The Assassin

by Stephen Coonts

  The only light in the barn was from the exit signs above the doors at either end. Khadr’s eyes adjusted quickly, and he saw the layout, the stalls and the dark shapes that hung above the doors, the horses, watching him, looking around.

  He waited until the horses turned away, one by one, back to their feed bags or standing asleep or lolling in their stalls. He heard one horse lie down. Ten minutes passed with only the sounds of the storm; then he heard a gentle plop of a horse exercising its bowels.

  He started down the passageway that led to the front entrance . . . and froze. Something . . . A man snoring. The sound was above him.

  He searched the overhead, saw the platforms and the end of the hay bales stored there—and saw the areas where they weren’t.

  From a pocket he removed a small infrared detector that looked like a telescope. Holding it up to his right eye, he scanned the overhead. Two heat sources . . .

  Like a shadow he moved to the ladder against the wall, by a tack room, and stood at the bottom of the ladder looking upward. Listening. The snoring was closer. One man . . . no, two—definitely two—above him.

  He climbed the ladder, a lithe, agile black shadow, moving slowly and steadily. No one can move absolutely soundlessly, not even Khadr, but the sounds of the nor’easter on the uninsulated roof covered the tiny noises of the rungs taking his weight, the rubber soles of his shoes scraping on the wood.

  He paused at the top, his pistol in his hand, every sense on full alert. Slowly, ever so slowly he raised his head, which was still covered with the black ski mask. In the dim, almost nonexistent light they were black lumps sleeping on mats, their feet at least ten feet from him. They appeared motionless, snoring gently. Over his head the roof reverberated.

  Khadr forced himself to look around, to ensure that these were the only two men in the loft. The corners of this empty area of the loft were totally black, impenetrable. He used the infrared scanner. Empty.

  At any moment one of the men could awaken or someone could enter the barn down below. He could afford to wait no longer.

  He holstered the pistol and, using both hands, completed his climb, then stepped onto the loft floor.

  Neither of the men stirred. Now he pulled the pistol again, automatically thumbing the safety to ensure it was on. Stepping carefully, feeling the floor with each foot before placing his weight on that spot, he moved toward them. They were in sleeping bags, three feet or so between them.

  He moved so he was adjacent to their waists. He thumbed off the safety. Swiftly he bent down, placed the muzzle of the pistol inches from the head of the man on his left and pulled the trigger. A soft plop. A second later he put a bullet into the head of the man on his right.

  He was about to holster the gun when the first man he shot sat up, groaning, one hand on his head. Khadr placed the muzzle of the silencer against the side of the man’s head and fired again. The victim tumbled over and lay still.

  Now the killer holstered the gun and removed a penlight from his pocket. The beam was a tiny spot. Quickly he looked for the radios that he knew must be here.

  He found them. The first man he shot had an earpiece in his ear. The wireless transceiver was lying near his head. Khadr inspected the transceiver, ensured it was on, then clipped it to his belt. The earpiece he inserted in his own ear.

  He adjusted the squelch until he got static, then turned it down until the static faded into silence.

  Guns lay on the floor nearby. M-16s and 1911-style automatics. He picked up one of the pistols, checked that it was loaded, cocked and locked, and shoved it into his waistband, just in case. If he had to use it, he would be in deep trouble, perhaps fatal trouble. For him. Still . . .

  He went to the window and looked through the rain-smeared glass down into the yard. It was empty, but he knew there were people out there, waiting. Waiting for him. Shielding the penlight carefully, he looked at his watch. Only ten thirty. Lights were still on in the house. Four cars were parked near the small porch.

  He would wait, Khadr decided. He had all night.

  Standing silently, motionless, he took out his infrared scanner and began searching the area.

  Behind him the leg of the first man he had shot moved, then stiffened, then finally relaxed and moved no more.

  When I got downstairs, the party around the fireplace was breaking up. Callie and Amy were already upstairs, apparently, although I hadn’t heard them pass Marisa’s door. Smith made himself one last toddy, then carried it by me up the stairs. He refused to meet my eyes.

  Winchester called his dog, who followed him into the hallway that led to the dining room and kitchen. Grafton trailed along after the collie. Robin was sitting with her shotgun across her lap in front of the fireplace. She watched me descend the stairs and follow the two into the hallway.

  I found Grafton talking to the two FBI agents. “Tommy and Robin will take the first watch,” he said. “I want you to go upstairs and get some sleep. Tommy will wake you at three and you can relieve them.”

  He glanced at me, and I nodded. From a backpack he extracted two night vision headsets. He explained how they worked to the FBI agents, who had never used them before. Showed them the on-off switch, the switch to cycle between infrared and starlight, and showed them the gain and contrast knobs. The federal cops looked dubious.

  “If you’ve never used these before, you might be better off without them,” I suggested.

  They both nodded.

  Grafton handed me a set.

  “Since we have more people than we’ve had the last few nights, I’m going to try to get a full night’s sleep,” Grafton continued, talking to the agents. “Same drill as in the past—I’ll have the radio on so I’ll hear anything anyone says on the net. I’m the reinforcements. If anyone sees anything, hears anything, suspects anything, say so on the net. Got it?”

  He looked from face to face, then at me. We all nodded our understanding.

  “Admiral,” one of the agents said, the taller of the two. “Realistically, what are we facing?”

  “I honestly don’t know. We could be assaulted by a gang, bombed or attacked by stealth by one man. I don’t know. Last night at my place in Virginia four men tried to gain entrance to the building.”

  The FBI types looked at each other. The shorter one, who I knew was married from his comments during dinner, unconsciously felt the pistol in his holster to reassure himself. When he saw me watching he lowered his hand.

  Winchester went to the coatrack by the kitchen door and began donning a coat and slicker. The dog sat looking up at him expectantly.

  “Hunt, why don’t you let Tommy take the dog for a walk?”

  Winchester looked at me.

  “Sure, Mr. Winchester,” I said with false enthusiasm. “I need to stretch my legs.”

  “Okay.” Winchester took off the coat and held it out to me.

  “Thanks,” Grafton murmured. He slapped me on the shoulder, my bad one, and headed for the living room to give the other set of goggles to Robin.

  The dog looked at me as if I were its best pal.

  “Her name is Molly,” Winchester said as he took the leash off the hook. Molly stood up and turned around excitedly and fanned the air with her tail. “She has to walk and sniff a while before she decides to go.”

  I got dressed, arranged the slicker flap over my head and accepted the leash and Winchester’s flashlight. It was one of those black aircraft-aluminum jobs, with three or four D-cell batteries. I almost said no, then thought, why not? The rain wouldn’t do the night vision goggles any good at all, and I might need them later. I left them on a coat hook. After saying something polite, I opened the door, and the dog dragged me out into the night.

  And a damned miserable night it was. Not yet freezing, but with the wet wind howling at least thirty knots, and gusting higher, and driving the raindrops into my face and legs like pellets, it felt like the arctic. The wind chill must have been near zero. Tree branches writhed and whipped in the wind, an
d low evergreens bent over from the blasts. Why the Pilgrims and other strait-laced religious types from Merry Old England ever wanted to take this place away from the Indians, I don’t know.

  The dog liked it, though. She tugged me right along on her usual walk, I suppose. We went into the grass and along the hedges as she sniffed at everything. She found a couple of old dog-poop piles and inspected those carefully, but I got tired of that and pulled her on. She then charged to the end of the leash. Considering all the times she must have done this, you’d think she would have been leash-trained, but no.

  I flashed the light around, just looking, shining it everywhere, in case there was a watcher. The guy in the hole by the corner of the barn could close his eyes or duck down; he didn’t need me giving away his position. Mostly, however, I watched the dog. Having had a little canine experience myself, I knew the dog would detect an intruder before I did. Molly certainly wouldn’t smell him in this hurricane, but she would sense him. Khadr. If he was out here. Or any other holy warrior waiting for a sucker infidel.

  After a few minutes of this I led Molly on around the house. Might as well check out the whole area.

  As I walked, bent down to protect myself against the wind, struggling to hold on to the pooch, I thought about my recent tryst with Marisa. Now there was a woman! But was she the real deal, or only acting a part?

  The unanswered questions were right there, just beneath the surface. My paranoia was so ingrained by this time that I went over every look, word, touch, gesture—even her body language and the way she held herself—trying to find a false note. Ran the scenes over and over in my memory, looking . . .

  The problem, I decided, is really me. I find it impossible to not turn over the rock to see what’s underneath.

  Oh, God, Tommy, you idiot, what a way to live!

  From the barn window, Khadr watched Tommy trudge through the wind and rain with the dog lunging on her leash until he disappeared around the house. He didn’t know who the man with the dog was—the infrared didn’t allow that kind of definition. Now that Tommy was gone, he used the infrared scanner again, although he realized he was only looking at this side of the house, and the areas to his left and right were obscured by his vantage point. There must be people out here! Getting as close to the glass as possible, he used the scanner to look down to the right and left.

  There he was, a man, below, almost against the corner of the barn, to Khadr’s left. One man, in a hole, perhaps.

  Khadr continued to look, scanning, trying to determine if this was the only man. He was still looking when Tommy Carmellini and the dog came back around the house. They entered at the door they had come out of.

  A few minutes later some of the upstairs lights went dark. The people inside were going to bed.

  So how was he going to get past the man in the hole and get inside?

  Khadr began turning that problem over in his mind. In truth, he had no plan. He was looking for an opportunity, and if one developed, or he saw a way to make one, well and good. If not, he could always leave the way he had come in. He had a cell phone in his pocket to call Qasim to meet him.

  After all, Qasim wanted to create terror, and the discovery of two dead men in the barn would certainly create it. And another opportunity might present itself tomorrow night, or the night after.

  When I got back into the house, Winchester was waiting with a towel to dry the dog, who proceeded to shower us both anyway.

  “You take real good care of that dog,” I commented.

  “She belonged to Owen,” he said.

  When he had the dog reasonably dry, he took her upstairs. Grafton was standing in the main living room with Robin watching the Weather Channel. The nor’easter was the storm of the day in America, apparently. Three reporters were on station to bring us the latest and greatest. They posed outside, of course, getting hammered by wind and rain as they gave their breathless reports.

  All three talked about snow. When the radar picture came up, we could see it coming our way.

  “Six inches by morning in this area,” Grafton murmured. “Power lines are already down in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.”

  When the weather gurus went to a commercial, he used the remote to kill the sound of the savage beast. He left the picture on.

  The admiral glanced at me and Robin. “Tonight may be the night. If you see, hear or smell anything, anything at all out of the ordinary, call me on the radio. I’ll have it on and the earpiece in my ear.”

  “Sweet dreams,” Robin said brightly. She smiled. I decided that there is nothing like the smile of a lady holding a shotgun to jar your preconceptions.

  Grafton ascended the stair and we were alone.

  “So how do you want to do this?” Robin asked.

  “Why don’t you settle in here behind something solid so no one can drill you through a window, and I’ll circulate? I suggest you also turn off the downstairs lights.”

  “After a while we trade off.”

  “Okay.”

  She laid her shotgun on the bar and moved a chair behind it, then sat and put the weapon on her lap. The night vision goggles were within reach on the bar. I turned off the lights in the room, then, carrying my own scattergun, wandered back to the kitchen. I hadn’t managed much dinner and decided to inspect the refrigerator, just in case. While I was in there I shoved Winchester’s flashlight into my hip pocket. It threw a lot more light than my little penlight.

  Jake Grafton found his wife just finishing her shower. She dressed in a long nightie as he washed his face and brushed his teeth.

  “No shower?” she said.

  “I’m sleeping in my clothes.”

  She didn’t have any response to that. He had an M-16 lying on the chair beside the bed. When she was under the covers and he was beside her with a blanket arranged over him, she turned off the light.

  “I saw you talking to Isolde,” she said.

  After Marisa went upstairs, Grafton had taken the banker to a corner of the living room for a private conversation.

  “She thinks Qasim is a monster and Marisa is a victim,” he said.

  “So who killed Jean Petrou?”

  “I don’t know. Marisa thought he was selling information to Qasim, and he might have been. She followed him and saw them together once. She told Isolde about it. Either of them could have poisoned him. Both had access to Isolde’s prescription digitalis. Isolde says she didn’t and she doesn’t think Marisa did.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Marisa.”

  A long silence followed that remark. Finally Callie said, “Tommy is pretty taken with her.”

  “He’s a big boy.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Listen to me. Marisa called Qasim while she was here, gave him our address in Rosslyn. She told him we were here, and she told him we were going to the political dinner on Thursday.”

  “Does Tommy know that?”

  “Not that. He knows Marisa may have killed her husband, and he knows she knocked him down when he was set to shoot the fleeing intruders at the Zetsche estate. Heck, she may have poisoned Alexander Surkov—that’s a long shot, but it’s a possibility. Tommy’s been around the mountain a time or two, and he’s trying to figure her out, same as me.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “You wanted her to make that call, didn’t you?”

  “I was sorta hoping she would.”

  “So Qasim intends to assassinate the president?”

  “I think he wants Marisa there to see him do it. That’s my best guess. He has been playing us like chessmen, forcing us to do what he wanted. Thursday night. That’s his payoff, I think. Maybe.”

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  Grafton lay there in the darkness listening to the rain and wind, trying to relax. After a while his wife went to sleep—he could tell by her breathing.

  What if he had figured this all wrong and Marisa was an assassin? She was inside. What if she killed Winchester and
Smith tonight? Or opened a door or window for Khadr?

  After about half an hour, he got out of bed as quietly as possible, picked up the assault rifle and slipped out of the room. He closed the door behind him and made his way to the end of the hallway, which was lit with small night-lights at ankle height. There was a little straight-back chair there, along with a tiny table containing a dried flower arrangement, so he sat and tilted the chair back slightly against the wall. The rifle he kept on his lap.

  From this vantage point he could see all the bedroom doors except Winchester’s, which was on the ground floor. Over his head was a small window. He sat listening to the rain/sleet mix patter against it and the rising sound of the wind. The gusts were worse now as the heart of the storm came down upon them.

  I was watching the snow line march toward us on the television when the power went out. The picture dimmed, brightened, then went black. I glanced at the stairs and saw that the glow of the night-lights was gone. It was a few minutes after twelve.

  “Uh-oh,” I said to Robin.

  I put on my night vision goggles and fired them up. When I looked at Robin, I saw that she already had hers on.

  I switched to infrared and went to a window to look out. Between the rain-smeared glass and all the water in the air outside, I couldn’t see much. I tried the ambient light setting and saw even less. Terrific!

  I opened the door to the cabana and went out there. The pool was a sheet of black. The howl of the wind was breathtaking here in this unprotected area. Everything was wet; I could feel the water soaking into my shoes. It was miserably cold, too, whipping through my clothes. I didn’t stay out there long. I went back inside and locked the door.

  Then I went downstairs and checked all the windows and doors. The place was gloomy, even with the flashlight. The basement door was locked tight, but . . . I leaned a rake and shovel against it so they would fall over if the door was opened. Who knows, I might even hear one of them fall. I left the door at the top of the stairs open, on the off chance.

  After I checked the main-floor windows, the front door, the main rear entrance and the kitchen door, I strolled around, waiting.