Assassin's Revenge

by Ward Larsen

  Not now.

  He stepped down hard on the accelerator.

  The Renault’s feeble engine responded.

  * * *

  Why so many changes? Mordechai wondered as he stood by the chained-shut doors of an opera house.

  For the last hour he had been getting a stream of text messages from Slaton. He’d instructed Mordechai to collect the information he had unearthed on El-Masri and bring it to a rendezvous.

  The first meeting place given had been the southbound platform of the Schwedenplatz U-Bahn Station. Mordechai pocketed the flash drive and arrived within ten minutes. Seeing no sign of Slaton, he’d stood baffled on the platform, and forced himself to check the timetable now and again—as any normal person would. He thought it was a strange meeting place. There was hardly any traffic at this hour, and it seemed too public, too well monitored by cameras and police. He’d been staring forlornly at the entryway stairs when the next message buzzed on his phone.

  And so began a breathless series of excursions. He had been sent, in turn, to a nearby park, the courtyard of a church, and finally this—the ticket kiosk of a closed opera house. Then, finally, as he stood winded beside locked doors through which the arias of Wagner had flowed only hours ago, Mordechai realized what was happening: it had to be a counter-surveillance routine of some kind.

  He’d never had that kind of training, but he knew this was how it worked. He imagined Slaton watching him from a distant balcony or a darkened alley. Checking for tails, prepared to intervene. The thought was as reassuring as it was discomforting. The latter took hold when another text vibrated to his phone: Complications. Head home. Expect contact later this morning.

  His nerves a wreck, Mordechai drew in a deep, long breath, like a swimmer about to dive the length of a pool. He set out back toward his flat, quick-stepping across vacant streets. No passing car escaped his eye. He gave a wide berth to a group of clubbing teenagers ambling by in an amorphous mass of giggling and playful shoving. It occurred to him that Slaton had said nothing about El-Masri. Mordechai had expected that he would force an encounter tonight, as soon as the Egyptian arrived home. Had Slaton decided to wait until tomorrow? Did he want to see what was on the flash drive first?

  Questions tumbled in his head all the way to his flat.

  FORTY-ONE

  Mordechai entered his apartment and flicked on the light. He closed the door, threw the bolt, and leaned heavily into the wooden slab. He’d always thought it an extremely solid door, but never had he appreciated it more than in that moment. After catching his breath, he checked his phone—as he had five times on the way home.

  No new messages.

  It was nearly three in the morning. He pushed away from the door and looked wistfully toward his bedroom. He knew he could never sleep. It had been a desperately long day, and his stomach reminded him that he’d completely overlooked dinner. Over the course of the evening, he’d become increasingly consumed by the files he’d taken from El-Masri’s desk. What he found in them was stunning, so much so that tonight, for the first time, Mordechai realized his original plan was shockingly shortsighted. The information was simply too important, the risk too great, to keep chasing his private agenda with Mossad.

  He went to the refrigerator, opened it. Nothing piqued his interest. In the pantry he found a can of tuna and the tail of a loaf of bread. It would have to do. Minutes later he was sitting at the high-top counter, a wet tuna sandwich on a paper plate in front of him, wondering how Slaton would want to handle the trove of information. Suddenly the most dire of scenarios burst into his head. What if something had happened to Slaton? Successful as he’d been during his years with Mossad, everyone had their limits. He was destined to be a legend, but there was a price to having one’s name inscribed on a wall.

  Mordechai felt trapped between worlds. He had risen as a technician, strictly rear echelon. Yet he’d always felt he could relate to the operators, understand their needs. Only now did he see how much he’d been missing. In the field it wasn’t about analyzing the latest satellite images or comm intercepts. It was about sleeping and eating when lives were at stake. About surviving to the next day.

  At least I’m learning from the best, Mordechai thought.

  It occurred to him that the memory stick was still in his pocket. He was reaching for the tiny flag-emblazoned drive when he noticed that the room seemed unusually cool. He also sensed more street noise than usual. Or am I only imagining it? He tapped his fingers on the counter as if playing a chord on a piano, and murmured to himself, “No … I’ll never be cut out for this.”

  He walked across the room to the main window and looked outside. He saw what he always saw, albeit less of everything at three in the morning. Only a few lights glowed in the building across the street. Three floors down a lone taxi cruised past, and on the sidewalks a few people scurried through the chill night air.

  For the first time Mordechai noticed the window. It was slightly ajar—less than an inch, but definitely cracked. He couldn’t recall leaving it open, although he sometimes did in the winter—the flat’s radiator had a mind of its own. He reached for the latches and saw the problem. The swiveling metal clasps weren’t unfastened, they were simply … gone. Both above and below, he saw paired holes in the window frame where the latches had been. A shot of adrenaline surged as something else caught his eye—outside, a dark vertical line undulating gently in the breeze.

  Mordechai heard a noise behind him. He turned and saw a man in the middle of the room. A powerfully built Asian in a tight black sweatshirt. Without thinking, Mordechai bolted on an angle toward the locked front door.

  He never made it.

  * * *

  Slaton left Kapellerfeld with one immediate objective—to escape the scene of a crime. The chaos was miles behind him now, but he felt little relief. He was driving back toward Vienna, but what did it offer? A safe house that might no longer live up to its name?

  He passed streets he’d never heard of, put city blocks behind him. At three in the morning Vienna was at its diastole. The sidewalks were largely empty. Street sweepers scrubbed the curbs because this was their chance. A few bartenders and nurses trudged wearily home.

  Home.

  In that moment, Slaton knew no such place. He felt impossibly adrift. Vienna, Danube Park, Kapellerfeld. At every juncture, one step forward, two steps back. He saw a stray dog trotting on the sidewalk, nosing into the occasional trash can. A mutt with pointed ears and a tail like a question mark. Davy had been asking for a dog for his birthday. It was no easy thing, keeping a dog at sea, but it could be done. He and Christine had so far punted. But they knew the inevitability of the situation. Or so they’d thought.

  Slaton slammed on the brakes. A red light at a cross street seemed to appear out of nowhere. He pulled in a deep breath, straightened his arms and pressed his palms against the wheel. There wasn’t another car in sight. No pedestrians on the sidewalk. He waited in compulsory stillness.

  He recalled once hearing a pilot talk about being “behind the power curve.” That, he’d explained, was a place you didn’t want to be. The reference came from the tendency of jet engines to accelerate slowly from idle thrust. To have power when you needed it, a pilot had to think ahead, predict what was coming. For the aviator who got behind, the interval from idle thrust to something productive could seem interminable. And the more you need it, the longer it takes.

  That’s where Slaton found himself—behind the curve. It was time to think ahead. Time to push away the frustrations of the last hour. He began with what he knew. Three Middle Eastern men in the park. An Asian hit squad. An Egyptian who’d stolen nuclear material. Mordechai.

  Mordechai.

  He looked down at his phone. Slaton had been elated to get the text verifying when El-Masri would arrive. At the time that had been his priority, so he’d given little thought to the rest of the message.

  Now he looked at it again: Have extensive new information on El-Masri. Will pro
vide when we meet again.

  In that moment it had seemed secondary. Something they could address in the morning, after the night’s dust settled. Slaton had expected to be able to interrogate El-Masri. Then he recalled Mordechai’s promise this afternoon: I will call you tonight.

  Only he never had.

  Slaton felt a new unease. He’d been disoriented, turned in circles by the fog of battle. Or more precisely, by the prospect of losing the two people he loved more than any in the world. Now everything came together.

  And when it did … he realized he’d made a massive mistake.

  FORTY-TWO

  Slaton’s first inclination was to call Mordechai. The encounter at El-Masri’s made him reconsider.

  He parked a block away from Mordechai’s flat in Landstrasse—he’d gotten the address earlier, but had not yet seen the place. It turned out to be a narrow residential building, five architecturally bland floors shouldered between a pair of similar structures, the one to the north being one floor smaller. From the vacant far sidewalk Slaton studied the building.

  In diagraming El-Masri’s home, he’d had both the time and resources for precision. This was different, an off-the-cuff evaluation. And while the results might be more speculative, they were no less vital.

  The ability to survey structures in the field is an essential skill for a sniper. By virtue of his training, and more critically having spent countless hours behind optics, Slaton was something of an expert. Bombed-out hospitals, gleaming skyscrapers, lean-to hovels—all buildings could be viewed with certain expectations.

  Freestanding homes were always the most difficult to gauge—private architects took maddening liberties in the name of artistic license, and owners had a penchant for off-the-books modifications.

  Apartment buildings, on the other hand, were far easier to deconstruct. To begin, nearly all were repetitive, each floor hosting a certain number of flats. The floors also tended to mirror one another. Top-floor penthouses were the exception, particularly in buildings put up during the last forty years—the period in which developers realized that the increased cost of non-conformity was outweighed by premiums from ego-driven buyers.

  Slaton diverted casually into the shadow of an entryway. The portico was on a diagonal from Mordechai’s building and led to the locked entrance of a rising stairwell. A placard next to the door introduced a wealth management firm. If the door was unlocked before 8:00 a.m. Slaton would be stunned.

  With an unobstructed view of the building, his first chore was to identify the correct unit—Mordechai lived in 304. The third floor seemed obvious, although caution had to be exercised—a handful of countries assumed the non-standard convention of having a “ground” floor to begin, and naming the second story the first floor. Thankfully, the organizational paradise that was Austria fell under no such delusions.

  The building was relatively small, and Slaton saw only three units facing the street on each floor, distinguishable by paired windows—one large, presumably the main living area, and another for a bedroom. Having glimpsed the backside of Mordechai’s building on arrival, he knew the arrangement there was similar. Simple enough—six flats on each floor, making 304 almost certainly a center unit. The only question: Was it in front or back?

  Fortunately, this too was a matter of convention. From the main entrance on any given floor, odd numbers were customarily assigned the left side of a hall, evens on the right. The main entrance in this case would be the elevator, and this too Slaton could distinguish. On the roof he saw two cinder-block structures. The one on the left was larger with a single access door and heavy electrical conduit—the equipment room for an elevator. The rectangular block to the right was smaller, a standard emergency stairwell providing roof access.

  Altogether, it was no more than a series of deductions. Yet for Slaton it held value. He gave it an 80 percent chance that Paul Mordechai lived in the middle, third-floor, front-facing unit. A unit which, at that moment, had bright lights burning in both windows. At three o’clock in the morning.

  Thin curtains had been drawn over both windows. A minor caution sign. Then Slaton’s eye was caught by something more damning. It took a moment to even realize what it was—but once he recognized it, his suspicions were sealed beyond any doubt. From the roof of Mordechai’s building, a thin black line snaked down to the main window of 304. If Slaton wasn’t mistaken, an item of compound design with very high tensile strength.

  A tactical rappelling rope.

  Time seemed to accelerate, the implications clear.

  For an operator, the ability to climb or descend along the side of a building is core curriculum. Freshman-year. A seventy-foot drop to the sidewalk aside, the primary risk in the set-up Slaton was looking at involved being seen by a bystander. Yet at this hour, on a quiet street, and with a bit of watchfulness—the risk would be minimal. Acceptable even, given the reward of easy access. Anyone well trained could make the drop in twenty seconds.

  It didn’t escape Slaton’s notice that the line had been left in place, presumably as an egress option if things went sideways.

  Which was precisely where he was going to send them.

  Because leaving the line in place was a mistake.

  * * *

  Mordechai had never known such pain in his life.

  His thoughts were disjointed, fading in and out of coherent function. Both his hands had been smashed, the bones crushed. It felt like his nose had been driven through his skull. He knew he’d passed out multiple times. Then it would all come back. The man pounding his face, shaking him back to consciousness long enough to ask a question or two. When no answers came—could he even speak if he tried?—the man invariably tilted the chair back and poured cold water up his shattered nose.

  He tasted blood, smelled urine. A sensory nightmare of his own making.

  He could see no more than shadows and shapes—one eye had knotted shut, and the other seemed blurred by something viscous and red. His tormentor, who was terribly strong, had bound him to a chair with some kind of rope. Mordechai knew he was North Korean. Not because the man had Asian features, but because Mordechai had been reading the files on El-Masri’s flash drive.

  The flash drive … he thought. What if he finds—

  That hazy thought seemed to be struck from his head quite literally—something hard clouted his skull, just above the right ear. Mordechai saw bolts of white light. His head slumped, but he somehow clung to his senses. The questions kept coming, clumsy English that seemed oddly distant.

  “Where is Slaton?”

  Mordechai felt bile rise in his throat. He choked it down.

  “Why are you working with him?”

  Working…? Who…? Sensing a blow coming, his hands instinctively clenched. An agonizing mistake with so many crushed bones.

  “Is Israel involved?”

  Questions. So many questions …

  Mordechai began fading again. Soon the spinning world disappeared.

  And for the first time since it all began, he embraced the darkness.

  FORTY-THREE

  Slaton accessed the roof easily from an unlocked stairwell in the neighboring building. He found the black tactical rope anchored to the housing of a ventilation fan—directly over the window of what had to be Mordechai’s flat. As expected, it was a good-quality line, composite weave nylon core with a polyester cover. He was glad for that given what he was about to attempt.

  In climbing circles it was known as the Dülfersitz method. Absent any harness or hardware, the technique was used to lower oneself with nothing more than a single rope. The method was generally considered an emergency procedure, a last-ditch maneuver used by climbers or hikers to reach a safe place.

  Slaton doubted very much that was where he was heading.

  He routed the line carefully: between the legs, over the lower hip, across the chest, and over the upper shoulder. From there the line fed down to his guiding bottom hand. It was an awkward procedure, and he wished he had
a pair of gloves. To the positive, he’d trained extensively in the technique, and, with a mere thirty-foot drop to negotiate, Slaton was sure he could make it work. The far greater problem: What would be waiting when he reached the window?

  He stepped over the edge.

  Hanging from the rope, with his boots firm against the building, Slaton was reminded of the last time he’d been similarly situated. Less than a month ago he’d raised himself up Sirius’ mast in a bosun’s chair to repair a loose spreader. On that day his only opposition had been a few gusts of wind, the North Atlantic Gyre having its way with the boat’s rigging.

  What a difference a few weeks make, he thought as he lowered himself in snatches down the sheer stone face.

  The key to the method was maximizing contact points with the rope, effectively dispersing weight and minimizing friction. Slaton had mastered the technique wearing a full combat ruck, so that was in his favor. Tonight he was carrying nothing more than one Glock tucked securely under his belt. On the more sobering side—this wasn’t training.

  Passing the fourth floor, he got a good look at the window below. It was clearly cracked open, and as he closed in, with his feet nearly touching the upper frame of the window, he saw why—there were two sets of holes in the wooden frame where the latches had been removed. Whoever had gone in knew the basics. Exterior windows with no ground-floor access tended to be less secure—because less secure was cheaper, and builders cut corners to save money.

  As he’d already done twice, Slaton checked the street for pedestrians. Then he scanned the windows of the opposing building for stunned faces. He saw neither. In truth, it wouldn’t be a showstopper if he were to be seen. He expected to spend no more than two minutes in Mordechai’s flat. Any more than that would mean something had gone wrong.

  The rope was secured so as to be centered over the window. He searched for handholds on either side of the frame, and decided the best options were the window hinges themselves—a pair of six-inch-long mounts, upper and lower, jutting from the weathered brickwork.