The Assassin

by Andrew Britton

  And then it all came back: the rage, the frustration, the desire to simplify what had become too confusing. Vanderveen could recognize his sudden changes in mood, but he could not control them, just as he could not control the circumstances that had shaped his youth. He was on her in an instant, his left hand like a vise around her throat. He pinned her to the wall, grabbing her right hand with his, and crossing it over her body to control both arms. He was surprised when she refused to struggle. Even as a minute passed and her face turned scarlet from lack of air, she refused to lash out with her feet, to cry out with the last of her breath.

  “You stupid bitch.” He hissed the words, his face not more than an inch from hers. The fact that she wouldn’t fight only enraged him more. “You should have stayed in the room. You brought this on yourself. Why did you follow me? What were you trying to prove?”

  She didn’t try to reply, not that she could have. Instead, as he tightened his grip, trying to squeeze the last breath from her lungs, she rolled her head back against the wall. At the same time, her eyes closed and her lips parted in an unmistakably sensual way. Surprised and confused, he began to open his hand. Using all the movement left to her, she slid her left hand over his right and squeezed softly.

  He could not help what happened next: his grip continued to falter, and she was allowed a deep, shuddering breath, her throat expanding beneath his hand. He took an uncertain step back, ready to strike again, but instead of collapsing or stumbling away, she leaned over for several seconds, gasping for air.

  Then she straightened and stepped into his arms, her mouth fastening over his.

  He was too stunned to react right away; her fingers were fast in his hair, then sliding down the taut muscles of his back. His first thought was to pry them loose, but she seemed to sense his thoughts; before he could stop her, she had moved her mouth to his ear. She whispered a few breathless words of encouragement, urging him on. At the same time, she pulled off his shirt in one fast movement and pressed her body to his, her full breasts lifting and falling against his bare chest.

  He did not have time to consider this strange turn of events. She began pulling him back toward the bed, her movements soft but insistent. In that moment, he knew, with abrupt and complete certainty, that he would never get the truth from her. He would never know what had produced her, what pushed her forward; her mind and her past were equally inaccessible. But as trying as that knowledge was, for the moment, it didn’t matter at all.

  Her hands slipped behind her back, and her bra fell to the floor. Vanderveen pressed her down to the covers and lowered his head to her bare skin.

  When he woke, it seemed as though hours had passed, but a quick glance at the bedside clock told him he’d been asleep for less than an hour. He lay back for several minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. Then he sat up quietly and looked around the room. Raseen was sitting next to the window, a threadbare blanket wrapped round her bare shoulders. She’d pulled the curtains back; as a car passed in the street below, the headlights flickered over her strong features, momentarily brightening her dark brown eyes. Sensing his attention, she half-turned to smile in his direction.

  “You’re awake.”

  Vanderveen sat up and leaned against the headboard, running a hand over his eyes. “Yes.”

  She stood and walked back to the bed. She curled up next to him and rested her head on his shoulder, still wrapped in the blanket, as though guarding her virtue. He wrapped his left arm around her and pulled her close.

  “Can’t you sleep?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Strange, but the single word was answer enough. They sat in silence for minutes on end. He wondered if she ever experienced remorse for her actions, but he could not ask the question. Nor would he have trusted her answer. Finally, she pressed her lips to his ear and said, “I saw you on the phone, you know. Who were you talking to?”

  He hesitated, and she locked on to it immediately. “We’re in this together, Will. You must learn to trust me if we are to succeed.”

  Trust. It was a hell of a thing to expect, considering what she had just done. Still, she had a point. He had asked her to join him, not the other way round. If he couldn’t trust her, she had already outlived her usefulness. And yet, for all of her skills, she was beyond his experience and, therefore, beyond his control. It was the one fact he could not set aside. He thought about it for a few minutes more, weighing the options. She remained silent, awaiting his decision. Finally, he began to talk softly.

  He told her everything. He started with that day on the Syrian coast, all the way through to his work for Iran and al-Qaeda. He told her about the failed assassination of the U.S. president one year prior. Finally, he told her about Kealey and the threat that the man now posed.

  “I brought it on myself,” he said when he was finished. “I killed five of his soldiers, five men he was responsible for. Five of his friends. Then, seven years later, I killed his woman right in front of him. He has every reason to want me dead.”

  She shifted against him, trying to find a more comfortable position. “Perhaps so, but that’s in the past and can’t be helped. The question is, what will you do now?”

  Vanderveen smiled into the dark. “He’s close to Rühmann. Once he tracks him down, Kealey will come to Europe himself; he won’t trust anyone else with something of this importance.”

  “And we’ll be waiting,” Raseen said.

  “Yes,” Vanderveen replied. “We’ll be waiting.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “We meet the man our employers have sent. He arrives in London tomorrow afternoon.”

  CHAPTER 29

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The streets of Washington, D.C., were not as empty as Naomi would have expected at 4:00 AM. They had passed a number of vehicles en route to the Palisades, a wealthy residential area that stood out in the city, even amidst the redbrick opulence of Georgetown. Their route had taken them past the closed roads surrounding the White House, through Foggy Bottom and the river mist hanging over the Potomac. Shortly after they entered Arlington County, the lights of the States Naval Observatory appeared in the distance, glistening eerily in the damp morning air.

  Naomi took M Street off Pennsylvania, then swung a right onto Wisconsin Avenue, the wheel shimmying slightly beneath her fingers. The car was dark blue, a late-model Taurus with tinted windows, new tires, and Virginia plates. The vehicle looked modest enough, right down to the surface rust, but things were not as they seemed. A standard check through the DMV would lead the police to a crumbling brownstone in downtown Richmond, and the engine compartment contained a block that was far more powerful than the standard 3.0 liter V6.

  The car, which had been discreetly pulled from the Agency’s motor pool, was Harper’s final — and most dangerous — contribution to their unauthorized task. With enough work, Kharmai felt sure that the paper pushers at Langley could trace the car back to the DDO, but she was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. With any luck, they’d have it back in the pool before the workday began. She lowered the window slightly and checked the clock in the dashboard, wondering how long they had before sunrise. She was guessing it was at least three hours, which was more than enough time, assuming everything went according to plan. And that, she thought wryly, was a very large assumption.

  Kealey had been checking his equipment and murmuring directions since they’d left the hotel. She didn’t need his help, but she was too keyed up, too involved in her own thoughts, to point this out. Her nervousness was a source of lingering irritation, and it didn’t make sense; she’d felt fine when they were poring over the embassy blueprints. Of course, that had been in the safety of a warm, brightly lit hotel room. Now reality was starting to sink in, and for the first time, she realized how much she was actually risking. If anything went wrong, her career at the Agency would almost certainly be over. The thought made her stomach contract into a tight, queasy ball, but she shook her head unconsciously and stee
led herself. She’d made her decision, knew it was right, and she’d stand by her choice, regardless of the consequences.

  Kealey looked up from what he was doing to issue instructions, but she beat him to it, swinging a sharp left onto Reservoir Road. The Taurus coasted along for a few minutes more, gliding into the suburb of Senate Heights. Naomi pulled off to the side of the road and doused the headlights. The car was completely dark inside; Kealey had already removed the interior bulb.

  He opened the door as soon as the vehicle stopped, swinging his legs out to the pavement. At the same time, he hooked the earpiece into its proper position. They’d tested the radios at the hotel earlier. Naomi had driven the Taurus east on Pennsylvania, transmitting periodically back to Kealey’s room on the fifth floor. The Motorola XTS 2500 operated in the same high-frequency range as television and FM radio broadcasts; as a result, she grew tired of driving around the city long before noticing a meaningful drop in the audio quality. She had programmed the radios herself and felt sure they would perform as expected.

  Kealey turned back to her as she was slipping her earpiece into position. She met his unflinching gaze and resisted the urge to look away.

  “Naomi, this is your last chance. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She was annoyed that he felt it necessary to question her commitment again, but she pushed it down. “I’m sure. Just…”

  “What?”

  “Just be careful, okay?”

  He nodded once and clambered out to the pavement, closing the door softly behind him. She watched through the passenger-side window as he walked down the darkened street at a brisk pace, his hands jammed into his pockets. She followed him with anxious eyes until the night closed in behind him. Then she started the engine and drove on.

  The German chancery, the brainchild of famed architect Egon Eiermann, had clearly been designed with diplomacy in mind. Located far from the tumultuous rhythm of downtown Washington, the building was a true aesthetic achievement, a six-story amalgamation of glass, delicate wooden sunshades, and tubular steel support beams. The grounds, which encompassed 9 acres of prime real estate, were as unobtrusive as the building itself, marked only by the occasional poplar or oak. It was this very lack of vegetation that was troubling Kealey as he turned right on Foxhall Road and followed it north, adjacent to the chancery grounds. Garden lights were strewn about the grass, but from where he was standing, the narrow building was nothing more than a dark haze against the blue-black sky. To reach his objective, he would be forced to cross a great deal of open ground.

  Kealey turned away from the fence, adjusted the straps of his backpack, and continued walking. A small SUV swept past on the indistinct road, followed by a D.C. Metro police car. At the sight of the cruiser, Kealey made an effort not to visibly react. The vehicle slowed but continued on. Once it faded from view, he breathed an audible sigh of relief. On foot he was vulnerable. His dark clothes and pack, combined with the early hour, made him stand out in this affluent neighborhood, where the heavy police presence was designed to intimidate people just like him, or at least what he appeared to be: a transient of dubious means. He was extremely fortunate the officer had not stopped to investigate further, but given what was at stake, he couldn’t count on that kind of luck; he had to get off the street as soon as possible.

  The black-iron fence was waist high and did not present much of a challenge. He scaled it quickly and began making his way through the grounds. He had crossed several hundred feet when his earpiece came to life, and Naomi’s voice sounded clear. “Ryan, I’m in position. Where are you?”

  He keyed his mic and said, “I’m in the grounds, approaching from the northeast.”

  “How far are you from the building?”

  “About two hundred fifty meters.”

  “Okay. Hold on a second.”

  From the front seat of the Taurus, Naomi found the appropriate document and spread it across her lap, trying to pinpoint his location. The satellite photographs that supplemented the ORACLE file were shot with half-meter resolution, which made it easy to determine distance and spot specific landmarks. She had parked the car beneath a streetlamp on Hoban Road, directly opposite the embassy grounds, but the light was weak — weak enough to make her task more difficult than it should have been. Squinting into the semidark, she finally managed to pick out his approximate location on the creased paper.

  “Ryan, you should see a group of trees to the west, about thirty meters from your position.”

  A brief pause, then, “I see them.”

  “Stay on your side of those trees, and follow them southwest. They give way to a hedge that will lead you right up to the building.” She grabbed for another sheet of paper and scanned it quickly. “The cameras are beneath the first balcony, above the door. The second balcony extends from the edge of the building to the spot right over the cameras, so that’s your point of access, the northwestern corner.”

  “Got it.”

  “Remember, the cameras can pick you up from fifty meters out, so make sure you stay below the hedgeline.”

  “Right. I’ll get back to you when I’m in position.”

  She nodded to herself and took her thumb off the PTT (PRESS TO TALK) switch, then began leafing through the hefty manila file, searching for the diagram of the chancery’s ground-floor interior layout. All of it, except for the satellite photographs, had been supplied by the source recruited through ORACLE. The source — a senior assistant to the third secretary, responsible for administration — had been promoted and moved to the embassy in France nearly two months earlier. Unfortunately, he had been killed in a car accident less than a week after arriving in-country, a fact that Naomi had confirmed just five hours earlier. If he had still been in place, he would have had complete access to the information they were after. The second option, of course, was to cultivate a new agent within the embassy, but convincing foreign diplomats to switch sides was a sensitive business, and not something that could be accomplished in the space of twenty-four hours.

  Not for the first time, Naomi’s eyes flickered up to the rearview mirror. She was parked in a residential neighborhood and knew that she would look extremely suspicious to anyone who happened to glance out their windows. It couldn’t be helped, though, and they needed less than an hour, perhaps as little as forty minutes. All she could do was hope that their luck would hold.

  Come on, Ryan, she thought, anxiously fingering the radio hooked to her belt. Hurry.

  After scaling the fence, Kealey had paused to pull down his black balaclava. Now, leaning against the exterior wall, just out of sight of the cameras, he looked down at his dark clothes. They were soaked through from the morning dew, which covered every square inch of the manicured lawn. He had crawled the last 70 meters to reach the building, and as he shrugged off the backpack, he tried to shake off the exhaustion that threatened to overtake him. He had not slept in nearly twenty-four hours, and while he had carried out dozens of missions under similar duress during his military career, he knew that what he was about to do would require all of his strength, both mental and physical. He could not afford to lose focus for even a second.

  The Radionics V1160N cameras were just around the corner, mounted 8 feet over the concrete walkway. From there, they were wired to a multiplexer in the control room, which split the monitor into four screens, representing these cameras and two others. The multiplexer, in turn, was routed to a Bosch VMD01, and from there to the tower. Despite its modest appearance, the VMD01 represented the cutting edge of motion-sensing technology. It was capable of adjusting automatically to changing environmental conditions, as well as correcting for camera vibration, thereby reducing false alarms. From head-on, the system was almost impossible to beat.

  Kealey thought back to the file that he’d studied for hours on end. Naomi had been the one to point out the obvious problems. For one thing, the cameras were too high to reach without a ladder of some type, which was clearly impractical, considering the distanc
e from the fence to the building. If he was compromised or otherwise forced to leave in a hurry, he could not be slowed by unnecessary weight. Besides, the local insomniacs would be quick to pick out a person carrying a ladder around the neighborhood at 4:00 a.m.

  With decreasing enthusiasm, she had also pointed out that the cameras had overlapping detection envelopes. Due to the VMD01 they could not only detect, but analyze motion in an arc of 180 degrees, which encompassed the only possible angles of horizontal approach.

  And that, Kealey had realized, was the key word: horizontal. The cameras could not be defeated from ground level; to take them out of the equation, he’d have to go in from above.

  Placing the pack on the ground, he opened the main compartment and pulled out the first of two ½-inch climbing ropes. It took several attempts, but he managed to sling the free end over the railing of the second balcony. Then he played out the rope until he had both ends back in his hands, after which he tied a hitch knot with an adjustable grip, something he recalled from his days at the Air Assault School in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. By pulling on the base line, he was able to work the knot up to the railing. He took a moment to listen to the environment. There was the distant sound of a siren, but it seemed to be moving away. Otherwise, there was nothing.