Assassin's Shadow

by Striker, Randy

“I thought I told you to keep a watch on the kitchen.”

  Heiny shrugged. “A man has to get the sleep sometime, ya?”

  “Well, I don’t want to have to call you again. Understand? I’m tired of these bastards waking me up in the middle of the night when they go on their food hunts!”

  Matrah turned and went back into the house. Through the Star-Tron, I followed Heiny. He returned in a minute with Sonya and Samuel Yabrud. The two of them looked sheepish, and there was a forced hilarity in their conversation.

  One of the world’s great actresses and one of Israel’s top diplomats had been caught trying to steal food.

  But Heiny himself was something of a diplomat. He never mentioned the kitchen. Instead he chose to pretend that they were just out for a walk.

  “The snakes,” he warned them. “Do not walk at night, for that is when the snakes are awake. You see? They are in the bushes, waiting to strike!”

  That solicited nervous laughter, and promises never to walk at night again.

  After seeing Yabrud and then Sonya back to their cottages, I followed Heiny and his German companion through the Star-Tron. Their cabin was well away from the guest cottages, at the other end of the island. They disappeared inside and switched off the lights.

  I was not awakened again that night. And when the birds started making their predawn noises, I packed my gear—all but the geophones—climbed down the water tower, and carried it from shadow to shadow back toward Sniper.

  The geophone by the docks was the only one that had not been activated.

  That’s why I was shocked to find the note.

  It was lying in plain sight on the booth table inside the cabin.

  And the cabin had been locked.

  I picked up the note and read it in the coming light of the new day. As I hid my gear away beneath the fish box, I forced myself to stay calm. Mechanically, I made myself consider when someone might have had the chance to come aboard Sniper, pick the lock, and leave the note.

  That’s when I realized that it could have happened at any time the day before. Or even during my all-night vigil—if they had come by water and taken pains to be damn quiet.

  Did the time frame eliminate or single out anyone?

  No. Absolutely no one.

  Before locking Sniper, I picked up the note and read it again. It was written in heavy block letters with a felt pen. You couldn’t tell if the writer was left- or right-handed, male or female. It was plain scrap paper, and it bore no odor.

  It read: THERE IS NO PLACE SAFER THAN IN THE TRACK OF THE HUNTER. AND NO PLACE MORE DANGEROUS THAN THE SHADOW OF THE QUARRY.

  YOU ARE IN THE SHADOW.

  12

  On the fourth night after dinner, Sonya Casimur came to my bed.

  I wasn’t totally surprised.

  She had come more and more to depend on me. Like most great actresses, her film life blended evenly into her real life. She was a woman made for the bedroom: wide dark eyes, a face that suggested some inexorable wanting, a body that, in days of old, kings would have fought and killed for. But with all that, she possessed a potent force of character, one that guarded her sensuality like a junkyard dog. All truly beautiful women have it—and if they don’t they are soon destroyed by the thousands of faceless drooling men who seek to satisfy themselves with that beauty.

  But her guard was down now.

  She had left it behind in her cottage with the panties she did not wear, and the bra she never wore.

  She covered herself with only a brief silk nightdress. It tied behind her neck in a tempting bow. Her dark legs angled soft and long beneath the skirt, and the full breasts were visible beneath the thin material.

  She stood in the little living area of my cottage. She had pulled the wooden door closed behind her. Her hair was carefully mussed, and her brown eyes seemed to hold mine with a piercing heat.

  “Again you brought the beer but did not stay. Why is it you do not like me?” The mouth pouted. But the eyes challenged.

  “I like you fine, Sonya.”

  “Then why do you never stay? To talk?”

  I stretched and yawned. “The workouts here tire me out.”

  That was a lie. The second day had gone much as the first. And the third day had gone like the second. They assembled us at seven a.m. for a slow half-mile jog before breakfast. After breakfast (a sparse mixing of fruit and cold cereal) we separated into our groups. There were only four to a group. In ours it was Sonya, myself, Yabrud, and a hugely fat Texan who talked long and loud about his oil and cattle. He had a nasty smoker’s cough, and he liked to slap people on the back. Because, on the second day, Sonya had met their leers with a frozen stare, Yabrud and the Texan had found kinship in the things they held in common: money, and the great actress’ contempt.

  And that left Sonya and me together, even in that small group.

  While she had every talent necessary to be a film star, she seemed to have zero athletic ability.

  Every day we would swim, and every day I would drag her along behind me. It was the same on our cross-country runs. She would fall or collapse from exhaustion, and I would pull her to her feet, then half-prod and half-carry her the rest of the way. Our instructor was always either Heiny or his German counterpart. Neither of them seemed to mind. In fact, Heiny appeared to take some pleasure in playing Cupid: putting the two of us in impossible circumstances, then leaving us alone. But he never left without first giving me a private wink and grin.

  And I have to admit that Sonya Casimur was one very desirable creature. When left to her own devices, all the staged smiles fell away along with the well-practiced theatrics, and she became the unexpected: raucous, profane, and much given to helpless laughter. With all the stage trappings cut away, she became a peasant girl again without an ounce of affectation.

  So, on one level, the days at St. Carib went smoothly. With Yabrud in my group, he was never out of my sight during the day. And during the brief private hours before and after dinner, his brace of CIA bodyguards hung on him like glue. And there was the beautiful Sonya for company while I sweated the fat away, working my way back into shape.

  But on another level, things weren’t going smoothly at all.

  For the first time in my civilian life, I felt as if I were the one being hunted. FEAT’s assassin knew who I was, where I was, and what my daily routine would be.

  And I knew nothing about him.

  The morning after finding the note, I had managed to slip away long enough to search the beach area near the docks. There had been a high tide that night, so I thought someone approaching Sniper by sea might have unknowingly left some track revealed by the falling water.

  But there was none.

  I even went carefully through the cabin, looking for anything that might offer a clue: a bit of hair, a scuff mark on the carpet.

  But there was only the note.

  Again and again I went over that note, trying to press every drop of information from it.

  It was written on a four-by-six scrap of paper. A chunk of gumming in the upper left-hand corner told me it had been torn from right to left off a common note pad. It meant that the author was probably right-handed.

  The words themselves were meticulously drawn—the starkest of block letters. It suggested the assassin knew that plain block letters are the only way to disguise handwriting. The reason for wanting to disguise the handwriting was obvious. Once he had killed Yabrud and me, he didn’t want to be traced. But maybe there was a deeper reason for careful forming of the letters. Perhaps he knew that any hint of his own penmanship would provide a glaring clue to his or her identity. And nothing is easier to spot than someone writing in a language not native to him.

  So—the assassin was probably right-handed. And, perhaps, a foreigner.

  Not exactly earth-shaking deductions.

  But the most important clue was the note itself. Why did he even bother leaving it? Certainly it wasn’t a warning. A hunter doesn’t warn a lion before he is
about to shoot.

  No, the note was a challenge.

  It implied a love of the hunt.

  And this assassin wanted to make the hunt interesting.

  He had dropped the gauntlet. And I had no choice but to pick it up, accept the challenge.

  The assassin had everything going for him. The only thing I had on my side was that he was not the cold methodical killer I had expected. He was an assassin. And if D. Harold Westervelt was any judge of FEAT, that terrorist organization hired nothing but the best. But this, at least, was a killer who loved sport.

  If not, I would have been dead long before; dead like Stormin’ Norman Fizer, my old lost friend.

  So, when they throw you into an arena filled with lions, you grab for any weapon you can.

  And, for now, the only weapon I had was my game plan.

  So I stuck with it.

  The second night on St. Carib was a replay of the first. I took beer to Sonya Casimur’s cabin, returned to my own for a suitable length of time, then made my midnight climb to the water tower, where I sat wearing seismic earphones, Remington 700 sniper rifle in hand, the cylindrical silencer making the weapon look even more lethal.

  Only this time it was harder to sleep.

  A hell of a lot harder.

  Did the assassin know I was on the tower? And if so, why didn’t he just shoot and bring his hunt to an end?

  Finally, I did drift off to sleep. But I awoke with a jolt, fleeing my own dreams.

  A nightmare, not a dream.

  In gauzy slow motion, I had finally brought the assassin into my sights. I could see his face clearly through the infrared scope.

  He was smiling; smiling because I had been in his sights for some time. He trained an SVA Dragunov sniper rifle on me, his cheek resting on that weapon’s strange skeleton stock, his right eye huge and red and dragonlike as he brought the cross hairs of his own night scope to bear on my forehead.

  He was smiling, and for some reason I could not pull the trigger.

  I could not manufacture the effort it took to make that simple gesture of death.

  And then I saw the flare and brief recoil of his own rifle, and I knew that I was dead, dead, dead....

  So I really was tired when Sonya Casimur arrived alone on that fourth night.

  But not from St. Carib’s workouts.

  I was tired from the three near-sleepless all-night vigils. And, the toughest of all to admit, I was worn by the strain of, for once, being the hunted instead of the hunter. I was tired by the fear.

  All this while Samuel Yabrud labored through the fat-farm drills, blissfully unaware that we were both marked for death.

  So Sonya Casimur stood before me dressed in her brief silk nightshirt, breasts held in warm relief against the thin material, the promise of naked buttocks beneath the short skirt.

  “Why is it you do not like me?” she repeated. The dark eyes held mine, searching, offering, challenging.

  “Sonya, I told you: I like you fine.”

  “Is it that you are not really a man?”

  “Are you asking me if I’m a homosexual? Bingo—that’s it. I’m too tired and, besides, I only like other men.”

  She came toward me, reached out, and touched my bare chest with her hand. It seemed as if there were electricity in her fingers. When I had heard her knock at the screen door, I had hastily shoved my commando pants and watch sweater back under the bed, then pulled on the first thing I could find—the thin St. Carib–issue running shorts.

  At her touch, I felt the old yearning deep within my abdomen, and I wished I had pulled on something other than those loose shorts.

  Her tongue traced the edge of her full lips. “You are not the gay man. You are not the homosexual.”

  “And how can you be so sure?”

  “A woman knows. A woman can always tell.”

  I took her firmly by the arms, walked her backward, and sat her down on the couch. She closed her eyes and held her face up toward me, expecting me to kiss her. And when I didn’t, the eyes flared open.

  “Why are you so mean to me?”

  “Maybe it’s my suspicious nature. Maybe I become a little wary when a woman who could have any man in the world starts coming on to me like a nun who wakes up to find herself in an NFL dressing room.”

  “I am not chasing you!”

  “Well, this is certainly not your cottage. I didn’t come to your door still wet after a shower, smelling of shampoo and perfume.”

  She smiled slightly. “You are jealous of my other men, no?” She held up three fingers. “I have only been married this many times. And two of them were very fat and very rich, and the other was a handsome gay boy.” Again her hands traced the lines of my chest. “But you are not the gay boy.” Her hands stopped at the elastic of my shorts. She looked down meaningfully, the smile broadening. “That tells me you are not the gay boy. That tells me you are very much the man.”

  I took her stray hand in mine. She moved her fingers, stroking my palm. I said, “Sonya, you already know that you are very beautiful. And you already know that you are very sensual—and if you don’t stop rubbing your leg against mine, I may lose control of myself and prove it to you. But there are some things I can tell you that you don’t know. When you drop that sex-kitten actress routine of yours, you really are fun to be with. I’ve enjoyed the last couple of days. I think that behind that greasepaint facade is a pretty decent human being.”

  She nuzzled herself against me, the tension sagging out of her, legs parting slightly as she rested her face on my shoulder. When she spoke again, the voice had changed, her accent fading with the staged seduction. She said, “You see through me, Dusky. That is why I . . . feel comfortable with you. I get so tired, so damn tired of being the famous actress. Sometimes I don’t know if that is the real me on the screen, or if this”—she tugged at her own flesh—“if this is really me.” She looked up at me, the dark eyes piercing. “But you know which is the real Sonya Casimur, Dusky. And now I want you to make me feel like the woman I really am.”

  I felt my face close on hers; felt my mouth join her wet lips, felt my hand stray up the curvature of ribs, and heard her whimper softly as I cupped nipple and breast in my right hand.

  She was soft and wanting, and the light perfume she wore seemed stronger with the growing heat of her body.

  But I couldn’t stay with her. As much as my body wanted her, I couldn’t spare the hours that a joining with such a woman deserved.

  There was the little problem of a mission. And what would I say to D. Harold Westervelt if Samuel Yabrud died bloody while I slept in a beautiful woman’s arms?

  And beyond that, there was another lady whom I had professed to love.

  I had made no promises to Marina Cole. Nor had she made any to me. But that was just a verbal loophole that far, far too many people use to jump from bed to bed; a makeshift rationalization that can explain away any infidelity.

  Had I come to the point where the bedding of a woman meant nothing more than the brief hipwrithing climax; the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am philosophy that has become the demigod of a million lonely suburban hipsters?

  It was the chic creed that has always offended me: the creed that has turned love into nothing more than a penis handshake.

  At any rate, Marina Cole deserved more.

  And so did Sonya Casimur.

  But the mission took precedence over everything. So, thankfully, it left me with no decision to make.

  I pulled myself away from the tangle of arms and legs. Sonya lay back on the couch, breathing heavily. She made a motion as if to pull the silk dress up over her head. I got a brief look at perfect thighs and soft brown curl of pubic hair before I stopped her.

  “No, Sonya. I can’t.”

  I expected her to be mad.

  But she wasn’t.

  For the first time, she was hurt. I read it in her eyes, her face.

  And there was no playacting involved.

  “Dusky, but why?
Why . . .”

  Saying it, the excuse sounded pretty damn weak. “There’s another woman I’m pretty much committed to.”

  “You’re married?”

  I shook my head. “No, Sonya. I’m not married. But it makes no difference.”

  She stood up, straightening her dress, her hair. “You like her better than you like me?” There was no inflection of surprise in the voice. It was an honest question filled with hurt.

  “That’s not fair to ask, Sonya.”

  She stepped back, studying me. “Yes,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes—the love for someone else. Is that the woman you would leave me for?”

  “Yes,” I said. But I wasn’t sure. Was it Marina that she saw? Or someone else from long, long ago in another lifetime?

  It didn’t matter. As long as she believed it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She reached up and brushed my face with her lips. I held her hand and kissed it lightly. She said, “Someday, if I am lucky, perhaps I will find a man who cares as much for me.”

  “And if you’re luckier, he won’t be the bastard I normally am. And he won’t have any ugly scars.”

  She shook her head, caught in private thought. As she left, she said over her shoulder. “Your scar’s not really that ugly, Dusky. In fact, I was just beginning to like it. . . .”

  13

  So I played the fourth night like the rest.

  But I knew the calm couldn’t go on much longer. FEAT’s assassin had to strike.

  And he had to strike soon.

  The whole physical-fitness routine on St. Carib was aimed at the culminating “Solitary”—the two days and one night alone on an island.

  Every day we had met for a class on very basic survival. They showed us the edible plants—seawort and prickly pear and others; demonstrated how to dig clams and coquinas; explained how to spear fish at night using a torch.

  It was really just a sophisticated form of Boy Scouts. They dramatized the Solitary; emphasized its importance. They made it sound as if two days on a secluded beach without food was the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest.