The Assassin

by Stephen Coonts

  Before Grafton had time to answer, Huntington Winchester roared, “For Christ’s sake, Jerry,” and leaped from his chair. He squared himself in front of Smith with his fists clenched. “Writing a book wasn’t even mentioned when you told me you wanted to help rid the world of these Islamic fascists. You’ve put ten thousand dollars into this venture, and Cairnes and I and the others have contributed almost four million. So what is this? A shakedown? Blackmail? Either we buy your goddamn screed for a price you set or you’ll publish and ruin us—is that your game?”

  “Hunt,” Smith said, trying to keep his voice under control, “I’m a journalist. That’s what I do. I made you no promises about keeping your venture, or my participation in it, a secret. When this has played out I’ll decide—”

  He got no further because Hunt Winchester reached down with both hands, jerked him erect, then planted a straight right on his chin. Smith missed the chair and sprawled on the floor, half stunned.

  “By God, that felt good!” Winchester exclaimed.

  He reached for Smith again as Cairnes said, “Hit the bastard one for me.”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Grafton said. He clapped his hands once. Winchester froze with Smith half off the floor.

  “You can beat the crap out of Mr. Smith any old time,” Grafton continued, “but right now why don’t you gentlemen sit here like reasonable adults and listen to what I have to say?”

  Winchester dropped Smith back onto the floor and began feeling his pockets. Smith tried to push him away, and Winchester slapped him. He felt some more, then reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a small digital recorder. He walked away from Smith, looking it over, then tossed it into the flames in the fireplace.

  “I’ll sue you for assault, Winchester. These men are witnesses.”

  “Didn’t see a goddamn thing,” Cairnes rumbled.

  Smith climbed back into his chair while Winchester stood in front of the fire staring at him.

  When Smith was safely back in his chair, he wiped his face on his sleeve, felt his jaw, then said to the admiral, “I want to know who the hell you really are.”

  “The name is Jake Grafton.”

  “Who the fuck do you really work for, Mr. Grafton?”

  “I told you when we first met, Mr. Smith: the Central Intelligence Agency. I might point out that I am a covert employee. As you probably know, revealing that fact to anyone not authorized to know it is a federal felony, punishable by imprisonment.”

  “Got that, Smith?” Cairnes snarled at the journalist, who was still probing the tender place on his jaw.

  “I got it.”

  “Publish and be damned, you little bastard,” Cairnes roared. He grabbed his cane like a baseball bat. “I won’t pay you a fucking nickel. And I hope the feds send your sorry, traitorous ass to prison. Judas! Betraying your friends for money—”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Grafton murmured. “You’re in this lifeboat together. Save the recriminations for the ten-year reunion. Right now you have a more pressing problem.”

  “Oh?” That was Cairnes.

  “The name of your problem is Abu Qasim, a smart, wily, vicious man who specializes in murder and mayhem in the name of Allah. He has killed, or ordered killed, Alexander Surkov, Wolfgang Zetsche, Rolf Gnadinger and Oleg Tchernychenko.”

  Their faces fell. “Oleg?” Winchester gasped.

  “Murdered with a car bomb yesterday in England.”

  “Isolde Petrou?”

  “She’s still alive and under armed guard.”

  Jerry Hay Smith mopped his face with a handkerchief. When he had composed himself, he said, as if they had been discussing pop music in Mombasa, “What has Oleg’s murder got to do with us?”

  Grafton’s face wore a savage look when he said, “Qasim intends to kill you, too, Mr. Smith. And Winchester and Cairnes. So far, his batting average is a thousand. I called you here to see if we could find a way to keep you three out of Qasim’s reach—and alive—for a few more days.”

  They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Winchester opened it, admitting the cook and the butler carrying trays. They served coffee and an egg soufflé, then left.

  As the four men ate, Hunt Winchester said to Grafton, “I notice that Jean Petrou wasn’t on your list.”

  “The list is not complete,” Grafton said softly, thinking of Eide and Radwan. “I doubt if we’ll ever learn all the names of Qasim’s victims.”

  “What I want to know,” Jerry Hay Smith tossed in, “is how a request Huntington Winchester made to his friend the president got him—and us—up to our eyeballs in the middle of a fucked-up CIA operation. And how we wound up funding the goddamn thing.”

  Grafton took another forkful of soufflé and swallowed it before he said, “You’re just lucky, I guess.”

  “Tell us about Abu Qasim,” Cairnes urged. “Everything you know.”

  It was early afternoon when I arrived back at the safe house. My shoulder was throbbing, and I was in a black, foul mood. I had my hand on my pistol, which was in my right-hand coat pocket, when I got out of the car. Fortunately the morning fog had dissipated, the air had warmed nicely, and I could see that there were no armed men lurking behind the nearby shrubbery.

  I knocked on the door. Seconds later Kerry Pocock opened it. She had her hand down beside her leg. I glanced down and saw she was holding a large, wicked-looking automatic.

  “Hello, Tommy. Do come in.”

  I did so, and she shut the door and threw the bolt.

  Marisa and Isolde were dressed and sitting in chairs. Everything they owned was in their purses.

  Marisa’s brown eyes swept over my messy coat, then went to my face. The coat had some blood on it—mine, unfortunately—and a few seriously dirty spots.

  “What happened to you, Mr. Carmellini?” Isolde asked. She leaned forward, looking at me intently.

  “I met a man in a park,” I said evasively. I was unwilling to say more. They could see that, I guess, and left it there.

  “They’re ready to go,” Kerry said in her take-charge way. She should have been a grade-school teacher instead of wasting her talents in MI-5. “They were hoping you might detour for a small shopping expedition on the way to the airport.”

  I glanced at my watch. We had five hours until the plane was due to leave. “Why don’t you come with us and bring your shooter? You can escort the ladies to your favorite shops while I wait outside. I don’t want either of them going to any shop they’ve ever visited before.”

  “When I am in London, I always shop at Harrington and Jones,” Isolde Petrou announced. “We’ll go there.”

  Pocock looked at me for a decision. Getting the senior Petrou to do what I wanted her to do was going to be a challenge, but I didn’t think this was the time and place to draw a line in the dirt. With women, one has to carefully pick his battles. I tried to smile gracefully and nodded my okay.

  “Perfect,” said the indomitable Pocock to the mesdames. “Ladies, let us depart.”

  Later that morning Jake Grafton answered the door to the Winchester estate. He recognized the men on the stoop: Harry Longworth, Ramon Martinez, Will Tschudi, and Nick Metaxas. They were Americans, except for Metaxas, who was a British adventurer. All four were lean men with short haircuts and heavily tanned skins. Longworth was in his early forties, the other three in their thirties.

  “Come in, gentlemen.”

  When they were inside with the door closed, Grafton shook each of their hands. He held on to Longworth’s as he said, “Sorry about Gat, Harry. We’re going to miss him.”

  Harry Longworth just nodded. He looked glum, but there wasn’t anything more to say.

  Grafton led the four into the study, just off the main room, and sat them down. “I think it possible that Abu Qasim or people working for him may try to kill the people in this house. It could happen any time—today or two weeks from now. I want to trap and kill them.”

  He went on, briefing them thoroughly and telling them
what he wanted. It took half an hour. When he finished, he said, “Any questions?”

  Harry Longworth shook his head from side to side.

  Whenever he received an assignment, Ramon Martinez tried to come up with a point the briefer missed. This morning he couldn’t think of a thing.

  “You’ve covered it, sir,” Will Tschudi said. Metaxas nodded.

  “You’ve got my cell number. Talk to me. I don’t want any surprises, none at all.”

  He meant that he didn’t want them to surprise him. They seemed to understand perfectly.

  “Let me introduce you to the principals.”

  He led them into the main room. Sitting around the fireplace in the library area were Winchester, Cairnes and Smith. “Gentlemen, these are the men who are going to keep you alive.”

  He pronounced everyone’s name as the four former soldiers got a good look at the three men seated in the chairs. Facing those three, he said, “If you see these men, ignore them. Do not speak to them or acknowledge their presence in any way. Do you understand?”

  “Who are these guys, Grafton?” Jerry Hay Smith said belligerently.

  “They are shooters, Mr. Smith. Snake-eaters, snipers, commandos, clandestine soldiers, whatever you want to call them. They’ve been working for you.”

  “I feel like a worm on a hook,” Smith complained.

  “That’s an excellent analogy,” Grafton muttered. He nodded to the former soldiers, and they filed out of the room.

  “I assume they have some weapons,” Cairnes said.

  “That’s a safe assumption,” Grafton said, glancing at his watch. He addressed Winchester. “I have to go to Washington for a few days. I’m leaving you in good hands. You managed to talk to all of your domestic staff?”

  “Yes.”

  “My people will be here this afternoon to replace them. Mr. Longworth will admit them. If you have any questions, Winchester, call me.”

  “I want to know how long this state of affairs—we three as prisoners—is going to go on,” Winchester said in a no-nonsense tone. “This is a ridiculous situation, the three of us huddling here like fugitives in the United States of America, guarded by gunmen while foreign assassins are stalking us to commit murder.”

  “If they are,” Smith said sourly. He was a sour man.

  Grafton’s gaze went from face to face. “I’m asking you to cooperate with us for a few days. If you’re tired of living and want to take your chances, go home. I’ll send flowers to your funeral.”

  That seemed to stifle them. For a moment, anyway. Grafton shook his head and walked out of the room.

  “We are prisoners,” Smith said to his companions.

  “Now you know how the president feels,” Cairnes shot back.

  “Grafton talks to you like you’re a boot recruit,” Smith said to Winchester, who got out of his chair and went to the window, where he stood looking out. Smith continued, “Personally I find it galling to take orders from some civil servant weenie without the backbone or wit to make it in the real world.”

  “He should have scribbled himself rich and famous, like you did, eh?”

  “Don’t patronize me, little man,” Smith roared at Winchester’s back. “I won’t take crap from you just because you know how to run a few fucking factories.”

  “Oh, shut up, Jerry,” Simon Cairnes said disgustedly.

  Winchester ignored them both and headed for his private office.

  We wound up in first-class seats on our trip westward across the Atlantic. The Company put us in business class, but Isolde threw a ladylike duck fit when she heard that, so I upgraded us, using my credit card. If the Company bean-counters took offense when I turned in my expense account, I decided, I’d send a bill to Isolde. She would probably frame it and hang it on a wall.

  I had an aisle seat with Marisa on my left and Isolde in a window seat on the other side of the plane. On the aisle beside Isolde, and across from me, was a college-age youngster who was fashionably disheveled, with tattered jeans, an earring and sproutings of facial hair and pimples. I decided he was harmless and ignored him. He must have decided I, too, was harmless, and old as dirt, so he ignored me—donned his iPod earphones and tuned out.

  I felt sort of naked sitting there unarmed beside two women with targets on their backs. I had given Marisa’s Walther and my Springfield to Mrs. Pocock to hold until I returned to the sceptered isle, someday. A pistol in your pocket won’t make you bulletproof, but in our uncertain age it can be a comfort, a metal pacifier, if you will, or a crucifix for the ungodly.

  My shoulder was aching, so I rubbed the bandage and helped myself to another two Tylenol, which I swallowed without water. Marisa watched without comment.

  We had been airborne about an hour and were flying above a cloud deck when she said, barely loud enough to hear, “What happened this morning?”

  So I told her, whispering. I saw the kid across the aisle glance my way. He couldn’t hear a word with those earphones on, but must have assumed Marisa and I were lovers.

  When I finished a recitation of events, she had no comment. I had a few, but I didn’t voice them. Really, someone who supposedly knew what he was doing whanging away with a silenced .22-caliber pistol at that range? I hadn’t seen him carrying a rifle, and the police search didn’t turn up one. So it had indeed been a pistol, a weapon designed for point-blank murder.

  He was lucky he hit me. Well, hit me twice.

  I wondered why he shot me in the first place. He didn’t have a chance in a hundred of killing me.

  He certainly didn’t panic. That was out. A diversion? From what?

  I decided that a diversion was the likeliest possibility. The man who had killed Eide Masmoudi might have been leaving in another direction.

  So I had botched that assignment, too. I seemed to be having a long dry spell at the plate.

  “You’re lucky you aren’t dead,” I muttered to Marisa.

  “Sometimes I wonder,” she responded.

  “Who are you, really?”

  “Just a woman. That’s all I know about myself. I am a person with an unknown past and an unknown future.”

  “That pretty much describes most of us,” I observed.

  After she picked at the complimentary meal and drank a glass of champagne, Marisa settled back with a pillow under her head and went to sleep. The flight attendant saw her and brought a blanket, which I arranged over her.

  Isolde sat staring out her window at endless clouds and sky. After a while she removed several reports of some kind from her large purse and immersed herself in them. Once in a while she made a note in a margin. She must have grabbed those when we skedaddled from the château.

  She was a tough old bird. Still, son Jean, friends Zetsche, Tchernychenko and Gnadinger dead, with the fearless, feckless Tommy Carmellini standing guard . . . Standing up for your principles was turning out to be damned expensive. I wondered if she thought signing on with Huntington Winchester was worth the cost.

  I read the newspaper I had bought in the airport, then leafed through the in-flight magazine, which was full of info on cool vacation places I’ll never have the time and money to visit. Nothing in there on the sewers of Cairo, where I’d spent some time this past summer. After a while my eyelids got heavy. I reclined the seat and drifted off.

  “Two more dead?”

  “Yes. Oleg Tchernychenko and his two bodyguards were killed when his limo blew up on a motorway. Rolf Gnadinger was stabbed with an icicle, apparently. The maid found him dead on the front stoop of his house outside Zurich.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Sal Molina, shaking his head sadly. He took a moment to gather his thoughts. They were sitting in his cubbyhole office at the White House. “Any more news?”

  Grafton told him about Sheikh al-Taji, Eide Masmoudi and Radwan Ali. “The British police found Ali an hour or so ago. He and his two roommates had been tortured to death. Their landlord found them in their London flat. Blood everywhere.”

  “A
l-Taji’s death was in the morning briefing. What will the autopsy show?”

  “That he died of heart failure. These things happen.”

  “Why did they murder the roommates?”

  “Guilt by association, I guess,” Jake Grafton said forlornly. “Needless to say, the Islamic militants are claiming that the sheikh was assassinated by agents of the CIA.”

  “You’ve fucked this up, Jake.”

  “That’s an accurate description, I suppose.”

  Molina picked up a pen and bounced it off the desk. “Guess we had better go see the man.”

  “Before we do, let me see the president’s schedule for the next several weeks.”

  Molina dug the document out of a locked drawer, then sat silently while Jake perused it. When Jake handed it back, he said, “I don’t like what you’re thinking.”

  “Let’s go see him.”

  Molina put the schedule away, then led the way to the Oval Office. Two senators were with the president, so they had to wait. Ten minutes later the senators left and, after murmuring something to the receptionist, who would hold the calls and keep any scheduled visitors waiting until they came out, Molina led Grafton in. The private secretary was there, and Molina waved him out. He closed the door behind him.

  Both men took seats on chairs facing the president, who was seated at his desk. The president listened in silence as Jake summarized events in Europe and the U.K. over the last several days. He didn’t interrupt or comment, merely listened. He was used to listening to bad news, Jake thought, and no wonder—he heard a lot of it.

  When Jake finished speaking, the president sat in silence digesting it. “So where do we go from here?” he asked.

  “I’ll resign, if you like,” Grafton said. “Wilkins wants me out, and you’ve got to admit, he’s got good reasons.”

  The president waved that away. “I don’t remember you promising results. As I recall, you told Sal you thought it was worth the risks to get a shot at Abu Qasim. Still feel that way?”

  Grafton searched the president’s face, then Molina’s. His gaze returned to the president. “Qasim wants a big strike. He needs a big strike. He wanted your head last fall in Paris, and I think he still does. If he can also get Winchester and his pals, fine. But they are small fish and you’re the whale.”