at the supper table. It’s god-dang awful, is what it is,” Patterson said, visibly shaken. “The worst.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Miami

  STOKELY JONES REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS IN ONE OF THE most spectacularly beautiful rooms he’d ever seen. Sitting in a plump upholstered chair that seemed to be made out of gold, he was slightly concerned, as his senses gradually returned, that this might be heaven. Last thing he remembered, he’d been standing at the entrance to Vizcaya, talking to Ross. Then somebody had swung the big door open and plunged a hypo into the side of his neck.

  “Look up there, Ross,” he said to his fellow traveler. “All them golden angels. Looks like Paradise to me.”

  The room was all white and gold. Ceilings had to be twenty feet high. Gold and marble statues and big crystal chandeliers and paintings up on the ceiling like out of some fancy picture book. Fireplace so big you could walk inside, invite folks over to supper inside it, and marble columns like in some kind of damn palace over in Europe somewhere.

  There was even a pipe organ. Big gold pipes just like Radio City only maybe smaller. Yeah, a modest little place all right. Cozy.

  “Well, we ain’t in Harlem anymore, Ross,” Stoke said. “Yo. Ross?”

  Ross didn’t answer. His friend was ten feet away. He was sitting in a chair just like Stokely’s but his head was down, his chin resting on his chest. Taking a siesta, Stoke decided, definitely traveling in the land of Nod. Then he saw the preacher. The kid was sprawled face down on the marble floor. There was a large pool of liquid, spread out all around his head. Red liquid. Blood? Yeah. It was blood.

  Aw, shit, Preacher.

  He tried to stand up and couldn’t. Couldn’t move his arms or his legs. He was connected to the gold chair somehow. That’s why he couldn’t get up and go help the preacher. Maybe he should wake up Ross and get him to do it. Help Trevor. His thr
oat was dry and he was still feeling dizzy, but his eyes weren’t so fuzzy anymore.

  “Ross? Hey, Ross, you sleepin’? C’mon, my brother. Wake up, son, somebody got to help Preacher. I can’t seem to do it.”

  No answer.

  Any feeling he’d had about being in heaven was gone. He looked down at his arms and saw that they were taped to the damn chair. Legs, too. Ross? Yeah, same situation. And didn’t look like anybody could help the poor little preacher boy now, no how, no way. He looked around the room, seeing it clearly now. Oh, yeah. He remembered.

  Vizcaya.

  Used to be a museum. Now this guy—who was he?—Quixote Fox, owned it. Stoke knew a lot of rich folks, hanging around Alex Hawke all these years. There was money and there was money. This was one seriously rich cat, buy a museum and just move in. This was offshore money, saved for a rainy day. Hell, a cocaine cowboy who’d been tight with Fidel? Moved out all the cash he could while the getting was good.

  Cop brain kicking back in. He could feel it. Little police peanut at the back of his skull. That was good, he was going to need his peanut just in case he had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting out of this damn museum without becoming part of the permanent collection.

  “Feeling well rested?” somebody asked him.

  Tall, thin guy. Snazzy. Wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses. Voilà. Yeah, the guy who disappeared from the Fountainbleau, standing in the front of a group of ten or twelve Chinese guys, all wearing matching black pajamas and all pointing Chicom assault rifles at him and Ross.

  Boss himself had on a pretty white linen suit, shiny white shoes, long black hair all slicked back. Had a skinny little black mustache on him, looked like an anchovy stuck on his upper lip. Big white teeth. Had the chick with him, Fancha. He walked across the terrazzo flooring, tapping his white cane in front of him, and stopped two feet short of Stokely.