The Assassin

by Stephen Coonts

  The merchants had been haggling for as long as Mohammed could remember. Mohammed’s father had been good at it, and loud, and hearing his voice rise and fall, ridiculing ridiculous offers and pleading for justice, was among Mohammed’s first memories.

  So what was troubling him?

  He stood in the hallway, just out of sight of people on the street, as he weighed his feeling of unease.

  Abdul-Zahra Mohammed took a deep breath, exhaled and stepped through the door into the crowd. He went to the corner, avoided a bicycle loaded impossibly high with copper pots and strode along by the leather merchants and their customers, who were fingering the merchandise and haggling.

  Something—or someone—was behind him.

  He could feel the danger, the evil.

  Mohammed glanced behind him and saw the cloth on the head of a man at least three inches taller than the people surrounding him. A strange face, a tall man . . .

  Mohammed pushed his way into the crowd, galvanized by a sense of urgency and fear. Yes, he could feel the fear. It surged through him and stimulated him and made him breathe in short, quick gasps.

  He glanced over his shoulder again, and the tall stranger was still there, only a few steps behind. It was an evil face, the face of the Devil, the face of the enemy of God.

  He tried to run, but the crowd was too thick. Too many people! Get out of the way! Let me pass. Don’t you understand, let me through!

  Now he felt panic, a muscle-paralyzing terror that made him lose his balance and stumble and grab at the people around him like a drowning man. He was drowning—drowning in his own fear and terror.

  He sucked in a deep breath to scream and opened his mouth, just as an unbelievably sharp pain shot through his chest. A hand roughly grabbed his upper arm.

  He had been stabbed! The realization came as he felt the knife being jerked from his body with a strong, steady stroke.

  He staggered, felt his legs wobbling, felt dizzy . . . then the knife was rammed into him again. He looked at his chest and saw the shiny steel tip of the knife protruding from his robe. Blood . . . there was blood!

  The pain! He felt the knife being twisted by a savage hand. The pain was beyond description! He couldn’t draw breath to cry out.

  The world turned gray as his blood pressure dropped. Then the light faded and he passed out.

  Abdul-Zahra Mohammed didn’t feel the hand on his arm release him, nor did he feel himself fall to the stones of the street. Nor did he feel his heart stop when his chest filled up with blood.

  The man who had killed Mohammed walked on in the crowd, his brown eyes roving ceaselessly, taking in everything and everyone. He was in no hurry, merely moved with the crowd.

  He did hear the excited exclamations and shouts behind him as the crowd became aware of the body of Abdul-Zahra Mohammed lying in the street. He kept going.

  Five minutes after he knifed Mohammed, Ricky Stroud, former master sergeant, U.S. Army Special Forces, now just plain Mr. Stroud, walked out of the Old Quarter. He hailed a taxi and told the driver in perfect Arabic to take him to the bus terminal.

  Sitting in the taxi, he realized the sleeves of his robe were spotted with blood. A spray of red droplets, hardly noticeable . . . yet the cab-driver was looking, glancing in his rearview mirror.

  He shouldn’t have pulled the knife out for a second thrust. That had been a mistake; he realized that now as he looked at the tiny red stains on the dirty white robe. Ricky Stroud hadn’t been sure of the placement of the first thrust, so he had surrendered to temptation and tried to improve his chances of killing Abdul-Zahra Mohammed. He and his three comrades had worked for two months to set up that fleeting opportunity in the street, and he wasn’t willing to take the chance that Mohammed would survive. So he jerked the knife free and put the second thrust dead center in Mohammed’s back, just to the right of the backbone, between the ribs, and gave the blade a savage twist to cut and tear tissue, speeding the loss of blood.

  “You pays your money and takes your chances,” he said silently to himself, and forgot about it.

  At the bus terminal he paid the cabbie and disappeared into the crowd, went into the station and out a side entrance and kept going. He walked for a mile, hailed another cab, then another, and finally arrived at the safe house where he was staying.

  There was another man there, also former Special Forces. His name was Nate Allen.

  “Get him?”

  “Yep. And I got photos of the two guys who left the tea joint before he did. I think I recognized one of them.” He held out his digital camera.

  “Oh, yeah,” Allen said when he looked at the shots. “I recognize this second dude. He’s a bomb maker.”

  “Got some blood on me,” Ricky Stroud said. He sighed and pulled off the robe.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “Pulled it out and stabbed him again, just to be sure.”

  “Get another robe and let’s clear this joint,” Nate Allen said. He picked up his pistol, checked the safety and rammed it between his belt and his belly.

  “I wasn’t followed. I’m sure.”

  “People saw you. Get a new robe on and let’s get the hell outta Dodge.”

  Both men pulled on robes, made sure their headpieces were properly in place and took a last glance around the room. There were fingerprints, but nothing else. The place was as spotless as careful men could keep it.

  Allen jerked his head toward the door, so Ricky Stroud put his ear against it and listened intently. His eyes went to Allen, who had his hand on the pistol under his robe. He shook his head, then pulled the door open.

  As the door opened, a man in the hallway rammed a knife into Ricky’s belly, doubling him up.

  Nate Allen didn’t hesitate. He jerked the pistol free, grabbed it with both hands and opened up across the doubled-over Ricky Stroud, who was sinking toward the floor. He kept his shots low, waist high, gunning the figure coming through the door and moving the muzzle right and left, firing through the thin wall in a deafening fusillade. The .45 slugs weren’t full-metal-jacket hardball military slugs; they were made of hardened lead so they expanded when they struck flesh. Nate fired the whole magazine, eight shots, as fast as he could pull the trigger.

  He ejected the empty magazine and reached in his pocket for another as a high-pitched, keening wail came from the other side of the wall. Someone was thumping the wall, kicking it, it sounded like.

  He got the second magazine in and was thumbing off the slide release when a shot came through the wall, tugging at his sleeve. Before he could get the gun leveled, Ricky Stroud’s weapon began hammering. Stroud fired four times, spacing his shots along the wall. A cry and a thud followed when he stopped shooting.

  Stroud struggled to rise on one knee, his belly and crotch covered in blood.

  “Get out,” he whispered hoarsely. “I’m finished. Won’t be long. Get!”

  Nate Allen didn’t hesitate. He stepped over Ricky, glanced right and left. There were four men lying in the hallway. He stepped around them. One of them was struggling to rise. Nate shot him in the head.

  As he exited the building he heard a shot behind him. Ricky Stroud had shot himself.

  There were people in the street, all facing the building from which the shots had come. Ignoring them, Nate Allen walked through the crowd and kept going.

  “Abdul-Zahra Mohammed is dead. The killer used a knife and got blood on his sleeves and chest. He was seen. There were two of them. The brothers killed one, and the other escaped after killing all four of the brothers.”

  Abu Qasim’s face was impassive as he heard the news.

  The man who delivered the bad tidings shifted uncomfortably. He started in on Allah and his mercy, but Qasim lifted a hand, stopping the sermon.

  “How did they find Mohammed?”

  “He was dead in the street—”

  “No, fool. How did the infidels find him?”

  “He rarely left the Old Quarter. Everyone knows that.” T
he truth was that with no education, limited life experience and a xenophobic outlook, Abdul-Zahra Mohammed hadn’t felt comfortable outside the tiny circle in which he had been raised. This mind-set was so common in the Arab world that it was unremarkable.

  “More to the point, how did the infidels learn he was in the movement?”

  The messenger had no answer and, wisely, said nothing.

  “So, this man who escaped—where is he now?”

  “Rome. We have him under surveillance.”

  Rome was Nate Allen’s favorite city, the one place on earth he loved above all others. It was modern, stylish, very Italian and literally built on top of ancient Rome, which cropped up in ruins and walls and columns when one least expected it. In Rome one got a sense that one’s life was merely an eye-blink in the cosmic experience, and yet one sensed the Italian urgency to enjoy, to savor, each and every moment. There was a woman, too, a dark-eyed slender woman who loved life and Nate Allen. So Rome was . . . special.

  On pleasant afternoons Nate liked to sit on a patch of grass with other men, most of whom were older, most of whom wore laborers’ clothes, and listen to the Italian language being spoken around him. Some of the men brought wine, and as they smoked they passed the bottle around. Behind them, in the center of this little urban paradise, young men kicked soccer balls around, shouted and laughed and strutted for the girls who paused to eat lunch and watch. It was very pleasant, a world away from North Africa.

  Ricky Stroud had screwed up that hit . . . and paid for it with his life. Damn, that was hard.

  Of course, Ricky knew the odds and the risks and signed on anyway, as Nate had. Sitting in the grass in Rome listening to the laughter and watching the girls and boys, the smells and heat and palpable religious frenzy of the Arabs seemed like something from a nightmare, some horrifying thing that had grown in the corner of your mind yet wasn’t real.

  But it had been real. Ricky Stroud was really dead. Real damn dead. Of course, so was that murderous asshole Abdul-Zahra Mohammed. Blowing up airliners was his chosen quest. He had never actually been on an airliner—had never been more than four miles from the Old Quarter in which he was born—but the idea of destroying two to three hundred infidels in one stupendous, spectacular, fiery blast appealed to his sense of righteousness. The nonbelievers lived so well, flaunted their sin at the sons of Islam, tempted them with sins of the flesh and spirit—they deserved to die in a horrible, public way. Mohammed knew God wanted it that way, so he did everything in his power to recruit the people and provide the money to make it happen.

  Well, he used to. Now he was just plain dead.

  Nate Allen took a deep breath of Rome and tried to forget Abdul-Zahra Mohammed and Ricky Stroud, who had given his life to rid the world of a great evil. A man has to make a stand somewhere. Nate had learned that in the U.S. Army as a very young man, and it was the guiding star in his life.

  He glanced at his watch. Sophia would be home from work now and cooking dinner. Lord, could that woman cook!

  Nate eased himself erect and picked up the sports coat and the backpack that contained his pistol. He draped the backpack over his shoulder and the coat over his arm.

  With a last look around the square, he set off for Sophia’s flat. On the way he bought a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread. They didn’t need either one, but it was a private joke.

  Humming, he climbed the outside stairs to her apartment, the entrance to which was on the roof of an old building that stood on the side of a hill. This flat had been the building superintendent’s home on the roof here by the water tank until developers condo-ized it.

  He paused at the door, the old instinct of caution very much with him. No one in sight was paying any attention to him. He opened the door. Halfway through the opening something slammed him in the head and he felt himself falling. Hitting the floor, trying to move.

  A kick in the head, stunning him.

  The backpack was ripped from him. Rough hands hauled him erect. His legs didn’t work very well and he almost fell.

  As his vision cleared Nate Allen saw her, her mouth taped shut, fear in her eyes, her dress ripped half off. Sophia! Blood covered her torso. The men who held her had knives and had been cutting on her breasts.

  There were four of them—two beside her and two beside him.

  “Nathaniel Allen,” the man beside Sophia said. He was middle-aged, of medium height, clean-shaven, with short dark hair. In his hand was a pistol, an automatic with a silencer on the barrel. The muzzle was pointed at him. “You need to answer some questions for us,” he said in English. The accent was so faint it was barely there.

  Allen said nothing. The horror of the moment had him in its grasp. He could see the fear and terror in Sophia’s eyes, and the guilt hit him like a hammer. He had brought these animals here, to harm her.

  The pistol moved a hair, and he saw the muzzle flash as something rammed him in the stomach. A bullet! The shock doubled him over.

  The man smiled. “We have many questions. You can answer them truthfully and completely, or we will butcher this woman before your eyes. When she is dead, we will butcher you.” He leaned forward. “You are both going to die. Do you understand? You can die slowly, horribly, or you can answer my questions and have a clean, quick death. Those are your choices.”

  Nate Allen felt the pain as the shock to his abdomen wore off. He found he couldn’t stand. As he sank to his knees, he whispered, “Who are you?”

  “I am known by several names. You don’t need to hear them. God knows who I am, and that is enough. Now tell me, who hired you to assassinate holy warriors?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The man on the left side of Sophia slid a knife into her breast. She writhed, thrashed; the veins and tendons in her neck stood out like cords as she tried to scream against the tape.

  “Perhaps, perhaps not. We will explore that. Let me ask another question. Who is your contact, the man who gives you your target and pays you?”

  There was no hope—none! All they could hope for was a quick end. “He is a Russian,” Nate Allen said as he stared at Sophia, writhing with the knife in her.

  “You’re lying. You work for the CIA.”

  The man on the couch shoved his knife slowly into Sophia, who groaned against the tape.

  “No,” Nate Allen hissed.

  “Who, then?”

  “Jake Grafton.”

  When he heard the name, Abu Qasim knew he was hearing the truth. Yet he wanted more, a lot more.

  The torture and questions went on until Sophia passed out from loss of blood. Her blood was all over her, the floor and the man beside her, who was obviously enjoying torturing her. When she fainted, Nate Allen spit in Qasim’s face.

  The man wiped the spittle from his face and, with a glance at Sophia, nodded. The knifeman pointed a silenced pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. Her head slammed back. The knifeman let her corpse fall to the floor.

  His interrogator put the muzzle of the silencer on his pistol against Nate Allen’s forehead. “Tell the Devil that Abu Qasim sent you,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

  A week later Abu Qasim attended a meeting in Karachi. Eight men were there. After they prayed, the man on Qasim’s right, an Egyptian, said, “Abdul-Zahra Mohammed was the fourth brother of the inner circle to die in the last six months.”

  “The CIA is sending these killers,” another man said. “Two of them are Russians, I am told, and one is thought to be a German. Some are Americans. They have killed four of us and we have now killed two of them.” He didn’t bother to mention the four holy warriors that Nate Allen and Ricky Stroud had gunned down in the space of seven seconds. After all, the sons of Islam were on their way to Paradise, and there were plenty more believers to take their place. Every devout brother wanted to go forth to meet the Prophet with the blood of infidels on his hands.

  “The American CIA is getting information from the banks and shipping companies that our brothers dealt with,�
�� Abu Qasim said. “The owners and officers who control these companies are cooperating with the American CIA. The CIA spies discreetly investigate, look for patterns and report to an officer of the CIA named Jake Grafton. He recruited these killers, names their victims and pays them. When I learned of this, I thought that if we took precautions, were careful, avoiding these companies as much as possible, Jake Grafton would have little success. I was wrong. He is a clever man and his men are competent.”

  The others nodded. Allah’s enemies had the help of the Devil, so of course they were clever, which made the glory of defeating them so much greater.

  “The infidels who run these companies fancy themselves the new Crusaders,” Qasim continued, “and like the Crusaders of old will be utterly consumed by the fury of Allah.”

  “Who are they?” one of his listeners demanded.

  Abu Qasim gave him a name. “There are others,” he said, “but that name I know.” Actually he knew all the names—he had gotten them from Jean Petrou—but he didn’t want these men knowing and discussing those names. Even the walls have ears.

  “Inshallah,” several said forcefully. God willing.

  “Stated simply,” Abu Qasim continued, “the problem is to kill them before they kill us. And, of course, to do it in such a way that the power of Allah is on full display to the nonbelievers.”

  “Allah akbar,” his listeners muttered. Yes, indeed, God is great!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JANUARY

  Her name was Kerry Pocock, she was as English as tea and toast, she had a gorgeous head of long, curly, dark brown hair, a good figure and a smile to die for, and she was an MI-5—British counterintelligence—op. Oh, yes, she was married to a guy who ran a pub and had two kids. She hadn’t shown me their photos yet, for which I was grateful. Tonight she was wearing a lovely dress and a simple necklace of real pearls.

  We were sitting in a really nice restaurant in Mayfair, the hip and trendy section of London. The place had white tablecloths, real silverware, bustling uniformed waiters and soft light. Since we were in the British Isles, I ordered a single-malt Scotch whiskey. She ordered a bottle of French wine.