by Ed McBain
“Delivery, sir. One day or two?”
“One-day, please.”
“I’d say the delivery charge’ll come to something like forty dollars, more or less.”
“Fine. When can you send it?”
“It’ll go out today.”
“Before you get our references?”
“I’ll trust you on those till you send them. Do you have a fax?”
“I do.”
“Just send me three business references and one bank reference. You can address those personally to me, my name is Anne Burroughs.”
“I’ll get that out right away,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pierce.”
He hung up, dialed Arthur at SeaCoast, filled him in on the conversation he’d just had, and asked him to fax the requested information to Miss Burroughs. Arthur said he would have it taken care of at once.
“While I have you,” he said, “the Statue of Liberty is in the First Precinct and the Plaza is in the Eighteenth.”
“Thank you,” Sonny said.
“What’s dimethylsulfoxide difluoride?”
“An insecticide,” Sonny said, and hung up.
He’d used a wire garrote the first time he’d killed anyone.
By the time he was seventeen, he had killed three men. By the time he was twenty—and an undergraduate at Princeton—he had killed yet another person, a girl this time. Since then, he’d been asleep. Waiting. And now, at last, the opportunity. There would be no personal glory here, none except the secret glory in his heart. Complete anonymity, Arthur had told him. Retribution without recognition. No credit claimed this time. Do the job and disappear. Take satisfaction in the knowledge that the debt had been paid, the score settled.
And although he was willing to give his life to achieve the goal entrusted to him, the No-Fail designation did not make such a sacrifice mandatory. Do the job and do it well, covering all tracks before and after, leave the victim or victims unmistakably dead, and then move on. He had been trained to kill and to escape intact. He would do both exceptionally well when the time came.
The first man he’d killed was an Egyptian spy posing as a rug merchant in Tripoli. In an operation of small consequence except as a training exercise, Sonny had gained entry as a seller of figs, snapping the wire loop out of his basket and around the Egyptian’s neck in a cobra-like strike that left him dead within seconds. His escape route was through the Old City, white walls and minarets, the smell of eucalyptus leaves, past the Mosque of the She-Camel, and down Jama ad-Duruj, and past the Osman Pasha Mosque, losing himself in dark and narrow alleys twisting downward to the sea, until at last the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean surprised him.
That had been the first time. There were two other men after that—one in Egypt, the other in Chad—and then the girl. Here in America. The only one he’d ever regretted. Sixteen years old. A sophomore at McCorristin High in Trenton, some fifteen miles from Princeton, where he’d been studying at the time. Francine Dumar, whose father was Alex Dumar, a GID agent whose cover was working as an insurance claims adjustor for the Prudential. Francine had been observed in conversation with a man from Langley, and it was assumed that Washington was taking a serious run at her in an attempt to nail her father as a spy. That she’d been receptive seemed undeniable. GID figured it would merely be a matter of time before they turned her completely.
The assignment was top priority in that one of their own was in imminent danger and remedial action was imperative. This may not have been a true mayday situation, where exposure and arrest—or even termination—of an agent was imminent; the job fell just short of an emergency Code Red designation. But it was serious enough, and Sonny’s orders were unmistakable. In the trade, “measles” was the international nomenclature for any killing engineered so that death would seem to have occurred either accidentally or through natural causes. Francine Dumar had to be eliminated, but discreetly. Francine Dumar had to contract a deadly case of measles.
He arranged her suicide. Overdose of the sleeping pill Seconal—which he’d forced down her throat one cold November night while her parents were attending a concert at the War Memorial on West Lafayette. Suicide note in her own handwriting—duplicated by their cobbler in New York. Sonny’s initial research had indicated that she was very popular at school, and also sexually promiscuous. The note explained in adolescent prose, which he himself had composed, that her period was three weeks overdue and she thought she was pregnant. Entirely plausible, given her reputation. He still considered it a brilliant touch, considering how inexperienced he’d been at the time.
Francine Dumar. A beautiful girl with long dark hair and brown eyes. He remembered that she’d been wearing nothing but a nightgown when he came into the small development house through a back door he’d picked with a nail file, the way he’d been taught at Kufra. She’d pleaded for her life. He’d pulled her head back by the long dark hair, forced the pills into her mouth, clamped his hand over her nose and mouth until she was compelled to swallow. Thirty-five of them, ten more than the lethal dose. She was comatose on the bedroom floor before he left the house. He knew she would be dead before her parents got home from the concert.
Saddest assignment he’d ever had.
Her father later defected, possibly suspecting that his only daughter had been murdered by his own people. His name appeared regularly on GID hit lists, but Langley had given him a new identity and so far he hadn’t surfaced anywhere.
Sonny looked at his watch.
He planned to revisit the Plaza early tomorrow morning, this time without the informative Miss Lubenthal as a mentor and guide. With her eager assistance today, he had learned the location of the pantry servicing the Baroque Room …
“May I take a peek into the kitchen, please?”
“Well … why would you …?”
“I just want to make sure it’s clean.”
“Clean? Well, I can assure you it meets the highest sanitary standards. In any event, that isn’t the kitchen. It’s the pantry. The kitchen is downstairs.”
“Oh. Well, how does the food get up here?”
“On the elevator.”
“And is the pantry where they prepare it for serving?”
“Yes.”
“Well, may I take a look at the pantry then?”
“I’d be happy to show it to you, but there’s an Orthodox Jewish wedding tonight, and the caterer might not like …”
“The caterer?”
“Are you familiar with the word trayf?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
“Well, I just don’t think he’d like us in the pantry while he’s setting out his kosher dishes and things.”
… and had also been able to locate and mark in memory all the exits leading from the room. Tomorrow morning, he would wander the back stairs without Miss Lubenthal in tow, searching for both an escape route and a possible lay-in location, should his final plan call for one. Earlier this afternoon, under guise of asking about a dais for his sister and her bridal party …
“Do they ever do that? Sit at a separate long table?”
“Oh, yes, to avoid seating conflicts between the two families. That way, the bride and groom, together with the bridal party, sit at a table on a raised dais, and there are no problems. Here in the Baroque Room, we normally …”
… and had gone on to show him where the dais was usually placed, there on the left, with the huge arched windows facing the park at right angles to it.
That’s where Thatcher’ll be sitting, he’d thought.
And maybe Bush as well.
With an exit door close by, leading to the pantry on the left. And directly ahead, a visible flight of steps climbing upward.
He would reconnoiter those steps tomorrow morning. Meanwhile …
He picked up the receiver again, and dialed the 800 number for Epsilon Chemical Supplies in Meriden, Connecticut.
The liaison officer seemed not at all bothered by the fact
that counterfeit British passports were in circulation. Apparently, this was a common occurrence and not something to get one’s feathers—
“In any case,” Geoffrey said, “it was only one passport. That is, they were one and the same passport, with different names in them, you see. The dead Scotsman’s passport, that is.”
The liaison officer glared at him.
His name was Joseph Worthy, or so he’d said, who knew what it might really be? He explained to Geoffrey at once that he was not with Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Office, as he’d told the noisy Miss Phipps, but served instead as liaison between MI6 and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, of which the British Consulate here in New York was an integral part. It was the Secret Intelligence Agency, in fact …
“SIS, MI6, call it what you will,” Worthy said.
… who’d contacted him early this afternoon to report the alarming fact that two women with identical green scimitar tattoos had been found dead in Manhattan, both of them carrying false British passports. The passports, he was now saying, were of no interest whatever to him. Sixpence a dozen, buy them in any local pharm …
“Well, surely not,” Geoffrey said.
“Figure of speech,” Worthy said.
“I should hope so.”
“The scimitar tattoo, on the other hand, is something of concern, especially since a former prime minister will be here in the city a fortnight from now.”
“Nine days from now, actually,” Geoffrey said.
“Worse yet,” Worthy said. “Who’s the police officer investigating these homicides?”
“A man named Allan Santorini. He’s with Homicide North. In the Twenty-Fifth Precinct uptown.”
“Seem any good?”
“A typical New York detective,” Geoffrey said, and shrugged. Unwashed, unshaven and uncouth, he thought.
“Does he have any idea what those green scimitars might mean?”
“No. And neither do I.”
“Does the name Sayf Quaṣīr mean anything to you?”
“No, what is it?”
“It’s an elite Libyan intelligence group.”
“It’s an Iranian terrorist group,” Santorini said.
“Simsir,” the other man said, and nodded. “I’m familiar with it.”
They were sitting in the twelfth-floor offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at 26 Federal Plaza downtown. Santorini had called here the moment he’d made his computer discovery. The special agent with him now was named Michael Grant. He was fifty-three years old and balding, and he told Santorini that his biggest recent assignment had been rounding up a gang of rustlers—here in the East, would you believe it, rustlers!—who’d been dumb enough to move cattle interstate from New York to Pennsylvania, thereby invoking the wrath of the federal agency. Through the windows behind him, the Statue of Liberty and the Jersey shore were clearly visible.
“Do these people tattoo themselves?” Santorini asked.
“Not to my knowledge,” Grant said.
“Little sword on their breasts?”
“I’m not that familiar with them.”
“Little scimitar? Because it means scimitar in Persian, you know. Simsir.”
“I didn’t know that,” Grant said. “In any case, they’re out of business. They were very active during the Iran-Iraq War, claimed responsibility for the assassination of several top-level Iraqi diplomats. But I haven’t heard anything about them since that bombing at JFK, back in …”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
“We caught a punk named Mustapha Hayiz—there’re no state or federal statutes against terrorism, you know, the Bureau got called in ’cause the bombing took place at an airport … interstate, international, all that jazz. We found him living like a camel-driver in a room in Philadelphia, big terrorist hero, the whole place stinking of human excrement. He wouldn’t tell us who his accomplices were—for all we know, he was operating solo on the airport bombing. Anyway, we sent him up for a long, long time—but he broke out last October, don’t know where the hell he is now. Probably back in Teheran, clenching his fists for the television cameras.”
“How many others were there in the group?”
“Originally? Five or six. All these terrorist groups with the high-sounding names—the Holy This and the Holy That, the Masked Ones, the Islamic Legion, the Flaming Sword, the Volcano, the People’s Bureau for Solidarity and Horseshit—these’re sometimes two, three guys who know how to put together a bomb, and another dumb bastard who’s willing to sacrifice his life delivering it.”
“Any women in these groups?”
“Sometimes. Why?”
“We found two dead women tattooed with green scimitars.”
“Well, green, now you’re talking Libya,” Grant said.
“Which is what concerns us,” Worthy said. “Do you remember the Yvonne Fletcher incident?”
“Of course I do,” Geoffrey said.
“April 17, 1984,” Worthy said, and nodded solemnly. “St. James’s Square, London. Outside the Libyan embassy … well, they called it the People’s Office. There were demonstrators outside …”
Geoffrey could still remember that day.
He was sixteen years old at the time, home from Eton, visiting his parents. A quiet Tuesday in London, five days before Easter. St. James’s Square tree-shaded and still save for the chanting of the demonstrators. The BBC news cameras were covering the event dutifully but routinely; in a democracy, one became used to demonstrations for or against everything on earth. The police were there as a matter of course; they were always on hand to make certain a crowd didn’t go entirely berserk. But no one, least of all Geoffrey, was prepared for what happened next.
He was watching the screen only casually, glancing up every now and then from the thriller he was reading, an addiction he’d picked up from his mother. He had reached the part in the book where the female detective was out in a rainstorm, tracking a rapist, when all at once he thought he actually heard thunder, and then realized in an instant that the sound had come from the television set—but it wasn’t raining in London that day. And then he recognized with a start that what he’d heard was gunfire. Actual gunfire. Not the kind you read about. Real gunfire. He looked up sharply. On the television screen, people were shouting, and policemen were rushing to where a young woman in uniform was lying on the pavement—dead, as it later turned out. Someone inside the embassy had fired an automatic rifle from the first-floor window, killing her instantly.
“We had that bloody embassy under siege for ten days,” Worthy said now. “Then somebody decided to allow the bastards clear passage home. Diplomatic immunity. For murderers.” He grimaced sourly, shook his head. “We still haven’t resumed relations with Libya … well, of course you know that.”
“Yes,” Geoffrey said.
He was still thinking about that dead policewoman lying on the pavement.
“So now we have two of Quaddafi’s elite intelligence people abroad in New York a week before …”
“Five days, actually,” Geoffrey corrected. “And they’re not quite abroad anymore, you know. They’re both dead.”
“Five bloody days before she gets here,” Worthy said. “Which seems quite a coincidence to us.”
Geoffrey didn’t see any connection whatever. He said nothing.
“I understand the Consulate here has been handling the banquet arrangements,” Worthy said.
“No, sir, not the banquet itself. The Canadian Consulate is looking after that. All I did was consult with them on the seating arrangements for the main table. So that Mrs. Thatcher might not be inadvertently offended. That was the extent of my participation.”
“Where have they seated her?”
“Well, let me show you the diagram,” Geoffrey said, and opened a desk drawer and took from it a copy of the sketch the Canadian Consulate had sent him. Worthy studied it:
“In keeping with protocol,” Geoffrey said, “the visiting prime minister
is considered to be at home when he attends an embassy affair. The Canadians have quite properly granted him the presidency of the table, here at the center, with his wife on his right, both of them facing the entrance doors.”
Worthy looked puzzled.
“Do you see where the places are marked with the Roman numeral one?” Geoffrey said. “That’s where Mr. and Mrs. Mulroney will be sitting. The Canadian P.M. and his wife.”
“What do all those little circles mean?”
“The circles indicate ladies. The usual seating arrangement for these affairs is boy-girl-boy-girl, as you see it here.”
“And where will our girl be sitting?”
“Well, I had something of a row about that with an idiot at the Canadian Consulate, who mistakenly assumed that the Consul-General and his wife should take the places of honor to the right of the host and hostess respectively. I informed her that protocol was crystal clear as concerned a visiting prime minister and the president of a repub …”
“Former prime minister.”
“In the eyes of many she’ll always be the P.M.,” Geoffrey said.
“Be that as it may, where are they seating her?”
“To the left of Mr. Mulroney, where you see the circled number one position. Mr. De Gortari, the Mexican President, is to the right of Mrs. Mulroney. But all of this may go up in smoke, if what I hear is true.”
“What is it you hear?”
“That someone very high up may be dropping in. A surprise guest. In which case, there’ll be something of a brouhaha regarding the seating arrangements. I’ll stick to my guns regarding Mrs. Thatcher’s place of honor, of course, but …”
“How do you mean someone very high up?”
“Here,” Geoffrey said, and tapped his forefinger on the desk.
“Here in the consulate?”
“No, no. Here in the States.”
“How high up?”
“If they’d told me, it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore, would it?”
“When will they tell you?”
“If it becomes necessary to move Mrs. Thatcher, I’d imagine.”
“And when will that be?”
“I haven’t the faintest.”
“May I have a copy of this?” Worthy asked.