It was the same with the weedy-looking man, with his long dark hair combed in a part down the center, the ends looking greasy, almost matted. He, too, was a Watcher. He had earphones on and bobbed his head, as if to a beat. Ambler knew that the audio transmission he was listening to was anything but musical. Instructions could be transmitted to him at any time, via a concealed radio device, and the woman with mouse-brown hair would follow his lead. As Ambler proceeded to the next memorial square, the back of his neck began to tingle unpleasantly.
There were more of them.
He felt it as much as anything. It was in the gaze too intent on passersby—the gaze too quickly averted. The ostensibly casual glance that lingered too long or ended too swiftly. It was in the fleeting exchange of glances between two people who were, from all appearances, of different walks of life, people who were or should have been unacquainted with each other.
There was the sense of walking through a social organism—a seemingly unstructured collection of people who were connected by unseen strings, even as those strings were manipulated by an unseen puppet master.
Ambler’s skin began to crawl. He had not been surprised to find a small number of plainclothes security operatives; some precautions would have been standard with a government official as senior as Undersecretary Whitfield was.
But the configuration of personnel he had come across was all wrong: all wrong for the sort of rendezvous he had been promised. There were far too many in place, for one thing. The netting was far too elaborate. People were situated in nondefensive positions, deployed as for rapid action. The patterns he was seeing were all too familiar to him; as a Stab operative, he had sometimes had to set up such a deployment, invariably in preparation for aggressive actions—abduction or assassination.
Ambler’s blood ran cold. He reeled in his mind, forcing himself to focus. Ahead of him, the man in the leather jacket and black T-shirt was passing the nylon backpack to two stone-faced men in dark woolen topcoats. They received the package and hurried off, no doubt toward some sort of containment vehicle.
Two possibilities presented themselves. One was that the meeting had been compromised—that mutual enemies had learned of it and were organizing an interception. The second—and Ambler had to admit, the more likely—possibility was that the rendezvous had been a setup from the beginning.
Had Fenton been lying to him all along? Contemplating the prospect was a grievous blow to Ambler’s sense of himself, but he could not rule out the possibility. Perhaps Fenton was a spectacular actor—the sort of Method actor who had disciplined himself to experience the very emotions he displayed. Ambler’s powers of affective perception may have been, as a life’s experience suggested, unusual and uncanny; he had no illusions that they were infallible. He was not incapable of being fooled. Perhaps, though, Fenton himself had been misinformed. That seemed a likelier prospect. It would have been vastly easier to lie to Fenton than it would have been to lie to him.
Whatever the circumstances were, Ambler knew that an immediate retreat was the only safe move. It pained him: Any member of the team that had been mobilized here might know something that Ambler needed to know. Every enemy was a potential source. Yet knowledge could do him no good if he was dead. He had, at least, to accept that truth.
Ambler quickened his stride and took an immediate right; it would lead him to the Père-Lachaise metro station. Now, on the straight, cobbled pathway, he strode even faster, like a businessman who had realized he was going to be late for a meeting.
He saw what was happening to him too late: the two bulky men who had received the backpack, both dressed in similar dark topcoats, were closing in on him from opposite directions and now stepping into him, their broad shoulders catching Ambler’s, spinning him around in a fluid, well-choreographed movement.
“Je m’excuse, monsieur. Je m’excuse,” they kept repeating loudly. A bystander would have made nothing of it, a minor collision among hurrying, distracted businessmen. Meanwhile, Ambler thrashed furiously and in vain. The two operatives were tall and broad—taller and broader than Ambler—and their enrobed bulk helped conceal the disciplined ferocity with which they propelled Ambler off the cobblestone and toward the back of an adjoining mausoleum. Moments later, concealed from view by an elaborate stone edifice, they stood to either side, hands gripping his upper arms, immobilizing him. The man on his right had an object in his other hand, a thing of plastic and a small glimmer of steel. A hypodermic, in fact, with an amber fluid visible in the calibrated tube.
“Not one word,” the man said in a hushed voice, “or I sink this in your arm.” He was an American, stocky-framed and broad-faced, and his breath had the bouillon stink of a bodybuilder’s all-protein diet.
Now a third man sprang into view, and it was a few seconds before Ambler recognized him. His hair was curly, thinning, graying; his eyes were narrow set, his forehead deeply creased. When Ambler knew him, his face was smooth, his head of hair full and unruly. Unchanged was his long, straight, broad nose and flaring nostrils, which gave his face a certain equine cast. There was no mistaking the man he had known as Cronus.
Now Cronus smiled, a smile so devoid of warmth as to be a beacon of menace. “It has been a while, hasn’t it?” he said in a conversational tone that was anything but conversational in intent. “Too long, Tarquin.”
“Maybe not long enough,” Ambler replied neutrally. His eyes flickered among all three men. Already it was obvious that Cronus was the figure of authority here; the others were looking to him for a signal to act.
“Ten years ago, I gave you a gift. Now I’m afraid I’ll have to take it back. Does that make me an Indian giver?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you?” Cronus’s eyes gleamed with pure hatred.
“Though it’s an odd expression, don’t you think?” Ambler needed more time—more time to figure out the situation he was in. “Odd, I mean, that we talk about ‘Indian giving,’ when you think about all those hundreds of treaties the white man made with the red man, all those promises and guarantees, all of which were broken. You’d think the expression should be ‘Indian taker’—meaning, to accept something that will only be taken back. Wouldn’t that make more sense?”
Cronus looked at him. “Did you really think you could get away with it?”
“With what?”
“You miserable fuck.” The words came out in a quiet explosion. “Killing a great man doesn’t make you any less insignificant. You’re still a worm. And you’ll be stepped on like a worm.”
Ambler peered into the black depths of Cronus’s eyes. Rage glinted there, but something else did, too: Sorrow. Grief.
“Cronus, what happened?” Ambler said softly, intently.
“You murdered Paul Fenton,” Cronus said. “The question is why.”
Fenton—dead? Ambler’s mind began to cycle rapidly. “Listen to me, Cronus,” he began. “You’re making a big mistake. . . .” This whole rendezvous, he saw now, had never been anything other than a death trap. The revenge plotted by a faithful lieutenant half-crazed with grief.
“No, goddamn it, you listen to me,” Cronus said, cutting him off. “You’ll tell me what I want to know. I’ll find out the hard way or the easy way. And I’m kind of hoping it’ll be the hard way.” Vengeful sadism fueled and twisted his face into a dark scowl.
The grand four-columned tomb of the Napoleonic general and statesman Maximilien Sébastien Foy had a massive base and a finely wrought statue of its inhabitant. For Joe Li’s purposes, however, its main point of attraction was the pitched stone roof above the pediment and entablature. Resting on the roof, concealed from view by the decorative parapet, Joe Li stretched like a cat and gazed through his binoculars. The view was extensive: the tomb was one of the highest elevations in the immediate vicinity, and the season had turned many of the trees and bushes into leafless skeletons. His rifle, a modified version of the QBZ-95 sniper rifle, was of Chinese design and man
ufacture; the 5.8×42mm ammunition it chambered was a kind exclusively made for China’s special-operations forces. The Norinco model—developed by China North Industries Corporation—had been not merely reverse engineered from Russian prototypes but improved in the process; the bullets had greater penetration power, retained their energy over a longer portion of their trajectory. Joe Li himself had further modified the rifle, to make it more mobile, easier to collapse and conceal.
Through his powerful binoculars, he studied the tight knot of men around Tarquin. Tarquin had demonstrated a remarkable ability to escape difficult situations—with professional dispassion, Joe Li had to grant him that. But he was mortal. Only flesh and blood. In all likelihood, there would be a great deal of both flesh and blood on display, and before the sun had set.
Joe Li’s last communication with Beijing had been unsatisfactory. His controller was growing impatient; in the past, Joe Li had always achieved results with considerable dispatch. He was not used to having to explain delays. He was even less accustomed to the sorts of complications that his assignment had presented him with. But Joe Li was not mere muscle, executing the commands of another; he had a head of his own. He collected and purveyed information. He had a highly developed faculty of judgment. He was no mere shashou—no mere triggerman. Tarquin was too formidable a target for a mere target shooter, and the stakes were too great to allow mistakes.
And yet the meaning of success, in this assignment, was proving to be less straightforward than Joe Li had first supposed.
He peered through the scope again, the focus electronically perfected to maximal sharpness at the precise point where the crosshairs met.
“Just curious. How many ‘associates’ do you have here?” Ambler asked.
“A baker’s dozen,” Cronus replied.
“Reticular placement,” Ambler said, partly to himself. It was a standard configuration at Stab, one with which both he and Cronus had plenty of experience. Each operative had a connection—either visual, auditory, or electronic—with at least two others. A small number of operatives had a connection with a distant unit. The redundant pathways ensured a coordinated response even if any of the participants were taken out of action. The old-fashioned top-down command-and-control structure had proven vulnerable to decapitation. The reticular system made that impossible.
“Not bad for something so last-minute,” Ambler said, genuinely impressed.
“The Strategic Services Group has resources everywhere,” Cronus said. “Fenton’s legacy. We’d all give our lives for him. That’s what people like you could never grasp.”
“People like me?” Carefully, casually, Ambler took a step back. His best chance of escape was to be the apex of a triangle—to get the other three to align themselves in a single level. He composed his face into an expression of resignation and glanced at the man to his left. The man was looking at Cronus, getting his signals from the leader. Cronus’s very authority would have to be used against him.
Now Ambler started speaking heatedly, testily—the sort of verbal protest that was normally inconsistent with physical aggression. “You’re making a lot of assumptions, Cronus. You always did. You’re wrong about Fenton, but you’re too blind or too stupid to admit your mistake.”
“Biggest mistake I ever made was saving your life, back in Vanni.” He was referring to the region in northern Sri Lanka that was a heartland of the Tamil Tigers—the LTTE terrorists.
“You think you saved my life? That what you think? You almost got me killed, you goddamned cowboy.”
“Bullshit!” Cronus spoke in a low voice, but his indignation was audible. “The meet was a setup. There were half a dozen Tamil Tigers present, armed to kill. Armed to kill you, Tarquin.”
Ambler remembered the scene well. After many weeks of negotiations, he had finally arranged a meeting with select members of the so-called Black Tigers, guerrillas who had pledged to be suicide bombers, a technique that the Tamils had pioneered. Tarquin believed that a hiving off of factions could be engineered, much as happened with Sinn Fein, that the die-hard terrorists could eventually be isolated from the broader civil struggle. The particular rebel leader he was meeting with, Arvalan, had come to recognize the futility of terror. He and his circle thought they could bring others along with them, so long as certain resources were made available to them. Tarquin thought he knew a way to assist with that.
Cronus was part of a small backup team that Tarquin’s superiors at the Political Stabilization Unit had insisted on. Tarquin’s combat vest was equipped with a fiber-optic microphone system that would provide them an auditory feed. Several minutes into the meeting, as Tarquin expected, Arvalan started to berate the American. An eavesdropper ignorant of the situation might have thought that Tarquin was being threatened. But Tarquin could see from the man’s oddly immobile expression that he was merely putting on an act, for the sake of his associates. Those were his lines. Tarquin knew his.
Then, suddenly, the thatched door to the jungle hut was pushed open, and Cronus barged in, his automatic weapon on full-fire. Another assault rifle—wielded by someone under Cronus’s direct command—was jammed through the opposite doorway, blasting away at the assembled LTTE officials. Within a few seconds, the bloodshed was complete. Arvalan and most of his circle lay dead; one member of his retinue had escaped through the jungle.
Tarquin had been livid. All his efforts had been destroyed by the actions of one headstrong, heedless Stab operative. In fact, it was worse than undone; word of the massacre would spread swiftly among the LTTE. The prospects for any further Western mediation or intervention had now dimmed, precipitously. No Tiger would ever agree to such a meeting again; the consequences were now all too clear.
Yet there Cronus stood, among the carnage, glowing with pride and smirkily declining what he imagined to be Tarquin’s gratitude. Afterward, Tarquin did something he rarely did. He cabled Whitfield and, explaining what had happened, told her that Cronus was a menace, someone who had to be removed from the field immediately, forcibly retired. Whitfield had, instead, relegated Cronus to a desk job among the analysts, on the grounds that his considerable experience in the field was too valuable simply to throw away. Tarquin understood the rationale, but he never forgave Cronus his blunderbuss impulses and self-satisfied manner.
“You were too full of yourself to know what the hell you did, back there in Jaffna,” Tarquin said. “You were a goddamn menace. That’s why they took you out of the field.”
“You’re demented,” Cronus said. “I should have left you to die, in the Tigers’ den. Like I said, my bad. But it won’t happen twice.”
“You think you saved my ass. The truth is, you nearly got me killed, and you destroyed an entire operation while you were at it. If it wouldn’t have jeopardized operational clandestinity, you would have faced judicial proceedings. And these poor guys are taking orders from you?” The trick, Tarquin knew, was to keep talking even as he attacked.
“You think you earned”—Tarquin fluidly swiveled back—“my gratitude? That just goes to show”—now, with explosive force, he slammed a spear hand into the throat of the square-jawed giant to his left—“how oblivious you are.” Despite the exertion, Tarquin did his best to maintain an ordinary speaking tone. The mismatch between his voice and his actions would confuse his assailants, gaining him a crucial few moments. He could feel the impact of his knuckles against cartilage. The damaged tissues surrounding the trachea would start to constrict his airway, but in the meantime, Tarquin would need to use the stricken man as a shield against the other two. Even as the syringe dropped to the ground, Tarquin lashed out at the other muscleman, but the man dodged the blow and reached into his jacket for a handgun. A second blow, to the temple, landed, and the impact shot a bolt of pain through Tarquin’s arm. Even so, the man was only temporarily stunned. Now he and Cronus dived out of the way, racing in opposite directions—a reprieve that was no reprieve at all, Tarquin realized. It meant that he was in the field of fire.
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br /> As Tarquin dived to the ground, he heard four muted reports—from where?—and marble and dirt exploded all around him. He forced himself to survey the terrain opposite and saw a mound of dense rhododendrons, their heavy leathery leaves immune to the cold—and, fleetingly, a glimpse of a hunched, khaki-clad shoulder.
Time slowed. He yanked the long-barreled pistol from the downed man’s shoulder holster, took careful aim, and fired a tight, rapid cluster of three shots.
He was surprised at the quiet spitting sound that came from the gun and realized that what he had taken to be a long-barreled pistol was, in fact, a Beretta 92 Centurion—a compact 9mm with a shortened slide and barrel. A silencer was what had elongated the barrel.
Now, from the rhododendron hedge, he saw a bloodied arm flail into the air, and, moments later, a wounded man lurched from the foliage to the safety of adjoining statuary.
Yet there was no safety for Tarquin. He had to move—every moment at rest was a moment he was in someone’s crosshairs. He sprang off in the direction where Cronus had run, felt the stinging spray of marble against his ear. Another bullet had been aimed at him, this one, he sensed, from a sniper operating from an elevated location. Tarquin glanced around him as he ran: there were all too many places where such a sniper could be secreted.
A baker’s dozen, Cronus had said, and he had not been bluffing.
All were seasoned killers, all programmed to take Tarquin down. He needed to shift the odds; he needed to use the peculiarity of the terrain against them. But how?
The Ambler Warning Page 38