The Assassin

by Stephen Coonts

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, man, no guns you said. Push the down button, you lyin’ sack of . . .”

  I didn’t, of course. The admiral was glad to see us. He took us into the study and closed the door. When we were seated, he asked Willie, “Did Tommy tell you why we need you?”

  Willie gave me an evil look. “Just gave me some shit about an easy job, no guns or knives, no violence of any kind. I knew he was lyin’, of course. He ain’t told the truth for one whole day in his whole miserable life. He’s the only man I know who tells more lies than I do.”

  “I’m taking our houseguests to Connecticut,” Grafton said, ignoring Willie’s bullshit, as I habitually did. With Willie, it becomes second nature. “But Callie, my daughter, Amy, and Tommy will be here alone. It’s possible that someone may try to kill Callie or Amy. If the hitter is a professional, he’s probably going to case the place, try to establish who is here, figure out the women’s routine, all of that, before he decides how to make the hit. I need someone in the street to find and identify the watcher. You, I hope, will be my someone. The job will last about a week—no more. If and when you spot a watcher, you’ll call Tommy on his cell phone. He’ll take over from there.”

  “Man, they’ll probably just burn the whole place down with everyone in it. You oughta get your wife outta here.”

  “Callie, Amy and Tommy will be here,” Grafton said in a tone that ended the discussion.

  “Just watch and call Tommy?” Willie said, eyeing Grafton.

  “That’s it,” Grafton reiterated. “I’ll get you a lapel mike and earphone. He’ll hear everything you say. You’ll also need some props, some reason to hang out on the street. You need to be out there wandering around, watching but not appearing to be watching.”

  Willie nodded. “I can do that.”

  “What props do you need?”

  “Just a brown bag and a bottle. Watched winos all my life. I can do that for a few days.”

  “You’re on the payroll. Contract wages. Stop by in the morning and I’ll give you the radio.”

  “I need some old clothes. Go to the Salvation Army this afternoon and get myself an outfit.”

  “You need to be out there pretty much around the clock.”

  “Gonna be tough money,” Willie said. “Tough money, this time of year, sleepin’ on the street.”

  “Just don’t drink too much of that poison,” I warned.

  “Sort of a government-paid toot,” Willie said philosophically. “Might be a nice little vacation, after all.”

  After he met Callie and shook her hand, and she thanked him for agreeing to help, he left to make his arrangements. Grafton went over to Langley for a few hours, and I did some general hanging out in his den.

  He was leaving in the morning for Winchester’s estate in Connecticut, and taking Isolde and Marisa with him. Callie and Amy and I were staying here, with Willie watching on the street. Although that sounded like a half-baked, desperate plan to me, I couldn’t come up with a better one.

  The problem was that Qasim and his helper—make that helpers, because I had no idea how many he had or could recruit here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.—could attack in dozens of different ways. Qasim and company certainly weren’t stuck on a particular MO. Already they had used poison—chemical and nuclear—bullets, a knife, an icicle and a car bomb. About the only methods they hadn’t used were fire and a nuclear explosion, and I suspected that with Qasim’s help they could arrange those things if they put their heads to it. Which was, of course, precisely why Jake Grafton, Sal Molina and the president wanted Abu Qasim dead and in hell.

  Hell, I had to agree, would certainly be the place for him.

  Marisa agreed, too. That conversation in the wee hours last night had been a revelation for me. She hated the bastard. Had he been just a figure from her childhood, she might have gotten over it in the hustle and bustle of life, but he came back . . . and she obeyed his orders in a terrorist attempt on the G-8 leaders. So now she hated him. And feared him.

  Or so she said. Of course, he also sliced up her face.

  I got up from Grafton’s little leather couch and examined the titles on his bookshelf and fingered his mementos while I went over that conversation again, trying to decide if Marisa had told the truth. The possibility that she was a world-class actress couldn’t be eliminated or excluded. Traitors have marched through the human drama since the dawn of time lying to everyone around them while they were committing treason. Such people are the lifeblood of intelligence agencies, including mine, and our most precious assets.

  Isolde came in about that time. We chitchatted for a bit about America and her previous visits, then I asked her point-blank: “Does Marisa really hate Abu Qasim, or is she lying?”

  The Frenchwoman looked me squarely in the eyes as she said, “Never have I seen someone hate another so much. It is a poison, and if she doesn’t somehow neutralize it, it will destroy her.”

  She thought about that for a moment, then added, “I, too, have hated, but not like that. Not with the entire total of my being, not to the absolute depth and length and breadth of my soul.” She got up from her chair, looked around the room once more, then said, “Hatred has mutilated and twisted Abu Qasim. I don’t want Marisa to end up as he is, disfigured, foul, obsessed to the brink of insanity, evil! That would be a horrible fate.”

  “Good to see you again, Admiral,” Robin Cloyd said when Jake Grafton walked into the foyer of his Langley office and the security door closed behind him.

  “Good morning,” he said and walked on through to his private office. His desk was orderly, with the items demanding his attention carefully arranged in a pile. The urgent stuff that needed his immediate attention was on top, and the routine stuff on the bottom. Cloyd did the arranging, and her judgment was impeccable.

  She also had his telephone call slips in a pile. Right on top was one from the director of MI-5. Jake sat down and dialed the number on the encrypted telephone that was on his desk. Three minutes later the British officer was on the line.

  After a few social pleasantries, the director said, “Little development I thought you should know about. We got into Alexander Surkov’s security box at his bank. Found a wad of currency and four passports for four different people. None of them had Surkov’s photo on them. Two were American, one British and one from the Ukraine.”

  “Real passports?”

  “Our boffins think not. They look good, very good, good enough to fool any immigration officer who has only a minute or so to look at them, but our experts think they might be products of the SVR.” The Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedski, Russian foreign intelligence, was Janos Ilin’s outfit.

  “You don’t say,” Grafton murmured.

  “No way to know for certain,” the British officer continued, “but one suspects Mr. Surkov had a lucrative little sideline supplying documents to unfortunates who found themselves inconveniently without.”

  “He knew people in Russia,” Jake said thoughtfully. “That was what he had to sell.”

  “The names on the passports don’t seem to be in our database, so we’re seeing what we can do with the photographs and addresses. In the meantime, we’re keeping this discovery under our hats. It won’t be released to the press or shared with law enforcement.”

  Grafton thanked him and said good-bye.

  Robin stuck her head in. “It’s almost time for your appointment, Admiral.”

  Grafton glanced at his watch, then headed for the door. “See you in a bit,” he said.

  The room beside director William Wilkins’ office was a multimedia theater cleverly disguised to look like a conference room. When buttons were pushed, walls retracted and displays popped up, rather like the cockpit of the starship Enterprise. Today the gadgets were hidden.

  Grafton made small talk with the head of the Secret Service, Abe Goldman, while they waited for Wilkins and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who were in Wilkins’ office behind closed
doors. An aide stuck his head in, saw that Grafton and Goldman were there and disappeared, presumably to relay the news to Wilkins, who came in a few minutes later with the secretary in tow. Grafton and Goldman popped to their feet.

  “Stay seated, gentlemen.” Wilkins had no regular chair, but parked his bottom wherever the mood struck him, a habit that led to small side bets among the department heads who regularly attended meetings here. Today he took a seat directly across the table from Grafton. The secretary, who was Goldman’s boss, seated himself with an empty chair between him and Wilkins. In the bureaucratic shuffle that followed 9/11, the Secret Service had been removed from the Treasury Department and put in the new Department of Homeland Security.

  “So, Jake, tell us this fairy tale you sold the president,” Wilkins began.

  Grafton stated that he believed Abu Qasim was going to attempt to assassinate the president, and gave his reasons, including the history of his attempts to bring Qasim to bay. He discussed the murders of Zetsche, Tchernychenko and Gnadinger, and devoted several minutes to discussing the break-in and murders at the Petrou château in France.

  Wilkins let him talk without interruption.

  When Jake finished, the secretary spoke right up. He was a veteran of the Washington bureaucratic maze and was fairly good at reading between the lines. “There’s a whole lot here you haven’t told us.”

  “He can’t and won’t reveal ongoing covert operations,” Wilkins said heavily.

  “But what’s the logical thread between these murders and an assassination attempt?”

  “Abu Qasim tried it last year, and he may try again.”

  “That’s a logical fallacy. Does the president know more than you’re telling us?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re selling us another pig in a poke,” the secretary grumped to Wilkins, who didn’t smile. “Another fucking hunch.”

  After the moment of silence that followed that remark, Grafton continued, “I had a telephone conversation this morning with the head of MI-5. He says Alexander Surkov, the Russian émigré assassinated with polonium in London, had four passports in his safe deposit box at his bank that may have been made in Russia. The working assumption in London is that he was a dealer in fake paper, which he got from a contact in the SVR.”

  “And that tidbit leads us where?” the secretary said heavily.

  “Tchernychenko, Surkov’s boss, was killed by a car bomb Saturday. Perhaps by Islamic extremists. Perhaps at the urging of Abu Qasim, who may have been a Surkov client.”

  “This is a house of cards,” Goldman observed. “Surkov’s murder could have been ordered in Moscow, and so could Tchernychenko’s. I’ve heard about Janos Ilin’s little disclaimer and request to Grafton, and it was a farce. All you people are doing is reading tea leaves.”

  “You want sworn testimony, go to the federal courthouse,” Wilkins shot back. “This is a spy agency. This is about as good as it gets, guys.”

  Goldman took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Okay,” he said heavily. He turned to Grafton. “When and where, do you guesstimate?”

  Jake told him. Twenty minutes later the secretary and Goldman departed, leaving Wilkins and Grafton alone in the conference room.

  “How confident are you that it will go down the way you told those two?” Wilkins asked the admiral.

  “This isn’t just my guess as to his intentions. Marisa Petrou also thinks this is the scenario.” He paused, then decided that the time had arrived to show all the cards to his boss. “I think she might have killed her husband, who was probably selling information to Qasim. I think she has made some kind of deal with Abu Qasim to keep him from killing her mother-in-law, Isolde. He may have told her to tell me this tale, but I doubt it. I think she is telling the truth as she believes it to be about his intentions. The bottom line is that she wants Abu Qasim dead. So do we.”

  “Is she or is she not his daughter?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t believe she does. Sometimes she thinks she is, sometimes she is sure she isn’t.”

  Wilkins rubbed his forehead with his fingertips as he digested that remark.

  “You know,” he said conversationally, “I’ve been in this business for twenty-five years. Without a doubt, this is the goddamnest tangle I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen them all.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And letting the president get these amateurs involved . . . Damn that Molina, with his fingers in every pie!”

  Wilkins took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, then said, “Tell you what—if Homeland doesn’t snag our buddy Abu in the interim, or if he doesn’t make his try on the president next Thursday night as you have so persuasively predicted, I want your resignation on my desk on Friday morning.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Grafton’s condo was on the eighth floor of his building, and it occupied the entire eastern end of the floor. Looking out the living room window, I could see over the buildings on the east side. See the roofs and the apartments they contained. Could see the spire of the Washington Monument in the distance, a white phallic symbol poking up above the trees.

  The main bedroom where the Graftons slept was on the northeast corner. Marisa was asleep in the adjacent guest room when I tiptoed in. Looking out the window, I could see more of the same. I drew the curtains and tiptoed out.

  When I wandered into the kitchen, Callie was there with Isolde, gabbling in French. I knew that Callie, a language professor at Georgetown University, loved opportunities to gas with native speakers of one of her languages. She and Isolde, a smart, dynamic, experienced executive with a wealth of life experience almost as broad as Callie’s, would soon be fast friends, I suspected.

  Each of them was working on a glass of white wine. Callie offered me a glass, but I refused. A door off the kitchen led to a tiny balcony which jutted out from the building on the east side. The kitchen windows on the south side of the room faced apartments in the buildings across the way, each with its private balcony and its windows.

  This condo was a sniper’s wet dream. I lowered the blinds and drew the curtains.

  “Surely they won’t be here so soon, Tommy,” Mrs. Grafton said.

  I didn’t think so, either, but I said, “Can’t be too careful.”

  She and Isolde went back to their cookbook, which was open on the butcher-block island in the middle of the room, and switched to English, in deference to my presence. Apparently dinner was going to be a production.

  I watched them until Callie looked my way again. “Hanging out here with Abu Qasim on the loose is going to be very dangerous,” I said.

  She smiled tightly. “I know.”

  “And lately I haven’t been doing very well at the bodyguard gig. Actually, I’ve been doing terribly.”

  “Isolde and Marisa are still alive,” Callie pointed out.

  “They’re alive because Abu Qasim didn’t want to kill them. Then. If and when he gets around to it, they’re going to have a serious problem. As you and I do.”

  “Marisa told me that he’ll probably send a colleague named Khadr,” Callie said. She got busy removing food from the refrigerator.

  Isolde was standing beside the cookbook watching us and listening. Now she said, “She thought Khadr was the gunman who attacked my château.”

  Here it was again: Ol’ Marisa knew a lot, to hear her tell it, and one suspected she knew a lot more that she wasn’t telling. That sure put a damper on the conversation.

  I watched the two of them dice vegetables and cut up a chicken for a casserole.

  “I’ll say it one more time,” I said to Callie. “I think you should go with your husband to Connecticut, or at least slip off to visit friends in the wilds of California or wherever.”

  “I know you and Willie will do your best.”

  “My best hasn’t been very good. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Besides, even if I were Superman, I’m only one guy. Who knows how many of them will come after us? Hasn’t it occurred to
you that they want me, too? Kill me, then the coast is clear to wax you, and every other person in this building. Every move I make leaves other options open for them. Surely you can see that.”

  “Amy will be joining us for dinner,” Callie said, glancing at me, “and she’ll be staying with us for the next week or so. Jake thought that wise.”

  End of conversation.

  So Grafton was betting the farm on Willie and me. I silently cursed him for a damn fool, then went back to the den and sacked out on the couch for a nap. It took a while, but I finally drifted off. Got to dreaming about killers setting off bombs against the door and rushing into the room with guns blazing. Started thrashing. Woke up suddenly covered with sweat.

  In addition to Amy Carol Grafton, there were two other guests for dinner, a journalist named Jack Yocke and a lady friend he brought along. I had read Yocke’s stuff for years in the Post and recognized the name. He was a tall, gangly guy, articulate and full of opinions. Apparently Grafton and Yocke had known each other for years. When Grafton introduced us, he pronounced Yocke’s name as Yock-key: I had seen it in print a hundred times but never heard it pronounced before.

  “We talked about having dinner together, what? Three months ago?”

  “Four, I think,” Grafton said apologetically. “Hard to fit you in between golf and bowling.”

  “You retired guys,” Yocke said wryly, glancing at me. I could see that he knew Grafton was about as retired as I was.

  “After the murder of Jean Petrou,” Yocke said as he scrutinized Grafton’s face, “I am amazed that the French authorities allowed them to leave the country.”

  Grafton shrugged.

  “I suppose you don’t want their presence in the States to make the papers?”

  “Publish if you wish, but don’t use my name. And don’t question them.”

  At the dinner table Yocke entertained us with unprintable inside dope on the goings-on among the politicos around town. I pretended I cared.

  Yocke’s girlfriend or significant other, as the case might have been, seemed nice enough. Her name was Anna-Lynn Something—I didn’t pay much attention to her last name. If she had any idea of the tensions swirling around the table, she ignored them. She seemed happy and laughed with Callie and Amy and told political jokes.