Diamondhead

by Patrick Robinson

  Both men were silent for a few moments. Then Judd Powell said, “Sir, would you mind telling the men yourself?”

  “Give me a break, Judd. This has already broken my heart. Isn’t that enough? I’d do damned near anything to make things different.”

  Judd nodded understandingly. “I guess there’s no chance this Foche will lose the election, is there?”

  “None. Our only hope is if the French bastard drops dead.”

  “Is there a ray of light anywhere, Mr. Remson? Anything I could tell the guys, just so we still have a little hope?”

  “There may be something, Judd. But it’s a long shot. Just tell ’em I’m doing everything I can.” Harry Remson already realized he’d said too much.

  The dark-blue Bentley came surging into the drive. Anne and Tommy had left for the hospital, where Dr. Ryan had promised to produce something to calm down the boy’s bouts of violent sickness. Harry disembarked, carrying with him a small white cardboard box. He walked onto the screened porch and shouted for Mack, who came bounding down the stairs, clean-shaven and sharp before a superior officer. Like always.

  “Okay, buddy, right here I got the cell phone, and it’s ready to go. Got a special chip embedded inside it, makes it undetectable by any search agency in the world. Incoming or outgoing.”

  “Jesus, Harry. Where’d you get it?”

  “NASA. Since you ask.”

  “Didn’t tell ’em who it was for or why you needed it?”

  “I might look stupid, but I’m not crazy,” replied the shipyard chief. “Anyway, you can make the call and offer them the million for the contract.”

  “Do I reveal who we have in mind?”

  “I’m going to leave that up to you, Mack. You may have to, in order to get a firm price.”

  “How about payment?”

  “I think we’ll agree to pay that twenty-five thousand for the recce. Then advance expenses of say fifty thousand. When Foche dies, we’ll pay the balance. But I’m not paying a bunch of murderers a huge advance fee that they could keep and then say the plot backfired.”

  “No. That would be crazy. We’d never have a chance of getting repaid.”

  “It’s our way or the highway. Tell ’em we’ll go somewhere else.”

  “Harry, there may be a difficulty if they do not have the slightest idea who we are, or where to come, if their money does not arrive.”

  “Mack, they’re in the high-risk, utterly illegal end of the business cycle. I’m betting they often have to take their chances on getting paid. But we’re not handing out an advance. Screw that.”

  “Okay, boss. No names; no clues about identity. And how do we transfer the funds?”

  “I’ve got a pretty big account in the city of Brest in Brittany, where the French Navy lives. It’s not unusual for us to have tens of millions of dollars in there. I’ll have the fee wired to an account in Switzerland, and from there it will go to the account of one of those Swiss lawyers whose sole purpose in this life is to hide identities, cash, bank accounts, and the rest. He will not know where the money came from when it lands in his account, nor will he ever have a way of finding out. The Marseille guys will contact him, and he will arrange their payment. No one will ever know who paid, and no one will ever know what it was for. If we get a deal, we’ll request the name of the guy who’ll pick up the check from the lawyer, and all he needs to do will be to identify himself at the office in Geneva. No problem.” Harry glanced at his watch. “Christ!” he said. “I’ve gotta get back. And your call to France is in fifteen minutes. Keep me posted.”

  And with that Harry Remson was gone, leaving Mack holding one of the truly great cell phones of the world. Anyone comes on the line, it’ll probably be a fucking astronaut, he muttered.

  He decided to make the call away from the house, so he walked out of the driveway and jogged down to the lonely spot where Tommy had caught the bluefish. Just as he arrived, a local fishing boat, driven by an old-timer, Jed Barrow, was arriving back from a night in the fog in choppy waters. Mack could tell by the way the trawler rode low on her lines it had been a decent catch. “Hey, Jed,” he yelled across the water. “Good job! Nice to see you.”

  Jed Barrow turned and stared across his starboard beam. Then he spotted Mack and yelled back, “Mack Bedford, you young rascal! I thought you’d taken over the entire U.S. Navy! Welcome home, boy!”

  Mack waved. He guessed the old man had been out maybe three or four miles. Somewhere around the back of Sequin. It was very deep out there, and lonely. In the past men had disappeared without a trace in the long, rolling seas common to this part of the world. Out there in the night, with just a nineteen-year-old kid for company, was a tough way to make a living in a dragger.

  But Jed knew nothing else. For him that short voyage out to Bell 12 was nothing short of a commuter run—there and back, maybe a couple hundred days a year. Coming home in the morning, cold, salt-encrusted hands, very often a decent haul, and then a short argument with the buying agent, summer and winter, sickness and health. And all because men like old Jed Barrow and his forefathers would rather have shot themselves than have someone tell them what to do.

  Mack pondered the life of a fisherman. And wondered if he should get into it himself. He had the money with his navy payoffs, SEAL bonuses, and well-saved signing-on fees. He could navigate, he could fish, and he knew the waters. But then he stopped himself—because, subconsciously, he was thinking about forming a business for Tommy. Always for Tommy. And what was the point of that? Yet he could not stop himself.

  He looked at his watch and mentally tore himself away from this world he knew so well, way down east on the Maine coastline. Instead he checked himself into a seamy, terrifying world of willful murder, a merciless, brutal place where he did not belong. He took out his supersonic cell and tapped in 011-33 for France, then the number, which would ring in the office in the backstreets of Marseille, in the Assassins’ Division. Raul’s place.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was, possibly, the closest Mack Bedford had ever come to losing his nerve. At precisely 10:15, sitting against a rock above the ebbing tide of the Kennebec estuary, he suddenly snapped his cell phone shut and told a half-dozen busy sandpipers he simply could not manage this. Harry Remson would have to find someone else. Because he, Lt. Cdr. Mackenzie Bedford, could not deliberately place himself among the criminal classes. Particularly among this shady group of “murder for hire” brigands, lurking in the back streets of Marseille. It was entirely too much to ask of him.

  Making a phone call to arrange the imminent assassination of the next president of France sounded pretty bad. About ten-years-in-the-slammer bad. Mack stood up and put the phone in his pocket and began to retrace his steps up the beach path. And then he thought again about the issues that were at stake, and about his old friend Harry. The Remson boss did not have to do this. He was an extremely wealthy man, and he could have just accepted the fate of the shipyard and let it go. It would hardly affect his life.

  In fact, Harry’s life would be a whole lot better without the shipyard. He owned a beautiful seventy-five-foot ketch he kept down in Saint Bart’s in the Caribbean, and he could certainly spend much of the winter there instead of fighting the frost, the snow, and the endless problems of the Maine shipbuilding industry.

  No, Harry was not, effectively, putting his life on the line for himself and his family. His wife, Jane, could have lived without Remsons Shipbuilding any day of the week. Harry was doing this for the people of Dartford. He was spending two million dollars and risking jail, just to keep everyone going with jobs, food, and comfort. Not one dollar for himself. Everything for the town. Everything to lose.

  And here he was, Mack Bedford, shying away from making a phone call to help save his fellow citizens of Dartford. The hell with it, he muttered, and dialed the number in Marseille.

  This is Raul. Mr. Morrison?

  Right here, Raul. Mack felt a surge of confidence. The name was wrong, and the phone call c
ould never be traced. He was safe. For the moment.

  Raul stepped straight up to the plate. He dropped his faint French accent and reverted to English, in the kind of officer-class accent expected of a man called Reggie Fortescue.

  “Okay, Mr. Morrison, old chap, let’s not prolong this call because I have no doubt your business needs an element of security. Tell me what you need.”

  Mack was stunned at the straight-shooting Englishman’s words. But he recovered fast and said quietly, “We need to have someone removed from the face of the earth.”

  “Uh-huh,” replied Raul, as if he had just been asked to lend someone a ten-dollar bill. “Where is he?”

  “France, probably Brittany.”

  “Uh-huh. Are you ready to reveal his name?”

  “Not yet. That’s a ways off,” replied Mack. “Do you have rates for such projects?”

  “Straightforward contract starts at three hundred thousand U.S. dollars. Goes up depending on the target’s personal security. Could end up costing a million, and maybe more. Is he well known?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we start at a million and rising. Bigger the risk, bigger the price.”

  “I understand. Does this mean you’ll undertake the project no matter what, if the money’s right?”

  “Almost. But we have turned down a couple of huge jobs. Mostly because both targets were heads of state, and that was a step too far.”

  “I see. Are you the biggest operation of this type?”

  “Yes. I believe we are. But I imagine you’re asking if there are alternative sources for you to try, and the easy answer is no. If we won’t take it on, no one will.”

  “Raul, you have been very helpful, and you will understand my reluctance at this stage to go further. It would be remiss of me to have you and your colleagues fully acquainted with our plan, only for you to decide not to proceed. This would somehow leave you with knowledge that could place both myself and my colleagues in grave danger.”

  “Mr. Morrison. If we ever stooped to that level, we would not be very long in this business, or perhaps not even in this world.”

  Every instinct he had told Mack Bedford not to reveal the target. He also knew that if he was to make any progress whatsoever in this onerous project, ultimately he had to reveal the target. Harry Remson had specified that Mack alone must make this decision. If Harry had been here, he would have understood the quandary. This was the moment of truth. Either Mack Bedford was going to tell the mysterious voice in Marseille precisely what he intended to do, and who was to be assassinated, or he would ring off and call back another time.

  He decided to swerve away from the critical path of the conversation. “Should you agree to undertake the contract,” he said, “and we were able to settle on a price, what arrangements would you wish us to make with regard to payment?”

  “Banker’s draft or wire transfer, Swiss bank, numbered account.”

  “We had already thought along those lines. We would prefer to deposit the money in our Swiss account in Geneva, and then have the cash removed to a lawyer’s office in Geneva, where your man would pick it up in person, subject to satisfactory identification.”

  “That would be perfectly agreeable to us.” Raul knew when he was talking to the real deal, a genuine heavy hitter with the wherewithal to make something happen and the ability to pay the correct price. “There would, however,” he said, “be the question of a first payment and then the final payment when the contract was complete. I imagine you have also considered that?”

  “We have, and that may be a sticking point. My colleagues naturally would not forward to you a large down payment, with the chance that you could just keep it and not complete the work. In those circumstances we would have zero chance of recouping any of the money.”

  “Equally, Mr. Morrison, it would be unreasonable for you to expect us to undertake an operation in an area of the utmost danger that could see us all tried and executed, not without any compensation whatsoever to begin the project. We could easily end up either dead or incarcerated—or, worse yet, broke.”

  Mack Bedford chuckled. “Raul, I have no doubt you have tackled such stuff before. What’s the usual drill?”

  “Mr. Morrison, we will require minimum expenses of fifty thousand dollars. And if we are not to be paid until the completion of the contract, we must know precisely who we are working for. Which ensures clients pay us promptly for dangerous work.”

  “What if we could not risk you, or anyone else, knowing who we are? What then?”

  “Fifty percent down, the other half on completion.”

  “And in those circumstances, you do not even want to know who we are?”

  “Correct. Even though we run the immense risk of you knowing who we are.”

  “Checks and balances,” said Mack. “The way of the modern world.”

  “The entire issue of us knowing your identity is our only security,” said Raul. “Most people, perhaps unwillingly, stump up that first down payment to protect their anonymity. And we have never once failed to keep our side of the bargain. We are the acknowledged world professionals in the business.”

  “I guess I have to assess whether we are prepared to place our own futures in your hands,” answered Mack. “And that’s an awful lot of trust.”

  “Either that or pay the price up-front,” said Raul. “By the way, may I assume you are calling from the United States?”

  Mack’s mind raced. His cell phone was untraceable. He could be anywhere. He answered the question in a strangely pressured manner. “No,” he said, “I’m not. I am American, but right now I’m calling from London.”

  “Is that your headquarters?”

  “Yes,” said Mack. “Right here in London.”

  “And now you must tell me the identity of your target because we can progress no further. I must assess the risk and the price. You must assess your priorities—the secrecy, or the desire to protect your money until the last moment.”

  “I cannot make that last step without further consultation with my people,” replied Mack. “I’ll need time. Maybe two or three days. But I’ll be back to tell you, one way or the other. Same time.”

  He snapped the phone shut and stood there on that lonely stretch of shoreline watching the Kennebec River flowing out toward the Atlantic. He dialed Harry Remson’s number and asked to meet him at the house as soon as possible.

  Harry arrived marginally after Mack and listened carefully to the account of the contact with the hit men from Marseille.

  “It’s a bit of a dilemma,” said Harry. “Plainly, I don’t want to hand over possibly a half-million dollars to a bunch of criminals who will vanish instantly and take the cash with them. And the alternative is to reveal my identity, which is more or less out of the question. If I’m going to do that, I might as well shoot the sonofabitch myself.”

  “I don’t think you need to reveal your identity,” said Mack thoughtfully. “But someone has to satisfy them that we are on the level, prepared to stand behind the contract.”

  “I was rather hoping, in the end, that might be you,” said Harry. “But I had not thought it through properly, not at that point.”

  “So which of the two options do you prefer?”

  “I’m not crazy about either of them,” said the shipyard boss. “But I’d rather risk the cash than my name. And I’d sure as hell rather risk the cash than have the goddamned yard closed down.”

  “Which I guess brings us to the even more difficult question of revealing to them precisely who it is we wish to have killed.”

  “You got any thoughts on that?”

  “Just one. We cannot get even to first base without telling them.”

  “And, of course, they might turn down the job as too risky?”

  “Yup. They might. But I do get the feeling these guys are principally interested in the cash. If it can be done and they think there’s a fair chance of getting away with it, they’re gonna give it the old college t
ry.”

  “Mack, I’ve mostly built my life on making tough decisions. And right now, I’ve just made one of ’em. We have to tell these guys who we want rubbed out. You didn’t throw the astronaut phone away, did you?”

  “Hell, no. It’s right here.”

  “Then let’s knock the ball right back into their court. And tell ’em now. We want them to hit Henri Foche. They can’t trace us. NASA gave me their word on that. Let’s go for it and tell ’em what we want.”

  “Okay. But I don’t want to do it from here in case Anne comes back. I’ll take a walk to a lonely spot down by the shore. And I’ll call you right back. If it’s a go, I guess we’ll need that e-mail address, so they can show us a plan.”

  “See you later, buddy,” called Harry as he climbed back into the Bentley and hurled gravel as he rocketed the slick dark-blue sports car out onto the deserted road.