When Dag returned, he said, “Come on, we’re getting out of here.”
“Where?”
“Doesn’t matter. Let’s just go. I don’t want to talk about this in a police station. I don’t want anybody overhearing this. It sounds crazy enough when it’s just you and me.”
Lammeck followed the Secret Service agent out to the cold and the car. Newburyport’s sidewalks and streets held little traffic. A few kids rode bikes. Most of the men were gone to the military or their boats. The women were at home or in a factory.
Dag started the Packard’s engine. He pulled away from the police station and drove west through town.
“Put it in a nutshell for me, Professor. Who were the Assassins, and why is one of their goddam knives in that box?”
“There’s a lot of history here. It doesn’t fit easily into a nutshell.”
Dag took an idle turn, down a residential street of close-knit and humble homes. “Cram hard, Professor. I’m driving; you don’t want me to go to sleep.”
“In the twelfth century, returning Crusaders brought back home to Europe stories of an odd sect of Saracens they’d met in Syria. These were Ismai’lis, an offshoot of Islam. You know about the Sunnis and the Shi’a?”
Dag gave Lammeck a withering look that said, Of course not.
“Fine. Muhammad died in 632. Because Muhammad was a prophet, he couldn’t be succeeded by another prophet; they don’t come along that often. But someone had to take the reins of Islam. Muhammad had appointed no successor, so the first leader, called a caliph, was named from his inner circle. The fourth caliph was Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. But Ali was opposed by a rival clan, the Banu Umayyid. In 661, Ali was murdered and the caliphate was taken over by the Umayyids. The majority accepted this; the followers of Ali did not.”
“Civil war,” Dag said.
Lammeck nodded. “Centuries of civil war. The Umayyid followers took the name of the community, or Sunni. The Ali opposition called themselves the Shi’at Ali, or just Shi’a. The Sunnis were the majority and became the Islam establishment. The Shi’a were persecuted.”
“Heard that story before,” Dag growled.
“The Sunnis continued to be led by their caliphs. The Shi’a pinned their hopes instead on the descendants of Ali, calling them Imams. The sixth Imam after Ali had a son, Ismail. This one apparently got a little radical and was booted out of the family business. But not without his own set of followers.”
“The Ismai’lis,” Dag offered.
“Dead on. The Ismai’lis were another opposition group, but this time within the Shi’a. They were extremely well organized, pious to a fault, secretive, traditionalist—in other words, perfect for anyone disenchanted with Islam in general and the Shi’a in particular.”
“These Assassins were Ismai’lis?”
“Yes. But by the time the Crusaders met them in the Holy Land, the Ismai’lis were already a hundred years old and very powerful in Islam. The sect was strongest in Persia, led by a brilliant young revolutionary named Hasan-i-Sabah. He was the founder of the Assassins. You’ve heard of him, yes?”
Dag glanced away from the road. “Who?”
“Have you ever read Arnold of Lübeck? Or Marco Polo?”
Dag sent Lammeck another of his “You’re kidding” looks, then put his eyes back on the narrow neighborhood lanes.
“Remember,” Dag reminded him, “nutshell.”
“I’m trying. But it’s a big story.”
Dag raised his palms from the wheel in surrender.
“In the middle of the eleventh century, Islam was weakened by the invasion of the Seljuk Turks. In 1090, to protect his Ismai’lis from the Seljuks, Hasan-i-Sabah took to the Elburz Mountains south of the Caspian Sea. He and his disciples conquered Alamut Castle, built on a massive rock six thousand feet above sea level. From Alamut, Hasan could dominate the entire valley, three miles wide and thirty miles long. There, his followers took ten castles in all, plus dozens of outposts and watchtowers. This became known as the Valley of the Assassins. Marco Polo brought back from Persia the story of Hasan-i-Sabah and the Assassins, and put them in his book, Travels.”
“Okay, that I’ve heard of.”
“Good. The educational system hasn’t completely failed you. From a prison cell in Genoa after his return, Marco Polo wrote about his twenty-seven-year journey on the Silk Road. One of the wonders he claimed to have encountered was a society of killers who seemed to murder their enemies with ease and extraordinary tactics. The story went that, high in the mountains, the lord of the Assassins raised a thousand sons of peasants from childhood. He had these boys taught Latin, Greek, Turkic, Arabic, and every language of the realm. They trained for years until they became masters of the many secret ways to kill—by blade, arrow, poison, and hand. These young men were instructed that they had to obey the word of their lord, The Old Man of the Mountain, and that if they did, he would assure them paradise in the afterlife.”
Dag snickered. “Nice retirement plan.” He wheeled the car into another random turn.
“Visitors to Assassin castles came back reporting that they had seen Hasan direct his disciples to jump to their deaths from the parapets, just to show off their loyalty before dinner.”
“I take it back,” Dag said.
Lammeck continued. “The legend goes that when acolytes were finally brought before Hasan-i-Sabah, they were asked if they would do anything Hasan required of them. The answer was always yes. Hasan maintained a huge pleasure garden at Alamut. The lads were taken to the garden, given every earthly pleasure, and messed out of their brains on hashish. After a few days of rapture, the boys were drugged and awakened in front of Hasan, who told them they’d been transported to Paradise. If they wanted to go back, he’d say, take this knife and go kill what’s-his-name.”
“Did this nonsense work?”
“Apparently like a charm. The first Assassin murder was the Turkish vizier himself, Nizam al-Mulk, in 1092. In the disguise of a Sufi mystic, one of Hasan’s boys waited months for his chance, until he got close enough to knife al-Mulk while he was being carried to the tent of his women. When Hasan got the report, he said, ‘The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss.’ To the Turks, the Assassins were criminals. In Islam, they were hailed as patriots fighting the occupation and enemies of the faith. The killers were called fida’is, which means devotees.”
“Where’d the name Assassins come from? The hash?”
Lammeck shrugged, though Dag was not watching.
“That’s the story. They were called the hashishin. Their cult was considered to have the greatest fighting abilities in the ancient world. It was said they could predict the moment of a man’s death by reading the stars. Assassins could shape-shift into animals, and mastered flying carpets.”
“Uh-huh.”
Lammeck was near the finish of both the tale and Dag’s attention.
“Want to hear how the story ends?”
“Alright. Finish up.”
“By 1250, Islam was in trouble. The Mongols had invaded Asia, and Genghis Khan’s grandson Hülegü was mopping up. He sacked all the Muslim lands as far as Egypt. In 1258, he took Baghdad. The final Ismai’li Imam was Rukn-al-Din. Hülegü wiped out the Assassin castles in the valley. He had the Imam murdered.”
Dag said, “Sauce for the goose.”
“The last that was heard from the Assassins was the words of the Islamic chronicler Juvayni, who wrote they had become ‘a tale on men’s lips and a tradition in the world.’ Great stuff, you have to admit.”
“Especially the flying carpets.”
“It’s a mixture of myth and fact, Dag.”
“I don’t give a shit about myths, Professor. You can keep Marco Polo and the Mongols and whatever else for your history books. I just want you to explain one fact to me: How did one of their knives wind up in Massachusetts?”
“It’s an Assassin knife, Dag.”
Dag’s patience was at an end. He jerked th
e car to a quick stop at the curb.
“Meaning?” he demanded.
“Meaning someone thinks he’s an Assassin. And that someone is highly skilled with an Assassin knife, and extraordinarily coldblooded. So that someone just might be.”
“A hired killer from the twelfth-century.” Dag looked incredulous.
“From this century, but using twelfth-century tactics and disciplines. In addition to what we’ve seen of his ability with this knife, he’s probably also a master at open-hand combat and poisons. He’s not likely a shooter; it’s not the Assassin way. But I would duck if he pointed a gun at me, in case I’m wrong.”
“This is so fucking unlikely.”
“But not impossible. In fact, the Alamut valley is still called the Valley of the Assassins. Your killer could be Persian. Or he could be a copycat.”
“Like I said. Unbelievable.”
“It’s the only explanation I can come up with. You asked. I told you. Our guy’s an Assassin.”
“Our girl,” Dag said.
“What?”
Dag jammed a hand into his coat pocket and produced a wadded brown paper bag. He unrolled the opening and reached inside. Between pinched fingertips, he withdrew several strands of long dark hair.
“I found these.”
“Where?”
“On Otto’s coat and pants leg. The yokel cops didn’t even bother to check him for forensics. So I went over his clothes with a magnifying glass and found these. I even found bits of hair stuck under the fingernails on his left hand. Christ, Professor. Our killer’s a woman.”
Lammeck took one of the strands from Dag. He stretched it to its length and held it up to the window to get the color. Shoulder length. Slight curl. Black as pitch. Definitely not Bonny’s.
“Is this the natural color?”
“Not sure. I’ll have it checked for dye back in D.C. But my guess, since you’re talking about some Arab assassin, is yes.”
Lammeck shook his head. “No, Persians aren’t Arabs. They’re Aryans. That’s why in 1935, Shah Pahlevi changed the name of their country to Iran. It means Aryan.”
Dag blew out a breath, gazing at the strands between his fingers. “It could still be a man with long hair, but I doubt it. This whole thing just smacks of a woman to me. The cuts on Bonny’s arms, that was skill instead of strength. The knife in big Otto’s chest—she didn’t drive the blade deep enough to finish him in one stroke. Even Arnold. He might not have opened his door to some strange guy in the middle of the night, but a woman? Who knows?”
“And if this is a hired assassin, a major part of doing the job would be to blend in. A man with hair this long would stand out.”
Dag carefully tucked the strands back into the paper sack.
“So, Professor. What’s your crystal ball say? Who’s her target?”
Lammeck gazed out the window at clapboard houses and bare trees. He considered a dark woman, stealthy, dangerous, clever, trained, making her way through the American countryside, anywhere, to kill someone, anyone. One lone woman in all this land, a nation distracted, at war, slipping unnoticed into place, waiting, striking.
At whom?
Lammeck opened his vast vault of knowledge on assassinations. What figure in history had ever been safe? Who had been too high and untouchable a target? No one. How could he predict who this Persian woman was locked in on when history dictated that every single person in America was prey? Even the first half of the bloody twentieth century was dripping with examples. In June of ‘43, Churchill dodged an attempt on his life when he didn’t board a plane that had been marked by Nazi agents, then shot down over French waters. Instead, actor Leslie Howard—Ashley Wilkes from the film Gone With the Wind—died on that plane. In 1918, after a factory speech, Vladimir Lenin was shot twice by an anti-Lenin revolutionary. Lenin survived, but died five years later from lead poisoning seeping out of the two rounds still in his torso. Louisiana senator and presidential hopeful Huey “Kingfish” Long was shot down in 1935 by an angry doctor in a corridor at the state capitol in Baton Rouge, while surrounded by bodyguards. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, entering a car in Milwaukee, took a bullet to the chest, fired by a deranged saloon-keeper. The would-be assassin claimed that President McKinley’s ghost, the day after his own assassination in 1901, came to him in a dream and accused Teddy, McKinley’s vice president, of his murder. A fifty-page speech in Roosevelt’s pocket, along with the metal case that held his spectacles, slowed the bullet. Teddy, bleeding, ignored those who pleaded with him to get medical attention, and delivered his speech. He died seven years later in his sleep, with the bullet still in his body. And of course, there was the botched assassination of Hitler last summer, the bomb in the bunker. But what about the earlier, lesser-known attempt on the Führer’s life? In 1939, a Swiss master carpenter built a bomb into the wooden pillar of a Munich beer cellar that exploded twelve minutes after Hitler left. Hitler had not felt well, and had shortened his speech, and had also not followed his custom of lingering afterward with beer-drinking comrades. After his arrest, no one believed the carpenter had the skills to do this alone, until he demanded access to a woodworking shop, where he re-created for the Gestapo the entire mechanism.
Lammeck caught Dag glaring at him. The agent was waiting for a response. What could Lammeck say? That this Persian woman was implausible? That she was also classic and perhaps historic, and that whatever she had in mind to do, she could very well pull it off, against any target she chose? Because the more unlikely the assassins, the more history seemed to favor them.
The problem for Dag was that he’d be looking for a specter assembled out of interdependent guesses. One wrong assumption and everything toppled, a house of cards. Every bit of evidence the two of them had amounted to nothing but bare speculation, starting with their assumptions about the crime scenes, all the way to the long black hairs. And what about the dead ends? Like, how did Arnold die if it wasn’t a suicide? Or who sent the assassin? And what if he and Dag pursued this woman based on a wrong guess of her target, then it turned out to be someone else? That would be the same as a free pass for her, and a death sentence for whoever she was really after. Finally, Lammeck couldn’t completely rule out the chance that the local cops were right, that this was a domestic murder-suicide. Or that the assassin might be a man, or not exist at all, just some local nut-job with an eye for antique knives.
Still, despite misgivings and traps of logic, Lammeck sensed that he and Dag were on a trail. This was a plot; he felt it in his gut. A conspiracy that aimed high.
Lammeck did not answer Dag’s question, but asked another of his own: “Why’d she kill Bonny and Otto?”
“Because they caught her.”
“Doing what?”
Dag hesitated. Lammeck filled in the response.
“Arriving. In the middle of the night. On a remote coastal beach in the dead of winter. It was just bad luck. Bonny, in the wrong place at the wrong time, saw our gal pop up out of nowhere, so she grabbed a crowbar and got out of the truck to do her job and challenge her. The woman tried to talk her way past. For whatever reason, Bonny didn’t believe her. They fought. Otto showed up too late.”
“She came out of the ocean,” Dag said.
Lammeck nodded. “Dropped off by a sub. Then swam or got rowed ashore.”
Dag asked, “And who has subs?”
Both men spoke:
“Governments.”
“It’s a shot in the dark, but what the hell, everything else about this case is.” Lammeck raised a finger to make his point. “The target has to be really high up. Why go to all that trouble for anyone less; who else rates that kind of risk? At this point in the war, getting a sub close to an American shore has to be next to impossible. The Germans, the Japanese, some nation wants someone big out of the way.”
Dag rubbed a hand into the furrows of his forehead. “This is such a stretch, Professor.” He lowered his hand. “And son of a bitch, if it isn’t exactly what’s happening. Now
, tell me, honest. Who do you think she’s after? Somebody in Boston? It’s only about forty miles from here.”
Lammeck shook his head. Dag fell back against the car seat. Lammeck did the same. Both men seemed to give way to the exhaustion of travel, the dire weight of Dag’s question, and the precarious balance of any answer based on such impossibly fragile deductions.
“Let me put it this way. Let’s not assume it’s the President of the United States. But my advice to you is, do everything you can right now to protect him.”
Dag thinned his lips. “Shit,” he said, snapping his head with the curse. “I was fucking afraid you’d say that.”
The Assassins Gallery - [Dr Mikhal Lammeck 01] Page 10