Assassin's Code

by Ward Larsen

  Bloch leveled his most severe gaze. “Nurin has made his decision. Ali Samir must be stopped, and we cannot be certain the French will take timely action.”

  Slaton looked at Bloch, then Talia. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  Bloch said, “I realize you are no longer employed by Mossad, David … but yes. The new director of DGSI must be targeted. The potential for damage outweighs any risks.”

  “Not counting the risks taken by me.”

  Bloch frowned. “You should know that a second kidon is en route, in case you decline.”

  Slaton stared at his old boss. He stood and crossed the room to a nicely stocked wet bar. Pulling a water bottle from a bucket of ice, he twisted off the cap and tipped it back once. “When am I to kill him? Thirty hours from now? The ceremony when he takes command?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you your business, but it seems the obvious opportunity. You already have the right weapon.”

  Slaton felt strangely at ease. He was beholden to neither Israel nor France. He considered the reprehensible things Ali Samir had done during his time in Gaza. He considered the straight road the man had driven since. Then he remembered The Peninsula, and Uday and Sarah. He avoided dwelling on the discomforting intersections between Samir’s life course and his own. Finally, he thought about Christine, and what advice she would give him. Unequivocally, he knew what that would be.

  “No,” he said. “I won’t do it. I’m sure your other kidon is as good a shot as I am.”

  “I doubt that very much … but I’ll inform the director of your decision.”

  Slaton had never before turned a mission down, and while he felt no obligation to Mossad, his duty to Israel did leave room for regrets. The divergence he’d faced for so long was rearing up again. Duty to his family versus duty to his homeland.

  Bloch said something to Talia, but Slaton was so engrossed in his inward thoughts it didn’t register. She began working her laptop as Bloch said, “There is one other thing you should know before you leave.”

  He beckoned Slaton behind Talia so they could all view her screen. Slaton saw a black-and-white video of a woman peering through a small rectangular window. He couldn’t see her face, but he instantly recognized her by nothing more than body profile and the way she moved—he had followed Malika for some time after the shooting at Le Quinze.

  “Where was this footage taken?”

  “Not was,” said Bloch. “This is a real-time feed.”

  “You know where she is? Right now?”

  “Yes. We’ve known for the last—” Bloch checked his watch. “—six hours. It was only recently, however, that we realized who she was.”

  Bloch got up and walked to the room’s only window. There he drew back an unusually thick slat—Slaton suspected the window covering itself was some manner of electronic baffle against eavesdropping, augmenting the bulletproof glass. He followed and looked over Bloch’s shoulder.

  “Across the street,” said Bloch, “the building on the left. You can see a series of five narrow windows, no more than vents really, along the second floor. The center window is directly across the street from our main entrance.” He let the slat fall.

  Slaton gave him a questioning look.

  Bloch explained, “The violence France is experiencing is not without precedent. We have long understood that our Paris embassy is a target. We keep excellent surveillance inside the building, of course, but one of our brighter technicians reviewed the security plan and suggested monitoring the surrounding area. A small team was brought in for a visit, people very much like you—tactically oriented, one might say. We asked them where they would set up shop if they wanted to surveil, or perhaps even target our facility. The window I just showed you was everyone’s first choice. Until three months ago, the entire second floor of that building was a warehouse for a small technology company. When the company was bought out, the space fell vacant, and we took the liberty of installing a few cameras. There are others in adjacent buildings, and one or two on nearby rooftops.”

  “That bright technician is going places,” Slaton said.

  “I told her the same thing.”

  Slaton looked at Talia, who appeared uncomfortable. “It was only common sense,” she said.

  Slaton pulled the slat back a second time, and studied the lay of the surrounding area. Fragmented thoughts rushed through his mind, one by one falling into an intriguing pattern, like ten pieces from ten different puzzles joining miraculously. He challenged what was brewing in his head from every conceivable angle, and he did see flaws. Every plan had them. But the risks were far outweighed by opportunity.

  Bloch said, “We’ve been watching her very closely. So far there is no sign she’s carrying a weapon.”

  “She has one … something small,” Slaton said almost to himself. He kept looking outside, transfixed not by the scene, but by an idea.

  “If you like,” said Bloch, “we can arrange a departure for you through the back entrance. You can fade away unseen very easily. On the other hand, I assume you are carrying the handgun we provided. If you would like a silencer in order to—”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” said Slaton. “I’ll take out Baland at the ceremony.”

  Talia and Bloch looked at one another, then at Slaton.

  He dropped the slat, and said, “But I do it my way.”

  Bloch knew better than to argue. “What can we do to help?”

  Slaton actually grinned as he looked at Bloch. “To begin … I’d like you to come out on the sidewalk with me and have a cigarette.”

  The former director of Mossad was rarely surprised, but clearly Slaton had got the better of him. “Neither of us smoke,” Bloch said.

  “True. But Malika doesn’t know that.”

  SIXTY

  To drop a thousand-pound bomb from miles in the air is an undeniable act of brute force. To employ such a weapon with maximum effectiveness, however, requires a certain degree of artistry, particularly when four of them are to arrive at the same point in a span of two seconds.

  The artisans that night were two French Air Force pilots who’d been tasked to fly their Dassault Rafale fighters from an air base in Turkey, where they had been forward-deployed, into the arid skies above Syria. The tasking order had arrived unexpectedly—the most important ones always did—and appeared sourced from the highest levels. A high-value target had been identified in Raqqa. It was an unusual mission from the outset—the target was a well-known mosque, which would normally have been off-limits. That being the case, the pilots undertook their preflight planning with the greatest of care.

  The first variable, they realized, was that the walls of a house of worship would not be fortified like those of a military facility. Surveillance footage confirmed that there was but one level to the mosque, no basements or upper floors to complicate their equations. The blast was to be optimized to destroy equipment, electronics apparently, although any personnel inside were considered fair game. There was the usual concern for civilian casualties in surrounding buildings, but no specific limitations had been placed on the strike. This told the pilots two things: Whatever lay inside was important, and someone was very certain of their intelligence. Taken altogether, the pilots agreed that a payload of four one-thousand-pounders was just the thing.

  The mission began smoothly, and the Rafales were eight miles distant when the target came into view on their weapons displays. Gliding through the black void of night four miles aloft, the pilots set a shallow dive with their jets arranged in an offset wedge formation, roughly half a mile apart. They hit their “pickle” buttons almost simultaneously, and for eighteen seconds the four bombs guided and glided toward their target. They ran as two sets of two, the lead bomb in each pair 650 milliseconds ahead of its partner. All that was straightforward, like four batted balls heading for the same fence in a ballpark, notwithstanding that their inertial and GPS guidance packages would cause them to converge on one particular seat.
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br />   Greater nuance lay in the fusing. The leading bombs—they had been dropped in pairs to protect against a lone failure—were fitted with delay contact fuses. Fifty milliseconds after penetrating the outer wall, which would place them well within the void of the main building, the bombs would unleash their fury. The trailing projectiles operated on an entirely different principle. They would guide initially to a point slightly beyond the first pair, and assuming they survived the shrapnel and debris sent up by their predecessors, which was highly likely, radar altimeters would begin a brief countdown. Ten meters above the ground, and centered on the original blasts, firing signals would be cued and airbursts initiated. Quite literally, explosions on top of explosions.

  That was exactly how it all happened. The former mosque in Raqqa, and present home of the Islamic State Institution for Public Information, was obliterated in less time than it took to tie a shoe.

  The most unforeseen consequence—fortuitous or not, depending on one’s perspective—began ninety seconds before the first bomb arrived, when a man walked out of the targeted building. The caliph of the Islamic State was two streets removed from ground zero when the blasts struck home, and he was knocked flat on his ass by the concussive wave. As a stunned but uninjured caliph was picked up by his security detail, everyone had a good idea what had just happened. No one mentioned the irony of what stood between them and the mosque: Shielding them from the explosions was the neighborhood’s oldest and most stalwart building, an Armenian Catholic church.

  Less fortunate were those inside the mosque, including the entirety of the governing Shura Council. They had gathered at the mosque for a briefing on their faltering computer networks, and chief among them was ISIS’ beleaguered military commander. Unlike the caliph, Wael Chadeh never knew what hit him.

  SIXTY-ONE

  The hard rain had gone to drizzle, but the wind refused to yield. Slaton and Bloch stood hunched on the sidewalk in front of the embassy, illuminated in the wash of a subdued streetlight. Their collars were turned up and the wind was at their backs. A pack of Marlboros had been donated by a security screener, a matronly woman who was happy to rescue the visiting contingent from an unnamed sister agency in Tel Aviv who professed a dire need for nicotine.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve done fieldwork,” Bloch groused, putting the cigarette between his meaty lips.

  “It comes back fast,” said Slaton.

  “Remind me why I am standing in the rain at one thirty in the morning.” Bloch took a long draw, and immediately stifled a cough.

  “Because I need a decent night’s sleep.”

  Bloch stared at him a few beats, and in the interval a cab rushed past and splashed mud onto his black Oxfords. “You know, I’ve made my living getting into people’s heads. I’m good at sensing motivations, predicting what men and women will do in given situations—so good that they made me director of Mossad. I must tell you, David, over the years … you have vexed me more than any of our enemies.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. Chances are, it’s why I’m still around.” He paused before expanding on why they were outside. “I want Malika to know I’m still here. I want her to stay awake all night watching this front door. While she does, I’ll be inside getting some much-needed sleep.”

  “And in the morning you will be sharp and she will be fatigued? Do you really need such an advantage to eliminate her? We have a live video feed on this woman—constant eyes on an unsuspecting target. I know it is your rule to seize every advantage, but this seems extreme even by your standards.”

  Slaton looked at Bloch, and could not contain a grin. “I appreciate your confidence in my talents for the dark arts. But there’s more to it than that—I’ll explain later. For now, I have two requests. I’m going to need a fresh phone. And tomorrow I want some help. You said Nurin had sent another kidon, in case I balked at the job.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he here in Paris?”

  Bloch smiled this time, enjoying a small victory. “She is in the neighborhood.”

  Slaton smiled back. He’d helped train two female shooters in his time with the service. They’d been among the steadiest he’d worked with. “Perfect. I may need her assistance.”

  The former director dropped his cigarette on the ground before reaching its end, and snuffed it out with a toe. “Approved. But whatever game you are playing, David, remember … Israel is to be kept at a distance.”

  “You can tell Director Nurin the feeling is mutual.”

  A gust of wind whipped up the urban valley, and Bloch looked skyward. “Is there anything else?” he asked, irritation back on display.

  “No, you should go inside now. Nobody stands out in the rain after their smoke is done. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

  Bloch disappeared through the front entrance.

  Slaton kept his free hand in his pocket, a perfectly natural stance on a cold and rainy night. The true reason was more purposeful. Talia was monitoring the room across the street on the live feed. While they’d still seen no evidence of a weapon, if Malika suddenly produced one and raised it to the window, Slaton had to know immediately. Warning would arrive as a vibration to the phone in his hand.

  He never looked directly at the window in question, but he knew exactly where it was. Indeed, it was the focal point of geometry running through his head. Angles and distances to every curb, trash can, and parked car, and one wintering urban sapling, particular attention given to what would still be here in the morning.

  He looked up and down the street, a few last mental snapshots captured, then took his final draw. Slaton had never been a smoker, but like many things he was not genuinely interested in, it kept a place in his repertoire. He knew how to operate bar-code scanners in stores, how to run a jackhammer, how to bus a restaurant table. He could drive a front-end loader, and knew that hotel vans typically departed lobbies at the top of every hour with drivers who didn’t give a damn whether you were a guest when you tipped in advance. Smoking was core curriculum, and he could carry it off like a pack-a-day regular.

  He looked up at a mist that swirled down through the streetlight’s aura and brushed against his face. The moisture felt good, almost cleansing. He tried once more to imagine why his plan wouldn’t work. Like Bloch, he too was a student of human habits and motivations, although Slaton’s view was more narrow than most—he took things only as far as necessary to put a specific vital organ under a gun sight for the necessary few seconds. Physical vulnerability—that was his customary endgame.

  Tomorrow, however, was going to be altogether different.

  * * *

  Fifty yards away, at the window across the street, Malika watched the man in the dark jacket intently. Even through the darkness and rain, she could tell it was the kidon—this was the third time she had seen him.

  At the moment he was in an extremely vulnerable position. She hadn’t expected that. He appeared relaxed, pacing casually back and forth across the same few yards of concrete. When his cigarette reached its end, he didn’t light a second. Probably because of the rain.

  Within seconds of flicking away the stub, he turned back inside, and Malika watched him disappear into the glowing warmth of the embassy lobby. She checked her watch and noted the time. Then she settled back, took a deep breath, and got as comfortable as she could on the cold concrete floor.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Six hours later Slaton walked out of the embassy into an indifferent morning. The wind and rain were fading, trying to hold on, as the sun hid behind the clouds. He carried a small attaché borrowed from the former chargé d’affaires, a man whose current status at the embassy was indeterminate, which told Slaton he was certainly Mossad. The attaché was quite empty, but it advanced the image he was after—a man on the move who had business at hand.

  Slaton had gone no more than ten paces on the puddled sidewalk when he put his new Mossad-issued phone to his ear as if answering a call. He stopped abruptly, the way pe
ople did for calls of such importance that walking at the same time was inadvisable. He meandered back and forth on the same square of cement for a full two minutes, then pocketed the phone and resumed his westerly trek.

  He kept a casual pace, and acted out a simple countersurveillance routine along the way. He arrived at his hotel some thirty minutes later, damp and disheveled and self-assured. At the front desk Monsieur Aranson of Sweden engaged the concierge in a brief back-and-forth about the weather, and she asked if he was enjoying his stay. He assured her that he very much was, thank you, and bid her a pleasant good morning before rambling across the lobby and disappearing into the rising stairwell.

  As soon as he was out of sight, Slaton broke into a vertical run, taking the steps three at a time. Inside his third-floor room seconds later, he quickly retrieved the Arctic Warfare Covert from its hiding place, and also the Glock 17. He set the Glock on a table and removed a small screwdriver from his pocket—another acquisition from the embassy. With a deftness that would have impressed any surgeon, Slaton broke down the gun, removed the firing pin, and had the Glock reassembled in less than a minute. The screwdriver and pin went into his pocket. He palmed a full magazine into the weapon, then racked the slide to charge a round into the chamber.

  The handgun he placed in the attaché, and that went unlocked onto a midlevel closet shelf. He went to the room’s large main window, outside of which was an exterior fire escape, and unlatched the window lock, then nudged the frame ajar a fraction of an inch. He carried the roller bag with the sniper rifle to the door, then paused to study the room. Struck by one imperfection, he went back and repositioned one of the two upholstered sitting chairs, pushing it against the wall by the window at a forty-five-degree angle. Returning to the door, he again looked over the room and was satisfied.

  Slaton shouldered into the hall with the roller bag in hand. He locked the door behind him and made his way to the stairwell. Before reaching the lobby, he diverted into a rough-edged hall and walked a weaving passage through the service corridor—he had learned on the day he arrived that it led to a back door. Luck was with him, and he encountered no hotel staff along the way.