The Assassin

by Stephen Coonts

  Of course it never happened.

  And never would. She knew that now. She didn’t know who her mother was and never would know.

  Her mother was probably dead. In fact, one suspected she killed herself when she realized what a monster she had married.

  Remembering those days when she was a child, thinking these thoughts, Marisa rode silently through the streets and suburbs of Paris with Isolde Petrou, who was also lost in her own thoughts.

  Henri Stehle lived in a walk-up flat in Montmartre. It was four in the morning when he rounded the corner and stood looking at the door to his building. There were no policemen in sight.

  Dare he risk it? His clothes and money were in his apartment.

  That fool American waiter! Chasing him. Of course he would tell the police that Stehle ran, and the police would want to know why.

  Running was so stupid. He had panicked.

  Fortunately he had seen his friend Alain sitting there at the curb in his car, waiting for him.

  They had had such a good thing going, selling cocaine to rich tourists.

  Standing in the dark doorway, Stehle tried to light a cigarette as he thought about the police and the money. He had drunk half a bottle of wine in the past hour, yet still his hands shook. He had to light three matches before he got his cigarette burning satisfactorily.

  He wanted the money in the apartment. It was his! He had earned every sou. But what if the police came while he was upstairs? He waited . . . watching and smoking—and shivering. He had left his coat at the hotel. What a fool he was!

  Henri Stehle went over the events of the evening one more time, running through every scene in his mind’s eye. That crazy American!

  Mon Dieu, who would have thought something like that might happen? It had been so unexpected, he had reacted without thinking.

  Shooting at the American had been foolish. Silencing him was futile—he really knew nothing—but the crazy American had chased him, ruining everything. It was so frustrating!

  Even now, the thought of that athletic man behind him, running to catch him, elevated Stehle’s heart rate. He looked up and down the street again.

  Think about the money! Forget the American and the police and all of that. Think about the money and the future and all the photographs you are going to take.

  He puffed nervously on his cigarette. Well, the truth was that every minute he waited made it more likely the police would catch him upstairs. The sooner the better.

  He screwed up his courage, tossed away his weed and walked to the entrance of the building, trying to walk normally. Through the door, up the stairs.

  In front of his door he paused. Listened. Not a sound from within.

  He used his key and pushed the door open. Closed it behind him. As he reached for the light he saw the man sitting in the chair. Startled, he stood motionless. In the weak light coming through the window from the streetlights he couldn’t see the man’s face.

  “Who—?”

  His words stopped coming when he saw the pistol. Saw the silencer. In the intermittent light from the streetlights and store signs, he saw the deadly little hole in the snout of the silencer.

  He stared, frozen, as the man extended the pistol, pointed it right at him, then, mercifully, everything went black.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I was uncomfortably ensconced in a jail cell at the Préfecture de police when the door to the cell block opened and George Goldberg, the CIA station chief for Paris, came in. He was a big guy, rumpled and overweight, a former All-American tackle who was three times brighter than the average football player. He wasn’t smiling.

  “When they said they had Carmellini, I didn’t believe it. But here you are.”

  Obviously, we had met before. Like last year, when al-Qaeda tried to assassinate the heads of government of the G-8 nations at Versailles.

  “You look a little worse for wear,” he said as he examined the bleeding goose egg on my forehead and the welt across my cheekbone. It was also cut a little. I figured the front sight of the officer’s automatic did the damage.

  “It isn’t the years, it’s the mileage,” I muttered.

  Goldberg spoke to the uniformed policeman with him, and the cop unlocked my cell door. He took off my cuffs as Goldberg plodded away. I followed George out of the lockup.

  The cop went off somewhere, and George led me to a desk, where I had to sign some forms for two glowering cops. I didn’t read the forms, merely signed everything they pushed at me. They gave me back my belt, bow tie, shoelaces and the contents of my pockets. I counted the money in my wallet.

  “Get out of here,” one of them growled in French, nodding to his left, toward the door that led to the street.

  Dawn was breaking on a miserable winter day when we came out of the prefecture’s courtyard. Goldberg had a car and driver waiting. He had some stroke with someone.

  When we were in the back of the car and it was rolling, he said, “Jean Petrou died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. They couldn’t revive him. And Henri Stehle, the head of food service at the hotel, can’t be found.”

  “I sorta had that impression. The police learned everything I knew in fifteen minutes, then we spent three hours going over it again and again. I refused to tell them why I was working in the hotel, and that seemed to irritate them.”

  “They’re very unhappy with you.”

  “Anyone else take a fast hike?”

  “Three of the staff seem to be missing. No one is sure just when they left. The police were hoping you would confess to the murder. They know that you were Johnny-on-the-spot when he had his first attack.”

  I shrugged.

  “You want some food?”

  “Yeah. And a bath and a plane ticket home.”

  “Admiral Grafton will be here this afternoon. All I can do is grub and a bath.”

  I was bathed and shaved, had had a nap and was accoutered in trousers, a white shirt, a tie and a sports coat when I was admitted that afternoon to the secure spaces in the basement of the U.S. embassy in Paris.

  The place looked like an old-fashioned bank vault but was called a “skiff”—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. Elaborate physical and electronic safeguards had been installed to prevent electronic eavesdropping. The air was conditioned, of course, and bore the unmistakable faint aroma of light machine oil. The windowless cubicles lit 24/7 with fluorescent lights overhead, the odor and the constant low-grade whir of fans moving air made the SCIF feel like a world within a world, a place detached from the places where normal people live. In short, the dump looked and felt like a prison. And believe me, if the people outside ever locked the door, we weren’t leaving until the resurrection of the dead.

  Grafton was tucked into a little office in the SCIF about the size of a bedroom closet. He had a desk, the chair he sat in and two more little folding chairs. The furniture almost filled the space.

  “I hear you had a long evening,” he said as he inspected my welts and bruises.

  I dropped my fanny into the folding chair on the left and sighed. “You want to hear it again?” I knew he would have been briefed, probably by George Goldberg. Two newspapers lay on his desk. Marisa was on the front of one and Isolde the other. I tilted my head so I got a better look. Isolde looked distraught, haggard, and Marisa looked overwhelmed. Lovely. Vulnerable. How did she manage that, anyway?

  “All of it,” Grafton said, nodding.

  When you report to Jake Grafton, it’s like talking to a voice recorder. He merely sat and listened, didn’t ask any questions while I spoke, nor did he do facial expressions or gestures to keep me talking. He listened. Listened so well that I always got the impression he could repeat everything I said pretty much word for word.

  When I ran dry he scratched his nose a few times and sat digesting it all. At last he said, “This Henri Stehle . . . he worked for the Paris World Hotel for about a month. The police say his references and his address are fake. The prior
employers he gave as references never heard of him, and he doesn’t live at the apartment house he said he did. The concierge doesn’t recognize the photo the hotel took for his building pass.”

  “Guess World Hotels Inc. really checked him out.”

  “The police inspector told me Stehle was the right age, had good references and knew how to cook French cuisine. The hotel manager let it go at that. Stehle didn’t handle money. He did an excellent job until last night.”

  “So he poisoned Jean Petrou?”

  “No proof of that. You didn’t serve the head table, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Turns out Jean and his mother both ordered vegetarian plates. Isolde has been a vegetarian since her university days, and Jean has had some kind of stomach trouble the last few months. The food that remained on Jean’s plate contained a powerful heart medication, digitalis; the other didn’t.”

  “The plates were identical?”

  “Apparently. The waiter was told in the kitchen who they were for. He served Isolde first, and she got the plate in his right hand because he’s right-handed. The plate in his left hand he put in front of Jean.”

  I wasn’t liking what I was hearing. “If the people in the kitchen didn’t know which person the plates were going in front of, they couldn’t have poisoned them. Have I got that right?”

  “That’s a working theory, anyway.”

  “So the implication is that either the waiter, Isolde or Marisa poisoned him. The waiter could have poisoned the food as he brought it to the table—”

  “Difficult but not impossible,” Grafton said.

  “—Or more likely, Isolde or Marisa put something in his grub when his head was turned.”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you. The police have heard that Isolde was a heart patient several years ago. They are checking with her physicians to see what medication she was on then and is on now.”

  “I don’t think Marisa did it.”

  Grafton chuckled. He had a dry chuckle, sort of like a rooster might make when looking at his favorite chicken. “Umm,” he said.

  “Why would his mother want to pop him off?”

  “Darned if I know,” the admiral muttered. “The French police are investigating. A very wealthy family, large stock positions in banks in four countries, board positions, family trusts—one suspects that with Jean’s death large sums of money will change hands.”

  “So what are the women saying at the château?”

  “Nothing at all. They got home, packed their bags and left in the limo for an unknown destination. Right now they are somewhere in Germany.”

  I said a nasty word. I was thinking of all the effort I put into bugging the joint. Okay, okay, the job took less than an hour, but I had to set it up and think about it for a week. That was the time and effort that was wasted.

  If Grafton had any sympathy for me, he didn’t let it show. He appeared to be thinking about something else.

  There was a photo on Grafton’s desk of Henri Stehle. This was the photo the Paris World had taken for his employee pass. I picked it up and scrutinized it carefully. Stehle didn’t look much like the old man I had seen here in Paris last fall. Yet the more I stared, the more doubts I had. Perhaps he and the old man were indeed one and the same.

  “Abu Qasim?” I asked Grafton, waggling the photo.

  Grafton shrugged. “Possibly,” he muttered.

  “Come with me,” he said. He picked up a file from his desk and led me to a conference room, where the real work is done in a SCIF. Speedo Harris and Nguyen Diem were there going over police reports and slurping coffee. Unfortunately the American embassy was the only place in France that served American-style coffee. British though he might be, Harris was swilling his like a Yank. He and Diem inspected my war wounds and made appropriate comments.

  Admiral Grafton summarized my adventures of the previous evening. “Gentlemen,” he continued, “we have a hell of a mess on our hands. The Russian government says it had nothing to do with the murder of Alexander Surkov, a murder that is being investigated by the British police and Interpol—and the nuclear angle is being investigated by half the police forces in Europe. Last night’s murder of Jean Petrou is being investigated by the Paris police. The only link between them is the presence at both poisonings of Marisa Petrou, who is possibly the daughter of the most wanted terrorist in America and Europe, Abu Qasim.”

  He paused, and Speedo Harris asked, “Is she his daughter?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “That comment could be made about bloody near every young woman on earth,” Harris observed trenchantly. The Brits were like that, trenchant, yet I don’t think Harris had a very high regard for the admiral.

  Grafton wasn’t normally one to take much crap from subordinates, but he didn’t bother to squash Speedo this time. “Very perceptive,” he said agreeably.

  “So what is your theory?”

  “I want to know if there is a link between these killings. What, if anything, did Alexander Surkov and Jean Petrou have in common?”

  “Marisa Petrou killed them both,” Speedo suggested.

  “Or Abu Qasim,” Per Diem mused.

  From a pocket Grafton produced a photo and handed it to Diem. I recognized the face from the newspapers—Alexander Surkov. He also produced envelopes, one of which he handed to each man. “You both are now liaison officers officially attached to the U.S. State Department, which means you work for me. Those letters will get you cooperation almost anyplace if you say please and thank you. Visit the various agencies investigating these killings. I want to know what they know. Got it?”

  Each opened his envelope. Diem was the first to whistle. “Is this really the FBI director’s signature? On a letter with my name on it, even.”

  “Your career is blooming like a rose.”

  “My letter is signed by the head of New Scotland Yard,” Speedo Harris said solemnly, staring at the paper. Then he looked at Grafton with new respect. “You have some pull somewhere.”

  “Somewhere. Now hit the bricks. You have my telephone numbers.”

  I thought Speedo was going to salute, but he didn’t. As he and Diem exited, George Goldberg came in. He handed Grafton another copy of the Stehle photo. “Twenty-three percent,” Goldberg said. He nodded at me and left.

  Grafton tapped the photo on his fingernail, then handed it to me. “Better hang on to that. You may need to wave it around somewhere.”

  “Okay.”

  “The folks at Fort Meade”—that would be the National Security Agency—”say that this photo and the one you took last year of the old man in Paris are of the same person, to a twenty-three percent certainty.”

  I took a good look at the Stehle photo. His face had actually been too close to the camera when it was snapped, and so the lens distorted the image slightly. Was that the reason the probability was only 23 percent, or . . . “He looked old last year,” I remarked.

  “He can make himself look any way he chooses, but he can’t change the dimensions of his skull, and those are the dimensions the computer measures.”

  “Twenty-three percent. Even Vegas gives better odds than that.” I put the photo in a breast pocket of my sports coat. “I don’t think Marisa poisoned anyone,” I added.

  “Why?”

  I hunted through the attic for a reason I could articulate, and couldn’t find one. None of it made much sense. Why in the world would Qasim want Isolde Petrou dead? Or playboy son Jean? On the other hand, I could think of a dozen reasons why Marisa might feel relieved that Jean was on his way to another place. I bulled ahead anyway. “Instinct, I suppose. She’s not the poison type.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Freud,” Grafton said dryly. “She and her mother-in-law are on their way to Germany. Get a car, pack your toothbrush and hit the road. Check in with the duty officer this evening—she’ll tell you where those women have come to rest. I want you to get as close to Marisa as humanly possible and stay there.”

  “You
think Abu Qasim might try to kill her?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know what their relationship is.” He rapped on the table several times with a knuckle; then his features softened and he looked me right in the eyes. “I want Qasim dead or alive, and I don’t give a damn which it is. Marisa is your bait goat. Take a pistol with you.”

  “Okay.” I stood to go.

  “If I were you,” Grafton added casually, “I’d watch what I ate around those women.”

  George Goldberg had four pistols in the safe behind his desk. I looked over his selection and took a new Springfield Armory EMP 1911 automatic with a three-inch barrel, in 9 mm. I’ve have trouble hitting anything at a distance, but within twenty-five feet, the bad guys had better watch out. The one I took had a clip welded on the left side of the frame so that a right-handed guy could stick it down between his trousers and shirttail in the small of his back and hook the clip over his trousers, anchoring the gun in place. George gave me an extra magazine with hollow-point shells already in it, and I put it in my trouser pocket. I worked the slide a few times, tried the safety and trigger, then loaded the thing, left it cocked and locked, and put it where it was supposed to go.

  “How do I look?” I asked George.

  “That sports coat doesn’t really go with those trousers.”

  “The next time I go shopping, I’ll take you along.”

  One of the embassy staff took me to the airport to rent a car. Since Uncle Sugar was paying the tab and I have a certain image to maintain, I rented a Porsche 911. As I drove it back to Paris to pack and check out of the hotel, I decided that I would buy one of these if my old Benz ever went lame and I had to shoot it.

  I was late getting out of Paris and got caught in rush hour. It was dark and raining by the time I had cleared the last of the suburbs. The pistol in the small of my back felt like a rock, so I put it in the pocket of my sports coat.