Moments later, the two of them had ducked into the still-deserted balcony above the seating area.
“The camera crews are going to be arriving in just a couple of minutes—lose the jacket, lose the tie, and you’ll blend right in.” They were the first words she spoke to him; her eyes, alive with love and devotion, spoke to him of things no words could convey.
He quickly stuffed his blazer and tie into one of the equipment boxes that were lying around. Now Laurel reached over and mussed his hair; the grooming appropriate for a Forum participant was not appropriate for a cameraman.
“Looking good,” she finally said. “Any leads yet?”
“Not yet,” Ambler said, feeling an upwelling of despair that he quickly tried to purge, both from his voice and from his heart. “Where’s Caston?”
“He’s probably off talking to his assistant—he’s been on the phone with him a lot.”
Ambler nodded but said nothing; the simple act of speaking was now an effort. In the next small sliver of time, he would succeed or he would fail. It was as simple as that.
“We’ve got two cameras here. Got you one with a 48X optical zoom.” She handed him the bulky camera, which was secured to a folding tripod. Both were a sort of drab green.
“Thanks,” he said. He meant, I love you more than life itself.
“Think he’ll be seated in front?”
“Could be,” Ambler said hoarsely. He cleared his throat. “Could be seated further back, too. Too many possibilities.”
“Well, you’re here. Just do what you do.” Bravely she was maintaining a bluff, almost jovial tone. Yet Ambler could tell that, like him, she was terrified.
The effects of stress could be paradoxical and unpredictable, like fueling an engine. Sometimes it provided a surge of power. Sometimes a flooded engine would stall. So much depended on the next several minutes. Just do what you do, she had said. What if he didn’t? What if he couldn’t?
Liu Ang was the beloved leader of the world’s most populous nation. He was not just the hope of his people—he was the hope of the world. With the squeeze of a trigger, that hope would be extinguished. China would be derailed from the carefully laid tracks of peaceful evolution and pushed onto a collision course—and the results would surely be nothing short of cataclysmic. An outraged, seething population of billions would clamor for revenge. A blind fury, multiplied by sheer mass, could pose a peril greater than any the planet had ever confronted.
In the artificial “courtyard” adjacent to them, the great and the good—and the not very good at all—chewed on canapés, checked their costly watches, and, wafting the fragrance of power, began to fill the Congress Hall. They were excited, of course, though many of them were too grand to let on. Liu Ang was arguably the most important statesman on the planet and quite possibly the most effective. Visionaries were plentiful, but Liu Ang had so far shown the ability to translate vision into reality. These thoughts raised dust storms within Ambler’s head; he had to banish them—had to banish thinking itself—if he was to see clearly.
The stakes had never been higher. They could scarcely be higher.
The hall itself was larger than it seemed at first. Simply arranging the chairs—each chair was separate, its chrome frame in contact with its neighbors but not physically connected to them—must have taken hours. At each seat was a plastic-wrapped RF headset, which would receive and transmit a simultaneous translation in one of ten languages, depending on the channel selected.
As the crowd drifted into the hall, Ambler decided to make a first pass through the floor without the camera’s zoom lens; he’d be relying on what his naked eyes could take in but would enjoy greater mobility. His eyes swept toward the front of the hall. Two immense blue panels on either side of the stage bore the familiar World Economic Forum logo. At the rear of the stage was a backdrop like a checkerboard, with tiers of smaller blue rectangles, emblazoned with the same white logo, the effect like that of a Chuck Close portrait. A large screen hung two-thirds of the way down the central section of the stage; the video feed from the official WEF camera would be projected upon it, for those who were seated in the rear of the plenary hall and could not see the figure at the lectern.
Ambler checked his watch again and then looked around him; the seats were nearly all filled now—it was astonishing how quickly it had happened—and the Chinese leader would be making his appearance in a matter of minutes.
Ambler paced across the front row, as if looking for a vacant seat. His eyes darted from face to face, and he detected . . . only the banal sentiments of the self-important. A pudgy man with a narrow stenographer’s notebook exuded the sort of anxiety appropriate to a journalist with an impending deadline; a lean man in a loud Glenurquhart plaid gave off the buzzy exhilaration of a self-made hedge-fund manager who was about to see a great man in the flesh. Another audience member—a woman Ambler vaguely recognized from pictures, a CEO of a tech company, blond and perfectly coiffed—looked distracted, as if rehearsing talking points for an upcoming interview. A silver-haired man with wire-rim bifocals, a forehead speckled with liver spots, and eyebrows you could pull a brush through was scrutinizing the small page of instructions that accompanied the headset and looking faintly dispirited, as if he had recently got word of a fall in stock prices. Ambler walked slowly along the rightmost aisle, carefully looking at a photographer carrying an outsized SLR camera equipped with an enormous lens. The man looked affable and simple, pleased, perhaps, with the position he had staked out by the wall and ready to defend it against any rival who staked a claim to it. At his feet was a hard-sided photographer’s case, on which countless travel stickers had been attached and carelessly ripped off.
Ambler’s eyes swept down the rows. There were so many people—Christ, there were too many people. Why did he think he could . . . He reeled himself in, shut down that line of thought. Thinking was the enemy. He cleared his mind again, tried to achieve a state of pure receptivity, drifting through the hall like an invisible cloud. Like a shadow, seeing all, seen by none.
A kaleidoscope of human emotion lay before him. The man with the fixed grin who—Ambler would have sworn to it—was desperate to go to the bathroom and equally desperate not to lose his seat. The woman who was trying to make conversation with the stranger next to her, a man who had sized her up and dismissed her in a single numbing look, leaving her fearful that she had been insulted, hopeful that it was a simple linguistic misunderstanding. A flush-cheeked jowly man with a comb-over who seemed disgruntled that he had not had time to down a proper highball. The know-it-all who, teetering past the edge of his knowledge, was discoursing about contemporary Chinese politics to his companions—employees?—who politely disguised their resentment.
There were hundreds just like them, all with their peculiar patterns of fascination, boredom, peevishness, and anticipation—daubs from the palette of ordinary human emotion. None of them was the person Ambler was looking for. He knew the type. He couldn’t analyze it; he just recognized it when he saw it or, really, felt it, like the wave of cold you feel when opening a freezer on a warm day. It was the glacial deliberateness of the professional killer, the man who was too alert to his surroundings, the man whose anticipation was not simply of what he would witness but of what he would do. Ambler could feel it, always could.
But now—when it mattered most—nothing. Nothing. Panic swelled inside his chest, and, again, he pushed it down. He race-walked to the rear of the long hall and mounted the narrow terrazzo stairs to the balcony. In the center, he saw a battery of three stationary cameras and half a dozen irregulars, from media companies across the world. The balcony would be an ideal site for a gunman; it would take relatively little skill to hit the target from such an elevated perch. Ambler met Laurel’s eyes—a parched man taking a quick sip from a desert oasis—and then glanced at the others, his eyes seeking out each strange visage. Nothing. No twitch on the dowsing rod, no click on the Geiger counter—nothing.
The camera eye c
ould prove his salvation. Wordlessly, he came over to Laurel and took the camera she had prepared for him, the one with the 48X zoom lens. For purposes of show, she had stationed herself at an older twin-lens camera, even more dinged and dented than his. Struggling for calm, he angled the camera head downward with the knobbed level and took in the members of the audience below; the nature of the sight lines meant that an assassin in the audience would have to position himself in the front half of the seating section. This still left five hundred candidates. How had he ever imagined he would have a chance? He felt as if a band were tightening around his chest, as if he were breathing against resistance. To think of the odds—but no, such things were best left to the likes of Clayton Caston. Ambler breathed a different atmosphere. He had to banish self-consciousness, banish rationality.
He could not fail.
If he had been faltering, at least the camera was working just as they had hoped. Its automatic focus provided almost immediate clarity of field. Don’t think. See. The faces were sometimes in silhouette, often at odd angles, but the camera electronics were sophisticated enough to compensate swiftly for variations in light level, and the level of detail was astonishing. He studied face after face in the viewfinder, waiting for the prickling that would tell him to pause, to look again.
Laurel, standing close behind him, murmured something encouraging at him. “It’ll come, my dear,” she said softly.
He could feel the warmth of her breath against his neck, and it was the only thing that kept the black miasma of despair from engulfing him. In a world of falsity and pretense, she was the one true thing, his polestar, his lodestone.
It was his belief in himself that was unsustainable. He had peered at row after row, and he could only conclude that his instincts, at last, had failed him. Would someone dart in from the entrance doors at the last moment? Was there a face he had somehow not seen?
Presently a rustle went through the crowd, and he heard the sound of the side doors shutting, locked now to outsiders. The guards would not open them again until after the speech was concluded.
Briskly the founder and director of the World Economic Forum, a tall, nearly bald man with steel-rimmed glasses, strode across the stage to make a few introductory remarks. He wore a dark blue suit and a blue and white tie, the colors of his organization.
Ambler turned around and glanced behind him, where Laurel was standing, tousle haired and beautiful and alert, peering through the eyecup of her own bulky, long-lensed television camera; and he tried to conceal the abyss that he felt in his own soul.
He knew she was not fooled. She mouthed the words I love you, and it was as if a glimmer of light appeared in a long, dark tunnel.
He could not give up. He must not give up.
The killer was here, ready to derail human history with a single squeeze of the trigger.
It was up to Ambler to find him, and the Ambler who could do so was the Ambler who was Tarquin.
He was Tarquin now.
He squinted once more at the viewfinder. Sound disappeared for him, save only for the slow thudding of his own heart.
The sound of seconds ticking past.
Adrian Choi shuffled through the dossiers that Caitlin had given him. Those personnel records from the psychiatric facility that Caston had been so intent on getting his hands on. Personnel records, for crying out loud—a bunch of goddamn résumés, for the most part. It should not have been so hard to get hold of them.
But it had been. That was why he’d figured he might as well go through them with a goddamn magnifying glass.
Boring as shit, most of them. A whole lot of technical schools and community colleges and military tours—for the orderlies, anyway. Psychiatrists with degrees from Case Western Reserve or the University of Miami medical school, nurses with diplomas from the Naval School of Health Sciences and other places with similar names, guards with backgrounds in the 6th MP Group, or the 202nd, whatever the hell that meant, with the initials CID in parentheses. Like that.
Except there was one—what would Caston call it?—anomaly.
Yes, it was definitely an anomaly.
Someone was knocking on his door, loudly. Adrian sat up with a jerk. Nobody knocked that loudly on Clayton Caston’s door, for Chrisssakes.
Operating on some dim intuition, Adrian decided not to answer it. A few moments later, he heard departing footsteps. That’s right—nobody here but us chickens. Maybe it was some jackass who thought it was the storage room with the printer cartridges. Or maybe it was something else. Adrian didn’t feel like dealing with it, either way.
He started dialing Caston’s cell phone; it was one of those international kinds, which rang wherever the user was in the world, and it would be their fourth conversation within the hour.
Caston answered immediately. Adrian briefly gave him the update. Caston had him repeat certain details, not testily but with an air of urgency.
“And when you cross-check,” Adrian said, “the Social Security numbers don’t match.” Adrian listened to Caston’s reply; he had never heard him sound so breathless.
“That’s what I thought,” Adrian put in. “Anomalous, huh?”
A study in expensively attired gravitas, the director of the World Economic Forum concluded his slightly grandiloquent remarks, received a warm hand of applause, and took a seat to the right of the stage. Then the applause began to grow as Liu Ang himself walked onstage, with a gentle, loping gait, and took his own place before the lectern.
He was—well, physically smaller than Ambler had expected, somehow. Yet there was something large about him as well: his mien conveyed an almost bigger-than-life serenity, a sense of great patience, even wisdom, a gentleness that knew itself to be stronger than brutality. He thanked the director of the World Economic Forum in a lilting, melodic English and then began to speak in Chinese. He was addressing the world—but his own countrymen were a large part of the world, too, and when his speech was broadcast to them he wanted them to know he had spoken his native tongue with pride and eloquence. He wanted them to know he was no returning sea turtle—no hai gui—but a citizen of China as authentic as any of them. Ambler could understand nothing of what the man said, but a great deal from the way he said it. So often, the propositional content of language was mere distraction from the subtleties of tone and intonation. Simple emotions were coated by a lacquer of complex ideas.
Liu Ang was wry and funny—the headset-equipped audience guffawed at just the moment Ambler would have guessed—and then was somber and impassioned. He understood a truth that he wanted others to understand as well. He was not selling them; he was telling them. It was not the usual politician’s voice. It was the voice of a genuine statesman, the voice of somebody who envisaged a future of peace and prosperity and wanted to invite the rest of the world to join that future. A man who saw that cooperation could be as powerful, and powerfully productive, as competition. A man who was helping to bring tolerance and enlightenment not only to the Middle Kingdom but to the world at large.
A man who was slated for death at any moment.
Somewhere in the hall, the assassin was biding his time, and Ambler’s instincts, his peculiar gift, had failed him, failed him utterly. Again, Ambler scanned the rows beneath him, gazing so intently into the viewfinder that his vision began to blur, his neck to stiffen. Now, abruptly, almost involuntarily, he looked up and craned his head around him, his gaze taking in the camera operators and coming to rest on Laurel’s face.
She had been peering through her camera at the man at the lectern, clearly as mesmerized by the statesman as he had been, and it was a moment before she realized Ambler was watching her. Something rippled through her face and then she turned to him with an expression of shaky resolve, an expression that was also brimming with love and loyalty and devotion. Ambler blinked hard. He felt as if there were a sty in his eye. No, not a sty but—what had he just seen?
The temperature of the room plummeted, it seemed to him; he felt as if he had be
en whipped by an Arctic blast.
Yet it was madness—he could not have seen what he thought he had seen.
He replayed it in his mind. Laurel, his beloved Laurel, studying the scene through the camera calmly—no, stonily, could it be?—and then the look on her face, a moment before it was wreathed in a loving smile. Again, he replayed that fraction of a second in his mind, and he saw another expression on her face, as fleeting as a firefly’s glow, and as unmistakable.
It was an expression of pure and crystalline contempt.
THIRTY-THREE
Ambler stole another look at Laurel and saw her right finger on what looked like a brace beneath the camera lens—in fact, he now realized, a trigger. A lightning bolt of comprehension struck him with devastating force.
How could he have been so blind?
All along, there had been a missing piece to the puzzle, hadn’t there? Caston’s voice: There’s always got to be a fall guy. A scheme of this sort always demanded one. The realization staggered Ambler like a body blow. He was not meant to prevent the assassination.
He was meant to take the blame for it.
The cameras—Laurel’s idea. Her “inspiration.” The old models were steel-clad contraptions, and dozens of them went through the X-ray detectors every day. But the rays could not penetrate the metal. Laurel’s camera didn’t conceal a weapon; it was a weapon.
It couldn’t be—yet it was. His mind lurched and reeled.
The twin-lens model was a ruse: protruding from the top hole was the bore end of a rifle. As a piece of engineering it was elementary: the long camera body and two-foot zoom served as a barrel; the functioning lens could double as the sights. And the trigger, of course, was exactly . . . where her finger was now.
Indeed, she was fingering the trigger with the assurance of experience. It had to have been she who had killed Benoit Deschesnes, in the Luxembourg Gardens: the Chinese marksman must have seen her do it, had seen through her deadly ruse and recognized the true threat to his people.
The Ambler Warning Page 47