The Assassin

by Andrew Britton

  “Good. So we’ll get them both.”

  “He’s due to arrive in an hour. Our helicopter’s waiting outside the base.”

  Kealey frowned. “They have a perimeter?”

  “Yeah, of course. They’re not going to land a chopper in an unsecured area. At least not this close to the city.”

  Kealey nodded and tossed back the last of his lemonade, crumpling the cup in his right fist. Then he dropped it on the ground, grabbed the AK-47 off the wall, and stood up. “Where’s the truck?”

  “Out front.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Forty-five minutes later, a black Ford Escort whined steadily down a narrow, two-lane road running across the Iraqi-Syrian border two miles south of the Euphrates. The vehicle was occupied by three people, a driver from the Military Security Department in Damascus and two older passengers, both of whom sat in the cramped backseat. The mood within the car was tense; just sixteen hours earlier, the two senior occupants had been summoned to the presidential palace in Lattakia, where they had met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. What he had told them was partially true: their role in the recent escalation of violence in Iraq — as well as the attempted bombing of the Renaissance Hotel in New York City — had been uncovered by U.S. intelligence. On top of that, the CIA was aware of their current location.

  The news would have been difficult to take on its own, but to make matters worse, it had been accompanied by an ultimatum. Both men were given twenty-four hours to get their affairs in order and leave the country. They were given the use of a private jet, provided their final destination was within Syrian air space and close to the border. Al-Assad had made it abundantly clear that he had never approved of the actions they’d undertaken, and for good reason; if the Americans had decided to strike before considering all the variables, his government would have paid the price. The meeting had ended on this sour note. As they were wordlessly guided out of the office, neither man thought to protest their swift expulsion from the safe haven of Syria. Both were silently surprised to be given the chance to leave at all.

  Neither could have known that the car waiting for them at the al-Maze military airport was fitted with a GPS transmitter sending an intermittent signal to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. From the moment the driver had started the engine, the young technician at al-Maze tasked with monitoring the Escort’s position had begun relaying its coordinates by cell phone to a communications sergeant with the 5th Special Forces Group, the updates arriving in tenminute intervals. It wasn’t long before this unlikely partnership was able to pinpoint the Escort’s likely first destination, a border crossing 2 miles south of the Euphrates.

  Fortunately, the crossing was not on a major road, which would have complicated things. The border checkpoint consisted of nothing more than a sandstone arch over the road, a few date palms, and the rusted hulk of a T-72 tank dating back to the first Gulf War. There was also a small machine-gun emplacement, situated next to a prefabricated building supplied by the DOD. A few discreet calls from U.S. Central Command to select members of the National Assembly ensured that the Iraqi soldiers assigned to this particular sector were ready to move out on a moment’s notice so that others might take their place. The outgoing unit received no information on the incoming unit, nor did they receive an explanation for the unexpected change in standing orders. The captain in charge of the displaced unit originally thought to inquire further, then decided against it. If the U.S. military didn’t want him or his men in the area, then so be it.

  The car approached the checkpoint slowly, the driver downshifting as the Escort rolled the last 20 feet, leaving the pavement for a temporary stretch of irregular, hard-packed dirt. The entire vehicle was coated in fine dust from the 40-mile run from al-Mayadin. Seven Iraqi soldiers with AK-47s stood in various positions around the checkpoint: two on the machine gun behind the sandbags, two more in the prefab building. Another talked loudly into his cell phone, and one provided cover for the seventh soldier, the arif tasked with identifying the vehicle’s occupants. The driver slowed to a halt, applied the parking brake, and kept his hands on the wheel, obeying the soldier’s familiar visual commands. At the same time, the man on the cell phone — an Iraqi army naqib, according to the rank on his Kevlar — snapped it shut and turned, screaming in Arabic down at the soldiers on the machine gun. Both men scrambled to correct something that the Escort’s senior passenger couldn’t quite see, but then the captain slapped both of their helmets and shouted again, obviously dissatisfied with their efforts to correct the unknown problem.

  The older passenger handed over his passport absently, craning to see through the windshield as the staff sergeant examined the worn booklet through his open window. The sixty-three-year old Iraqi wasn’t concerned in the least. The carefully forged document identified him as Khalid Abbas al-Bayad, a resident of Fallujah, and it had passed inspection before. But while he was distracted by the scene in front of the Escort, he didn’t notice that the soldier next to his door had pulled a Beretta 9mm from his leg holster and was holding the weapon below the line of the window. Then the soldier murmured something in Arabic that caught Izzat al-Douri completely off-guard. To his credit, he assessed the situation with amazing speed, given his advanced age. His eyes opened wide, and he opened his mouth to shout a warning, but by then, he already knew he had made a fatal miscalculation.

  When Ryan Kealey saw that the passengers in the backseat were distracted, he said the older man’s name. Even if the former vice president of Iraq had not been instantly recognizable, his reaction would have made his identity clear. As he started to shout a warning, Kealey took a single step back, raised the Beretta, and fired twice into Izzat al-Douri’s face. Tahir al-Tikriti cursed viciously as the back of the older man’s head exploded 2 feet to his left, showering his own face and the front of his suit with blood and brain tissue. Al-Tikriti was younger than his traveling companion, and he was fast; he already had his weapon halfway drawn when Kealey swung the Beretta toward him and fired twice more, the bullets entering the former IIS director’s chest less than an inch apart.

  Tahir al-Tikriti inhaled deeply, his lungs filling with air and blood. He looked up at his killer, taking in the young American face, wondering what was behind those dark gray eyes as the gun came up for the last time.

  The muzzle produced a searing, brilliant light.

  And then there was only darkness.

  CHAPTER 60

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  It was just before 6:30 AM, still dark, a light snow drifting over the city as a white Ford Ranger rumbled to a halt on Q Street, just northeast of Dupont Circle. The driver, having just stolen the truck ten minutes earlier in Georgetown, blew on her hands to warm them up, scowling at the heater in the process. It seemed to be taking forever to warm up, but with any luck, she wouldn’t need the vehicle much longer. Yasmin Raseen still had one good set of documents, including a well-worn Italian passport and a credit card issued by a bank in London. She’d already used the card to purchase a ticket to London, and she’d need the passport to board United Flight 920, departing for Heathrow later that afternoon. She was about to leave the United States for the first — and hopefully last — time in her life.

  She shivered slightly behind the wheel, even though she was wearing a down jacket over a white woolen sweater. Her hands were pushed under both layers, resting against the bare skin of her stomach to keep them warm. Not for the first time, she wondered what would possess a man to wake each morning at this ungodly hour to run the frigid streets of Washington, D.C. Had she been a religious woman, she would have been used to rising even earlier in order to say the Fajr prayer at dawn. Although she didn’t adhere to the faith, rising early for religious purposes seemed like a reasonable sacrifice. Prayer had meaning, after all, and could be conducted indoors, unlike running in this freezing air, which struck her as a strange choice of exercise. She could make no sense of the desire to invite a mugging or, barring that, a bronchial infectio
n before the sun came up in the east.

  It had taken her longer than she’d expected to track down the exact address on General’s Row, largely because the street did not offer a great deal of cover. Wary of inviting unwanted attention, she’d been forced to limit herself to a few hours of surveillance each day, moving along the length of the street. She was also forced to work on foot, as she was without a vehicle and couldn’t risk stealing one until it was time to act. After weeks of diligent study, she had finally narrowed it down to one probable address. Her suspicions were proved correct when the same black Suburban with government plates came to collect the deputy DCI four mornings in a row, depositing him at different times each evening.

  From there, she began looking for weak points in Jonathan Harper’s security. It soon became clear that the man was most vulnerable on his morning runs, which she had yet to see him miss. Not only would he be least aware at that time of day, having only been up for a short while, but the empty streets also provided a better chance for escape when her work was done. After finalizing her plan, she had booked the flight out of Dulles. Now all that remained was to carry out the act itself.

  As she watched through the windshield, the door to the brownstone was pulled open, and a man came down the icy steps, dressed in tracksuit bottoms, running shoes, and a Boston College sweatshirt. He was also wearing thin gloves and a woolen watch cap. Harper seemed to look up for a moment, as though appraising the dark, empty sky. Then he began to conduct a series of slow stretching exercises, his breath steaming in the cold air, his body casting irregular shadows under the sidewalk lamps.

  After a time he set off, walking north on 17th Street. From her position, she had a visual on her target for a long time. He broke into a run somewhere north of S Street, but then turned a moment later, fading from sight. Raseen wasn’t concerned at all. She knew that he’d retrace his route exactly. She’d seen him do it on each of the past four mornings, albeit from a much greater distance. She no longer needed the binoculars, for when he returned in forty minutes or so, she’d be ready to greet him in person.

  She found her right hand reaching out to touch the butt of her gun. Amir Nazeri had provided her with the Beretta .22 shortly before his death in New York. The plastic grip was cold to the touch, but she took comfort from it nonetheless. The weapon was resting on the passenger seat, covered by the previous day’s copy of the Washington Post. The newspaper had been in the truck when she’d popped the lock. Her first act had been to flip the paper over, as the lurid headlines were hard for her to take. Izzat al-Douri had been shot to death at a border crossing in Al Anbar Province two days earlier, along with his chief advisor, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

  Yasmin Raseen had known both men for many years, al-Douri since she was just a girl. While she had yet to shed any tears over their deaths, she couldn’t help but feel a distinct, but strangely indirect sense of loss. Since they’d been part of her father’s life, they were part of hers, and with their passing, she felt a little more alone in the world. And there was something else to consider: al-Douri had been her primary benefactor since her father’s capture near Tikrit, along with the last of the money he’d managed to personally carry out of the Central Bank before the fall of Baghdad. With al-Douri’s passing, she was left with very limited means. There was no doubt in her mind that the Americans were responsible for the assassination of both men, even though al-Douri had yet to be publicly linked to the recent events in Baghdad, Paris, and New York.

  As she waited for Jonathan Harper to return, her thoughts began to drift. Before long, they turned to Will Vanderveen, which didn’t surprise her at all. Over the past several weeks, he had occupied most of her waking thoughts, as well as her dreams. One memory in particular stood out in her mind: the night at the Hotel Victoria in Calais. What a strange incident that had been. His violence had sparked something in her she’d long sought to keep down, but setting it free had done so much for her, both emotionally and physically. He was one of the most fascinating men she’d ever known, completely cold, without compunction, and yet she had also glimpsed an underlying compassion during the few intimate moments they’d shared. It was still hard to believe he was gone, and although he had died before achieving his goal, he had achieved something else that he never had the chance to know about. Something much greater than what he’d aspired to.

  Her hands, warm beneath her layers of clothing, drifted over the smooth skin of her stomach. She smiled to herself, thinking about the life that would soon spring from her body. At thirty-eight years of age, she had long since come to the conclusion that motherhood wasn’t meant for her, that she would have to find some other way to fill her barren inner landscape. And yet, now it seemed she had been given the chance she had always longed for.

  She would not have to decide for many years, but she wondered what she would say to her child when he asked about his father. Would she tell him the truth? Or would she invent some acceptable version of events? Somehow, she didn’t think she could stretch her imagination that far. After all, there was nothing acceptable about the things she had done. While her actions had never concerned her before, she couldn’t help but wonder — in light of her recent discovery — whether it was time to put it all behind her.

  It was something she’d have to consider, but for now, there was work to be done, revenge to be had. As she stared through the light dusting of snow on the windshield, a distant figure emerged from the predawn gloom, his feet pounding a steady rhythm on the pavement, his shoulders bouncing beneath ethereal light. He was obscured by a sudden gust of loose white powder, but then he reappeared, right on schedule, drawing ever closer.

  Without shifting her gaze from the man jogging south on 17th Street, Nouri Hussein reached for her gun and pushed it under the folds of her coat. Then she opened the door and stepped onto the icy pavement.

  The runner approached, unaware, and the snow came down in a great white cloud, obscuring the rising dawn.

  Ryan Kealey series

  The American (2006) (aka Heart of Betrayal)

  The Assassin (2007)

  The Invisible (2008)

  Table of Contents

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  Table of Contents

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