Assassin's Game (45 page)

They both watched the three video screens, the most impressive being a feed from one of the local Geneva television stations. In a segment that had been running repeatedly for twenty minutes,
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lay broken in the water, the lake boiling around her like a frothing fire. Thick smoke, black in the city’s footlights, swirled wildly into the sky.

“But now…” Nurin said in a hushed whisper, “Hamedi has disappeared. Slaton has ruined everything.”

Veron stiffened—ears that had been assaulted by the thunder of a hundred battles were still sharp enough. “Slaton?
David
Slaton?”

“You know him?”

“I know of him—the
kidon
. He was a legend. But he was rumored to have been killed in England.”

Nurin shook his head. “No, Oded. He lives.”

Veron looked up at the monitor and stared at the incredible scene of destruction. “Then God help us.”

“No,” Nurin countered. “God help Ibrahim Hamedi.”

*   *   *

As Gardien de la Paix, intern level, Daniel Kammerer had been with the Geneva gendarmerie for a mere eight months. As a consequence of his junior status on the force, he was without fail given the most tedious and uninteresting assignments. At soccer matches he was relegated to standing at turnstiles to usher away the most blatant hooligans. At the recent wine festival he’d been assigned latrine duty, making sure the tipsy crowds relieved themselves in an orderly Swiss manner—lines respected, and no men allowed to appropriate the women’s portable toilets. And tonight, with a calamity of unprecedented drama playing out less than a mile away, Kammerer was stuck playing traffic cop, or more succinctly, shunting traffic away from the cordoned Quai du General Guisan toward Rue du Rhone and the safety of central Geneva.

He was diverting a delivery truck toward a side street, and enduring no small amount of honking and fist-shaking, when the event that would keep him writing reports until early the next morning began. The first thing that drew his attention was a shout. The words made no sense to young Kammerer because they came in a language he did not understand. The strident tone and volume, however, were enough to warrant a look. He right away saw three men standing midway along the Pont des Bergues footbridge, the second of the numerous spans connecting the left and right banks of the Rhone, and just west of the troubled Pont du Mont Blanc crossing where, according to the captain on the radio, more senior officers were searching for a missing Iranian diplomat in the aftermath of the spectacular attack.

Kammerer watched for a moment and heard more shouting. Two of the men, one dressed in black, were standing close to the bridge’s eastern side, backed against the hip-high metal railing. The third was ten steps away, centered on the bridge’s width and pointing an accusing hand at the others. In his short tenure on the force Kammerer had already witnessed his share of altercations, most involving alcohol. Yet there was something about this scene that seemed very different. Something that troubled him.

He abandoned his intersection, leaving the delivery truck at odds with a stalled motor scooter, and began closing the gap. He was twenty yards from the foot of the bridge, fifty from the rising dispute, when he realized that the man in the center of the bridge was not pointing his hand, but rather a gun. He also saw that one of the men backed to the rail was restraining the other with an arm wrapped around his throat.

Kammerer went for his radio, but the frequency was momentarily blocked by someone’s long-winded traffic narrative. He broke into a run, and shouted, “Police!
Arrêtez-vous
!”

The three men ignored him.

Kammerer finally heard a break on the frequency, but in the heat of the moment, with his heart thumping in his chest, the proper radio conventions and protocols escaped him—just as his instructor in training had said it would. But he remembered what she’d said next:
If you forget the correct way, just screw the procedures and say something
.

He did exactly that.

“Pont des Bergues, the footbridge!” Kammerer shouted into his microphone. “Officer needs help! I see a man with a gun, possible hostage situation!”

Thirty yards from the trouble, Kammerer slowed his pace and drew his service weapon. Before he had a chance to shout anything more, things began to happen in what seemed like slow motion. The man holding the hostage, the one clad in some kind of black suit, pushed his captive away and produced what appeared to be a gun of his own. Before he could raise it, the man in the middle of the bridge fired once, and then kept firing, a hail of shots that Kammerer would report as ten, but later be proven by ballistics evidence to be six. The man clad in black rocked once, twice, and then twisted back and flipped over the metal rail, disappearing into the river.

Kammerer pointed his weapon at the shooter, and screamed, “Drop the weapon!” He said it three times in all, once in each of the languages he spoke—French, English, and Swiss-German. One of them, he wasn’t sure which, seemed to work. Or perhaps it had more to do with the volume and situation. Whatever the impulse, the shooter set his weapon on the asphalt, backed away three steps, and very slowly dropped to his stomach and went spread-eagle.

“I’m a policeman!” the man shouted in English.

This Kammerer knew better than to take for granted. He kept his gun trained on the shooter as he closed in, kicked the gun a bit farther away, and cuffed the man, all while keeping an eye on the third man who was standing by the guardrail and looking very relieved. Help soon arrived in the form of three other officers, and things began to organize. Kammerer told the senior man, a captain, what had happened.

“Where is the other?” the captain asked. “The one who was hit?”

Kammerer led him to the rail and they both looked down. Fifteen feet below they saw nothing but the black Rhone rolling slowly westward, her rippled surface cold and empty.

FIFTY-FIVE

For the second night in a row Evita Levine rose in the elevator of the Isrotel Tower Hotel in Tel Aviv. Tonight the call from Zacharias had come late, and indeed caught her by surprise.

She had talked in a hushed voice from the kitchen and made the usual arrangements, yet on hanging up Evita thought she sensed something new in his voice. Or perhaps something that wasn’t there. His panting enthusiasm? In any event, she dressed quickly and told her husband, who was nodding off in his decrepit chair behind a television that was running, of all things, an ad for an aerobic exercise video, that her mother was ill and she was going across town to tend to her. Evita had always tried to avoid outright lies, but seeing her liaisons with Zacharias clearly drawing to an end, she tonight allowed herself the expediency of deceit.

The elevator opened, and she walked down the hallway wondering if it was time to break things off. This was a speech Evita had long rehearsed, and one that varied, based on her degree of disgust at the given moment, from a curt letdown to screamed accusations of sexual inadequacy. As she reached the familiar door, however, it all went out of her head. As good as that might feel, there was still reason to be cautious.

He answered her knock immediately, and the first thing she noticed was that he did not have a drink in his hand. The second thing was the way he backed away from her. His usual leer was replaced by a decidedly grim expression that seemed completely out of character. Evita felt the first pang of fear.

“What is it, darling?” She stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. She moved closer and put a soft hand around the nape of his skinny neck. “It’s not your wife, I hope. Has she found out?”

“Evita Levine,” he said, “you are under arrest for treason against the State of Israel.”

She stepped back with wide eyes and a slack jaw. Before she could respond two men appeared from nowhere and pulled her hands roughly behind her back. Evita had no doubt that life as she knew it had just ended, but as was often the case with those in the process of being handcuffed, the question that came to her lips was, “How did you find out?”

Mossad’s director of operations gave her a subdued smile. “Don’t you see, my dear? I’ve known all along.”

Evita stared at him dumbly. She thought of the nights they’d been together, the things she had done. How she had controlled him. She closed her eyes tightly until a vision of Saud came to mind, her forever-young sculptor with his strong hands and liquid gaze. Evita kept her eyes shut as if to hold that picture, and soon cold tears were streaming down her cheeks.

Six minutes later, and one hundred miles north of Tel Aviv, a second group of Mossad agents, these more tactically oriented, burst into a hotel room where the Hezbollah agent known as Rafi was sleeping off a daylong and well documented bender. The man stirred and, it would be later claimed in the after-action report, made a threatening move toward the nightstand drawer. Perhaps because of this, or more likely since the Mossad team was operating on Lebanese soil, no handcuffs were produced.

Forty nine-millimeter rounds later, the bloody body of Rafi looked as though it had been stapled to the splintered headboard.

*   *   *

Christine had spent the evening at Anton Bloch’s bedside in Saint Göran Hospital. She told the police it was because he was an old friend. Bloch, whose rapidly improving condition the doctors found encouraging, knew otherwise.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to turn on the television? There might be something new.”

She shook her head.

He had prevailed an hour earlier, and for ten minutes they witnessed the bloodshed in Geneva. The police gave few details, and the speculation by reporters was rampant, neither of which calmed Christine’s restless imagination. The few facts were damning enough: an attempt had been made on the life of Dr. Ibrahim Hamedi, leaving one assailant and a significant number of bodyguards dead. The scientist was missing. At that point, Christine had turned the television off.

Now she was pacing back and forth at the foot of Bloch’s bed, head low and arms crossed over her chest, and trying her level best to find hope.

“Sit down,” he said. “Can I order you some food?”

“I thought I was here for your sake.”

“I’m worried too, Christine. But I’ve had many nights like this. You simply can’t dwell on the worst-case scenario. Even if they’ve identified the shooter, they won’t release the name any time soon. Tomorrow is probably the earliest we can expect any good news.”

She stopped circling and went to his side. “Good news? From this?”

“It might not have been David,” he said. “Nurin could have sent another
kidon
to do the job.”

She probed his eyes. “Do you really believe that?”

His pause was too long for a lie. “No. But until we know something more accurate there’s no sense in—”

Assistant Commissioner Sjoberg walked through the doorway. He met Christine with a somber gaze that froze her in place.

“Have you seen what’s happening in Geneva?” Sjoberg asked, not bothering with any preliminaries.

“We saw something on television earlier,” Bloch replied. “A private yacht was attacked, and there was a shootout between an assassin and Hamedi’s security people.”

Sjoberg’s eyes remained fixed, and for a moment Christine thought he was going to chastise her, say something along the lines of,
You knew this was going to happen all along, didn’t you?
What he said was, “There was a second confrontation soon afterward on a nearby bridge. The Iranian scientist, Hamedi, turned up. He was being held hostage by a second assailant, a man dressed in black. One of my men, Detective Sanderson, shot and killed the suspect. It was your husband, miss.”

Christine’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the side of Bloch’s bed.

“Are you certain?” Bloch asked.

“The body went into the river. Until they’ve recovered it we can’t confirm his death. But as for the identity—yes, I’m sure. Sanderson interviewed Mr. Deadmarsh at length when he was here in Stockholm. He was positive. I can also tell you that Sanderson is an expert marksman. He was very close and wouldn’t have missed.”

The pain was unlike anything Christine had ever experienced. “No!” she whispered hoarsely. “Please, no!” Then, as Bloch put an arm around her, the torment arrived in full.

Oh, David,
she thought
, I did this to you!
Christine doubled over, folded her arms across her stomach, and began to sob uncontrollably.

*   *   *

Dr. Ibrahim Hamedi was quickly identified by the surviving members of his security contingent, which was now under emergency leadership after Farzad Behrouz had been confirmed as a fatality of the attacks, and soon all were being whisked to Geneva International Airport under a heavy police escort. There were tepid protests from quarters of the canton gendarmerie, the detectives there wanting to interview Hamedi as a witness, but a beleaguered Swiss foreign minister intervened, and when Hamedi’s chartered jet departed at half past eleven that evening there were substantial sighs of relief both in the air and on the ground.

The second man recovered from the bridge that night was taken briefly into custody, but soon confirmed to be a detective on the Stockholm police force. His gun was taken into evidence, and Detective Inspector Arne Sanderson, who seemed quite ill, did his best to answer questions from a hospital bed at Universitaires de Genève. He gave a precise, if broken, account of his engagement with the assassin, a story that the local detectives decided fit well with the evidence given by young Kammerer.

Rescue operations on Lake Geneva continued into the early-morning hours, and by sunrise every soul on
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’s passenger manifest
—
crew, guests, and the gendarme detail—had been accounted for. The casualty count reported in the morning papers was nine dead—eight from Hamedi’s security force and the assassin under the Pont du Mont Blanc. Ten passengers and crew members were reported injured, a number that insiders knew was optimistic, and forever left in question, due to the rapid departure of the Iranians. The flotilla of rescue vessels began to dissipate late that morning, and the investigative emphasis shifted to the only remaining loose end—a missing person, the man Officer Kammerer and two civilian witnesses had seen tumble fifteen feet down into the frigid Rhone River.