Assassin

by Tom Cain

  Lara did not. All she understood was the price she would pay for failure. Her tears had returned as he took a hotel Biro from the table and wrote on a scrap of headed paper.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘This is important. Are you listening?’

  She nodded miserably.

  ‘Good. This is the address of a place called the House of Freedom. It’s a shelter for women who have been trafficked. That means forced to come here, forced to go with men. It’s in Jumeirah, not far from here. I want you to go there. In a few days, the police will come to speak to you. It’s nothing serious, they just want to check you really were trafficked. But don’t tell them about me, OK? That’s important. Say that you escaped from your owner. Say that you want to go home. They will help you.’

  Lara looked at him in bleak desperation. ‘Can’t go home. My family will say I am bad girl, I am whore.’

  ‘Here,’ said Carver, pulling more notes from his wallet. ‘That should help change their mind.’

  Lara wiped the tears from her eyes and the snot from her nose. Then she asked the question that had been troubling her since they first met in the nightclub. ‘Who are you? Why you do… all this?’

  Carver smiled. ‘I can’t tell you what I do, or why,’ he said. ‘But my close friends call me Pablo. Why don’t you do that?’

  ‘Don’t go, Pablo,’ she said. ‘Please…’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got work to do. But you can stay here for a while if you like. Have a shower. Get something to eat. Don’t worry about the bill. But don’t stay more than one hour. In sixty minutes, you go, OK?’

  Lara nodded. ‘One hour, maximum.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  He walked over to the door, half opened it, then paused. ‘Goodbye, Lara,’ he said. ‘And good luck.’

  Before she could say, ‘Goodbye, Pablo,’ he was gone.

  Over the next few hours, Tiger Dey was gripped by violent stomach pains. These were the first effects of ricin poisoning. The 1-milligram dose – several times the estimated minimum required to be fatal – had been concealed within a sugar-coated pellet less than two millimetres across, designed to melt at human body temperature. This, in turn, was secreted inside the maraschino cherry given to him by an assassin he knew as Carver.

  Ricin acts by breaking down proteins within cells, causing them to cease to function. There is no antidote to the poison, which is swiftly metabolized in the body, leaving no trace. It is, however, identifiable by its effects, which are incurable. In Tiger Dey’s case, these progressed to repeated vomiting and bloody diarrhoea. Within two days his kidneys, liver and spleen would all collapse.

  Dey’s semi-legendary status, the controversy that surrounded him and the gruesome predictability of his demise attracted the kind of blanket media coverage that Dubai’s rulers do not particularly enjoy. Outside the hospital, cameramen and reporters jostled for position. Inside, Dey’s doctors tried their best to ease his pain. That aside, there was nothing they could do. There are few good ways to die, but this is arguably one of the worst.

  Khat, whose given name was Kajoshaj Bajrami, met a swifter, more merciful end. He was shot in the back of the head, at point-blank range, when he went to collect his car in the lot behind the Karama Pearl hotel. No one heard the silenced shots or saw his assailant. His wallet was missing, however, and several witnesses testified to the fact that Khat had spent the evening at the bar in the basement club, boasting to anyone who would listen that he had just taken fifteen thousand euros in cash off Tiger Dey for a whore he’d bought for less than three thousand and was past her best earning days. The motive for his murder was therefore obvious, even if the culprit was, as yet, unknown.

  At around 1.55 a.m., the man who had called himself both Samuel Carver and Pablo stopped by a dumpster behind a fast-food restaurant in the Deira district just north of the airport. He deposited a brown wig within the dumpster, making sure that it was well covered by a thick pile of stinking waste. He had already flushed his green contact lenses down a lavatory and swapped his white shirt for a black one. Back with his natural colouring of deep red hair and icy blue eyes, he made his way to Dubai International. Having checked in online and carrying only hand baggage he was in plenty of time to walk straight through security and on to the 2.45 a.m. Emirates flight to London. His ticket had been issued in the name of Damon Tyzack.

  Tired by his hard work, but delighted by its outcome, Tyzack settled himself into a first-class private suite, lay back and soon fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  5

  Several thousand miles away to the west, Samuel Carver was hurtling across the night sky like a human dart. With every second that passed he travelled 175 feet forwards through the air, and fell 50 feet closer to the surface of the earth.

  For six weeks, Carver had been planning and training, gradually dropping out of sight, going off-grid. Nobody who knew him knew where he was. The people who had encountered him lacked any clue to his true identity. The chartered De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft from which he had just jumped, almost five miles up, was routed from Richmond, Virginia to the island of Bermuda, several hundred miles out to sea. The crew were men who worked on the same principles as Carver. They did the job, took the money and kept their mouths shut. They did not know or want to know what he intended to do once he left their aircraft. They got him to a specified point at the time required, and then they flew away.

  Now he was lying face down with his back straight and his head tilted slightly downwards to streamline his shape and encourage maximum velocity. His arms were extended behind him at forty-five degrees from his body and his legs were wide apart. Thin membranes of rip-stop fabric formed wings that stretched between his arms and his torso, and from his crotch down to his ankles. There were four minutes to go before he hit his drop zone. But there were a myriad ways he could die before he got there.

  The higher you go, the colder it gets: a little less than two degrees centigrade for every thousand feet of altitude. Speed merely adds to that problem by generating intense wind-chill. Carver faced roughly the same risk of death from hypothermia as if he’d walked out of the Amundsen-Scott research station, down at the South Pole, straight into an Antarctic blizzard, but his only protection from the intense cold came from two layers of full-length thermal undergarments beneath his nylon flying suit.

  Altitude also thins the atmosphere. This can lead to hypoxia, or oxygen starvation, which in turn causes blackouts. An unconscious man in a wing-suit will lose control and tumble helplessly down to earth like a stricken aircraft. Carver’s chute was set to deploy automatically at around two thousand feet, but if his body position was unstable his lines and canopy could wrap themselves around him like a spider’s web round a fly. And then they’d just be shrink-wrap for his shattered corpse.

  To combat hypoxia, Carver was using a personal oxygen supply. But the extreme cold can play havoc by icing up an oxygen mask, leaving the user blind and disoriented. That, too, can lead to a fatal loss of control.

  Buffeted and deafened by the air being forced around his body as he plummeted, and as numb with cold as a deep-frozen T-bone, Carver wondered how much difference blindness would make. If he looked straight down, there was nothing below him but the infinite blackness of the Atlantic Ocean. But then out of the corner of his right eye, he saw a sparkle of light, far beneath him, that expanded and brightened with every second that passed, and now he was able to get his bearings.

  He was travelling from east to west, towards the eastern seaboard of America, still so high that he could detect the curvature of the earth. To his left, a dusting of lights from roads and buildings and a faint line of pale grey marked the sandy shoreline of the Outer Banks, the ribbon of barrier islands that curved around the North Carolina coast, enclosing a great stretch of water between them and the mainland. To his right, looking north across the Virginia state line, the lights he had seen glittering against the black earth were the cities of Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Hampton and Newport
News.

  Few places on the planet held more concentrated military firepower than that coastal conurbation, packed against the shoreline where Chesapeake Bay opened out on to the Atlantic Ocean. The US Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force owned thousands of acres, given over to bases that housed hundreds of combat aircraft and massive fleets of warships: aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and nuclear submarines. But Carver was all alone in the sky, aiming for the man who was his target, the man all those armed forces were paid to protect.

  6

  ‘See that picture over there?’ President Lincoln Roberts pointed at an antique photograph mounted in a stained-wood frame, one of a collection of personal mementos on the wall of the private study at Lusterleaf, his family home near Knotts Island, North Carolina. The monochrome print showed about twenty African-Americans gathered in front of a building made of crudely nailed wooden planks. A couple of them were grown men, the rest women and children, ranging in age from grandmothers to babes in arms.

  ‘Sure,’ said Harrison James. ‘You’ve had it there as long as I’ve known you.’

  ‘That’s right, but I never told you about it, I don’t think.’ The President grinned unexpectedly, his face lighting up with almost boyish mischief: fifty-six going on fifteen. ‘See, all those people there are slaves. The photograph was taken on the Gloucester Hall Plantation in Bertie County, across the sound from here, in 1860, maybe ’61 – round about the time of the secession, anyway. Look at the woman in the middle, sitting on that bench, holding her baby. Her name was Hattie MacInstry. Some Scots folks owned the place, she took her name from them. The little kid on her lap is Adelaide MacInstry. Her married name was Roberts. I’m her great-great-grandson. Her dad was the plantation overseer, man by the name of Obadiah Jakes. White man.’

  His Chief of Staff whistled softly to himself, shaking his head. ‘My God, Linc, that’s a helluva story! From the plantation to the White House. I mean, that’s… that’s America, Linc, right there. What an image! Wish we’d had that in the campaign.’

  ‘That’s why I didn’t tell you about it sooner. I knew you’d want it. But we couldn’t have run a campaign that was all about moving beyond racial divisions and then shown people pictures of my great-great-grammy on a slave plantation.’

  ‘So why are we talking about it now?’

  The President looked him right in the eye. ‘Because I aim to make the fight against slavery one of the central pillars of my foreign policy. I want to start a worldwide crusade for freedom, use the power of our great nation for good.’

  Whatever Harrison James had been expecting, it certainly wasn’t that. ‘You know, you coulda told me this earlier. I mean, you just said we didn’t want to campaign on race. Well, we sure as hell don’t want to base our first administration on race.’

  ‘We’re not going to, because this isn’t about race,’ said Roberts, totally serious now. ‘It’s about humanity. Africans, Europeans, Indians, Chinese – all the children of the earth – are being bought and sold in every nation on the planet, including our own, in a slave trade worth a minimum thirty billion dollars a year. You know how many slaves were transported from West Africa to this country in the four centuries before the trade was abolished? About six hundred and fifty thousand. You know how many people are being trafficked across national borders every year, right now, in the twenty-first century? Eight hundred thousand. The current United Nations estimate for the number of men, women and children living in conditions of slavery today, worldwide, is almost thirteen million. Some people think the true figure’s twice as high. It’s an abomination, Hal, a stain upon all our consciences, and I aim to stamp it out.’

  The President’s voice had been gaining in intensity as he spoke. He was tall and strongly built, blessed with the presence of a born commander-in-chief and the captivating oratory of a gospel preacher. Once he built up a head of steam Roberts became an unstoppable force. Harrison James tried to pull on the brake while there was still time.

  ‘But, Linc, it’s not like this is new. The State Department’s been issuing reports on trafficking for years. We’ve been putting pressure on other nations, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on enforcing action against criminals-’

  ‘Well, exactly, we spent hundreds of millions, in total, over several years,’ Roberts interrupted. ‘But we spend hundreds of billions on defence and the war against terror every single year, thousands of times as much. It’s time we looked at the world a different way. We’ve got to do something good, something that makes us feel proud of who we are and what we stand for. There are countless thousands dying and suffering every day because of slavery. What’s more American, what’s more patriotic, than standing up and saying, “That’s not going to happen on my watch”?’

  Now, for the first time in a while, there was a rueful half-smile on Harrison James’s face. ‘You sound like you’ve been working on that speech a while. I guess we better work out a way to sell it to the Hill, the American people and the whole damn world.’

  ‘I already did,’ said Roberts. ‘There’s a conference on people-trafficking in Bristol, England, next month.’

  ‘Sure, we’re sending a delegation.’

  ‘I want to address that conference.’

  ‘Next month? But, Linc – Mr President, your schedule’s already fixed. I mean-’

  ‘Screw my schedule. Make it happen.’

  The Chief of Staff’s face drained of emotion as friendship was forgotten and he became a subordinate taking an unwanted order from his boss. ‘Yes, Mr President.’

  The room fell silent, the tension between the two men charging the atmosphere. Then the mood was broken by a knock on the door. It was already opening as Roberts said, ‘Come in,’ and a man with bland, clean-cut features, his mousy hair cut in a short, conservative, corporate style came in. He wore a black suit, white shirt and sober blue tie. A wire by his neck revealed the presence of an earpiece.

  ‘Any news?’ asked the President.

  Special Agent Tord Bahr of the US Secret Service nodded. ‘Yes, sir. And I have to advise you, Mr President, that I strongly recommend evacuating you immediately. Our latest intelligence indicates a high probability of an attack on you tonight. There’s still time to get you away.’

  ‘You’re certain of the threat?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you’re totally prepared?’

  ‘Absolutely. As much as anyone can be.’

  ‘And my family are quite safe at the White House?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then I’m not going to cut and run. It doesn’t look good, the leader of the free world hiding at a moment of crisis. Are we clear?’

  Bahr’s jaw clenched for a second before he replied, ‘As crystal, Mr President.’

  ‘Thanks, Tord, I have total confidence in you and your team.’

  Roberts looked out through the bullet-proof glass that had been fitted to all the windows of his house. ‘Guess it’s going to be a long night,’ he said. But his Chief of Staff had already followed the Secret Service agent out of the door and was setting about his business.

  7

  Carver crossed the coast of North Carolina at an altitude of 15,000 feet, seeing down below him a narrow stretch of uninhabited scrub, less than a mile wide. He passed over it in twenty-five seconds, during which time he fell another 1,200 feet. Now he was over the inland waters of Back Bay. This was the longest section of his journey: four miles of open water, dropping all the time till he could feel the air getting warmer and richer, so that he no longer needed any oxygen. He knew exactly where he was and for now his flight was smooth and untroubled. He had a couple of minutes to make the best of it. After that, things would turn very nasty again.

  To his left was Knotts Island. It was about five miles long by four miles across at its widest, southernmost end. A thin ribbon of land connected it to the Virginia mainland, splitting two stretches of inland water: Back Bay and Currituck Sound. The Roberts estate lay on the
ribbon, with the main house right up against the Currituck shoreline.

  Carver flew a few hundred yards to the north of the estate. He was getting nervous now. The strong following wind which he’d counted on to carry him on his way had slackened and he was losing airspeed, not covering enough distance relative to the height he was losing. His altimeter started beeping in his ear, telling him that he was down to 3,000 feet. In no more than twenty seconds, he would have to open his chute. It was an illusion, he knew, but the ever-nearing roofs and trees below him seemed almost close enough to touch. Surely he would be seen. He felt the gaze of unseen eyes and his body tensed, waiting for the sound of gunfire. Yet none came.

  And then he was back over water, not much further to go.

  He banked hard left, turning through 90 degrees on to a southerly course that would take him over Currituck Sound, back down towards the estate. Then he passed 2,000 feet; the parachute opened; he felt the massive G-forces imposed by instant, radical deceleration, and after all the dangers he had overcome to get this far, Carver prepared for the deadliest part of his journey.

  For the next ninety seconds, he would be drifting over enemy airspace. Both he and his chute were covered in black, non-reflective material, making him very hard to spot. But even so, he knew from personal experience just how vulnerable a man felt hanging from a chute with hostiles armed with guns beneath him. It was a noxious cocktail of bowel-juddering fear, mixed with the exposure of a nudity dream, going out in public naked from the waist down. As he steered towards the sound, Carver didn’t feel any better about it than he had on any previous occasion. He had his pants on all right, but somehow his balls were still dangling in the wind.

  Up ahead there was a tiny island, just a few yards wide, poking up out of the sound, about a thousand yards from the shore. Carver, however, had no intention of landing on it. He would be far too visible, even if he could hit it and stop himself before his momentum carried him right over the far edge. His aim had always been to touch down in its lee, out of sight of the Secret Service personnel guarding the Roberts estate. And that meant landing in the water.