The Perfect Assassin

by Ward Larsen

  “So where did you find this beauty?” she asked with a glance up at the ripped headliner. “Is it hot?”

  He laughed, “You mean stolen? No, I bought her fair and square. Nine hundred pounds sterling.”

  “The seller won. Who was he?”

  “A young kid. Heroin addict, I think. Wanted to sell the car fast, probably for a quick fix. Once I offered cash, he signed it right over. I made a copy of the papers, then sent off the registration, but I neglected to sign at the bottom. Some clerk will see the mistake in a couple of days and send it back to an address that doesn’t exist. It will all take time, and for a few days we’ll have a beat-up car that’s been legitimately signed over to us.”

  “Whose name is it in?”

  “Yours.”

  “Mine?” she exclaimed.

  “Well, Carla Fluck’s.”

  Christine smiled, and then from somewhere deep within a laugh emerged, followed by another and another. It was contagious and he succumbed until both were laughing uncontrollably. It felt good, and Christine realized that even through all their troubles, all the death and deception, there could still be laughter. There could still be life.

  She sized him up.

  “What?” he asked, clearly wondering what was on her mind.

  “Oh, I’ve just never seen you laugh like that. I suppose I thought a person like you would always be … serious or something.”

  “A person like me?” he said, his voice harsh. “A killer, you mean. That kind of person.”

  “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, yes, we’re serious. One has to be when all you do is go around killing people all day. But we do all the rest. We laugh, cry, feel pain, a whole spectrum of emotions.”

  Christine fixed her gaze on the road ahead, not sure what to say. The ensuing silence was stifling.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

  “You don’t have to explain. I know how much pressure I feel like I’ve been under. I never stopped to think that you might—”

  “Get ready to turn off!” he interrupted.

  “What?” She noticed he was concentrating on the side mirror. Christine looked back and saw a pair of headlights in the distance behind them. A chill spiked down her back and her grip on the wheel tightened.

  “Is someone following us?”

  “Probably not.” The little Ford went around a curve and the head lights behind disappeared temporarily. “Turn! Turn there!” he said, pointing to a small gravel side road.

  Christine braked quickly and swerved onto the road.

  “Take it in another fifty feet, up next to those bushes. Kill the lights and put it in park.” Christine did as he instructed. “Make sure your foot’s off the brake pedal or else the brake lights will stay on.”

  Christine moved her foot as far away as she could and they both sat in silence. A long ten seconds later the car whipped by behind them, showing no signs of slowing.

  “Okay, turn us around and be ready to go.”

  Christine extracted the car from the side road, did a three point turn, and backed into their hiding spot. They sat silently for nearly ten minutes, the little Ford’s feeble engine idling.

  “All right,” he finally said, “we’re safe. Let’s press on.”

  Christine let out a deep breath. “You haven’t told me where we’re going.”

  “We’re going to put some distance between ourselves and The Excelsior. We still need to get lost for a day or two, and I think I know just the place.

  Prime Minister Jacobs’ morning staff meeting ended at 10:00. He had tried to show interest in the daily crises briefed by his various Cabinet members and their underlings. More Katyusha rockets flinging in from the Lebanese border, a severe influenza outbreak in the primary schools, and the Americans again. This time their Senate had tied up an international aid bill, threatening the start of the new Hadera desalination project. In spite of his efforts, Jacobs’ distraction was evident to all. When the meeting finally dragged to a close, the staffers were asked to leave, while Cabinet Ministers remained. General Gabriel and Ehud Zak looked worried. Sonya Franks and Ariel Steiner eyed one another contemptuously.

  Jacobs got things going. “What’s the latest, Anton?”

  The creases in Bloch’s brow seemed to have attained a permanent etch. “We found the ELTs. But not Polaris Venture.”

  “What does that mean?” Steiner pounced.

  “The ELTs were exactly where we expected to find them. Only they weren’t in the wrecked hull of a ship. They were simply lying next to each other on the ocean floor.”

  It was a result no one had predicted, and silence prevailed as the group digested the information.

  General Gabriel said, “So the ship might have been hijacked, and whoever did it threw these things into the ocean to throw us off?”

  “Maybe,” Bloch said. “All we can say for sure is that somebody’s trying to confuse us. The question is, why?”

  Jacobs forced hope into his voice, “Polaris Venture is a big ship, Anton. Surely if she’s still sailing around somebody will spot her soon.”

  “Yes, I’ve already sent out a message to watch for her. And our satellite people are going to give all the Arab ports a good look over the next few days.”

  “A few days might be too late,” Steiner suggested.

  Franks said, “I have to agree. Isn’t there something else we can do?”

  Jacobs was stung by the rebuke from one of his closest allies. He sensed the political sands shifting.

  “There’s more,” Bloch said. “I sent a flash message yesterday, about our London Chief of Station being killed in a gun battle.”

  “I know Anton, I saw it. It’s an awful thing. We’ll do what we can to solve that when the time comes, but for now we have to concentrate on Polaris Venture.”

  “This is about Polaris Venture. This morning I talked to London. It seems our people got a good look at the assailant.”

  “You don’t mean —” General Gabriel started.

  “I’m afraid so. It was David Slaton.”

  Jacobs felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “God Almighty,” he said.

  “What’s going on, Anton?” Zak demanded. “One of your people sabotages our most delicate operation in years, then runs off and starts killing his co-workers?”

  Bloch said, “We don’t know that he was responsible for hijacking or sinking Polaris Venture. And we don’t know why he’s been on a tear through England.”

  Zak showed a rare glimpse of impatience, “You can’t justify what he’s done now, Anton. This man is a menace.”

  Franks said, “I agree. He’s turned against us, for whatever reason. We don’t know what happened to that ship, but we know he was involved somehow. And there seems to be no doubt he’s responsible for decimating our London station.”

  The room fell quiet. Political allies exchanged knowing glances, adversaries glared at one another. All waited for Jacobs to speak.

  The Prime Minister stared at the table in front of him. Bloch had explained the tragedy in Netanya. Had Slaton gone off the deep end? Jacobs decided it didn’t matter. Not now.

  “Anton,” he said, “is there anything you can tell me in Slaton’s defense?”

  Bloch’s pause was brief. “No.”

  An ocean of grim faces descended on Jacobs.

  “Then you know what has to be done.”

  “I’ll issue the order,” Bloch said.

  By noon, Nathan Chatham’s patience was running thin. He had spent the entire night in his office, and though he’d directed two cots to be set up in a side room, so far his own was unused. The room was abuzz with people scurrying in and out, most of them leaving a paper or two on Chatham’s desk. He quickly scanned each and directed it to one of two places — a growing manila folder on his desk, or the trash can on the floor next to it.

  A man who Chatham didn’t even recognize came in carrying a heavy binder,
at least 200 pages long. He handed it to the inspector with a kind of ceremonial reverence.

  “What the devil is this?” Chatham demanded.

  The owlish man peered through round eyeglasses and explained succinctly, “It’s your personal copy of the Commissioner’s new policymanual. It explains everything we all need to know. New information security procedures, parental leave, and a greatly expanded statement on sexual harassment that—”

  “Balderdash!” Chatham bellowed. He got up, threw the brick of a manual straight into the trash can, then stomped on it for good measure. The clerk from the upper floor looked stunned.

  “Out with you!” Chatham said, his voice booming. “Out!”

  The bewildered clerk bid a hasty retreat and shot a look of warning to the next victim, who was now standing in the doorway. Ian Dark held back his snicker until the poor man was out of earshot.

  “Sexual harassment indeed,” Chatham fussed. “More worried about being kind and gentle to one another than catching killers. That’s what’s wrong with this place nowadays.”

  Dark’s tone was conciliatory, “You might have been a bit hard on him, sir. He’s a new lad on the upper floor.”

  Chatham’s terseness eased and he began to fidget, putting his hands in his back pockets. “Yes,” he muttered, “perhaps. Well, we’ll make it right then, won’t we?”

  “I’ll go up later and ask for a new manual, maybe have a word with the fellow.”

  “Yes,” Chatham fudged, “that’s the ticket. So, what have you found?”

  Dark held up a file and a videotape. “First of all, I just got off the phone with ballistics. From what they’ve seen so far, there were at least four shooters — three Israeli security men and the assailant. The Israelis surrendered their weapons for evidence. The attacker dropped one of his weapons on the way out.”

  “One of them, you say? Good Lord, how many did he have?”

  “The one he dropped was a Mauser, one round fired. Rough tests show it’s probably the one that killed Varkal. The rest of his work was with a 9mm, maybe a Berretta. We’ll have it all worked out soon. Are the Is-raelis cooperating?”

  Chatham had spent a good part of his morning at the embassy. “Things are rather chaotic there, as you might expect. The media have made the connection between yesterday’s events and those in Penzance. There’s a phalanx of reporters standing watch outside the embassy. Unfortunately, the woman I eventually spoke with wasn’t giving anything up. In fact, she was downright evasive.”

  “I imagine that’s how it will be until Tel Aviv decides otherwise.”

  Chatham strolled to a tray of sandwiches that had been put on his desk sometime last night. Blindly grabbing a sample, he took a bite and his mouth puckered. “Ugh! Bloody awful!”

  “I’ll send for something fresh.”

  Chatham found a carafe of water and reconstituted his fouled palate. “And so,” he said, “the question then becomes, why? Is this fellow a threat to the Israelis? Has he done them harm? Does he know something important, perhaps embarrassing? Find the answer to that, then we’re on the way to his identity, and eventually his location.” Chatham paced the room, wringing his hands behind his back. “What about this American woman? Any sign of her yet?”

  “No,” Dark responded, “she hasn’t been seen since he hauled her off two days ago. I shouldn’t give odds on her still being alive. Whoever this fellow is, he manages to leave a steady trail of bodies in his wake.”

  “What have you found out about her?”

  “Nothing extraordinary. She’s a doctor, well liked. No radical friends or fringe politics. Everything we’ve found points to a nice young woman caught up in bad circumstances. Maybe he took her from the motel as a hostage.”

  “Kidnapped her? The same person in the wrong place, again?” Chatham stopped pacing, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his long nose.

  “Bad luck, perhaps?” Dark offered weakly.

  Chatham shrugged, “We’ll come back to it. What’s that?” he asked, gesturing to the videotape Dark held.

  “Ah, a stroke of luck, or at least I thought it was. Remember yesterday, you told me to look into Yosef Meier’s death? Well, I found a jewelry shop about 100 feet away from the accident scene that had a security camera set up. It doesn’t show the actual point of the incident, but it gives a view out the front of the shop, toward the street. You can see the people on the sidewalk clearly. I went over it earlier, covered the ten minutes before and after the event.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid.”

  “Let’s have a look then.” Chatham eyed the seldom used TV and VCR that sat on a cart in the corner of his office. He dug around on his desk and found a remote control for the TV under some papers in the out box. He managed to turn the device on, but then quickly transformed the picture into a mesmerizing array of blue and green lines. Realizing this wasn’t right, he kept jabbing buttons, next commanding the set to auto-program ninety-nine channels of static.

  “It’s the devil’s own work, it is,” Chatham grumbled. He handed the control over to his subordinate. “You wrestle the beastly thing.”

  Ian Dark fixed the picture, then ejected a movie that had been left in the tape player. Chatham frowned when he saw it was a Swedish porn film. Someone had been using the equipment while they were out. Dark tucked it discreetly among a stack of Metropolitan Police training videos.

  “The accident occurred at quarter past eleven in the morning,” Dark said, “but I’ll cue it to start ten minutes before. I did impound all the tapes for that day. The owner of the store keeps seven days of tapes on file. Apparently in the jewelry business it’s easy to overlook one or two small things that might be missing, something the smart thief knows. This fellow inventories once a week and keeps enough tapes on record to cover it.”

  “Hmm, yes,” Chatham mumbled, concentrating on the video.

  The image was black and white, but good quality, and the time and date in one corner made it easy to get to the right spot. People on the street were clearly visible, though not for long. Only those few who stopped to gawk in the store’s windows were captured for more than a few seconds. The tape ran to the time of the accident, which Dark noted, then continued. Roughly ninety seconds after the accident would have occurred, Chatham waved his hand.

  “Stop! There—”

  Dark paused the tape. On the screen were an elderly woman with a shopping bag, who held a vague resemblance to the Queen Mum, and a couple of teenagers wandering aimlessly.

  “Inspector, the lads look harmless, and the little old woman—”

  “No, not the people,” Chatham snapped impatiently. He waved his hand in circles. “Go back, back a few seconds.”

  Dark obliged, rewinding frame by frame until Chatham stopped him.

  “There it is!” Chatham got up and tapped on the glass screen. “This car!”

  Dark studied the vehicle. “I can’t see the driver with that camera angle. The top half of the car is cut off. But one thing’s for sure, it’s a BMW. Do you think it could be the same one we found in Penzance? There’s a lot of those running around London, you know.”

  “Not like this one,” Chatham said. “Look at the license plate.”

  Dark squinted, “I can’t read the numbers, the angle is impossible. But it looks vaguely familiar. There’s something different in the border.”

  “It’s a diplomatic plate,” Chatham said with certainty, “and I’d wager that if it’s not the same car, it’s at least drawn from the same motor pool.”

  Dark strained to make sense of it, “You think the Israelis killed this Meier chap? Maybe the car was from another embassy. The Syrians, or someone like that.”

  “Hmm,” Chatham murmured, lost in a multitude of his own thoughts. “What we have to do is send this down to our technical people. Perhaps they can make something out of that license plate. In any event, I’m more inclined to believe that Yosef Meier’s death was nothing near an accide
nt.”

  “I suspect you’re right,” Dark agreed. “There’s a lot of killing going on here, and possibly more to come. It’s frustrating that the Israelis must know something about it, but aren’t letting on.”

  “Something?” He crossed to the window and stood with his hands on his hips. “They know all of it!” he growled. Chatham strode to the door and yanked his coat off the rack. “I’m going to have a word with Shearer.”

  They arrived in the late afternoon. As a seasonal matter, the beach access road had been blocked off. Slaton got out and dragged a wooden barricade far enough aside for Christine to maneuver their ragged little car through the gap, then shoved it back into place. He didn’t bother to smooth over the tire ruts in the muddy gravel — there were already others, so they were clearly not the first to circumvent the barrier. But on this day, with a chilly breeze and low, heavy clouds that seemed to promise rain, they would likely be alone. A small car park just inside the entrance lay vacant, and likely had been for days. Even during peak season, the beaches along this stretch of the Devon coast were not among the most popular. They were remote, rocky, and the water was nearly a mile from parking at its closest point.

  They drove slowly on a road that seemed to have no end, meandering deeper and deeper into a maze of sandy hills that were covered with outcroppings of coarse, tough vegetation. After ten minutes, Slaton announced his intention to find a place to park that would conceal the small car. There were plenty of hiding spots. Unfortunately, the same loose sand that created a warren of twenty-foot dunes also served to make the valleys impassable to lightweight, two-wheel-drive sedans.

  It took twenty more minutes of weaving before Slaton found a spot he deemed useful. A turnabout was situated between two dunes, and farther back a thick, straw-like stand of grass gave some firmness to the ground. Slaton got out and studied the area. Content, he guided Christine to pull the Ford back behind a large hill and into a stretch of brambles. This time Slaton yanked off a few long strands of grass and used them to sweep clear the car’s tracks. He went back to the main road and stood with his arms crossed, evaluating how well they were concealed.