Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (11 page)

Christine nearly replied, but instead began stacking bedtime books that had spilled from the pile on the coffee table. It wasn’t the first time Mike had asked her out. He was a good-looking, once-divorced brain surgeon with a stellar sense of humor and a black Maserati. She’d turned him down every time.

“Christine, maybe I shouldn’t be the one to say it, but it’s been over a year. At some point you have to—”

“
I know
 … I know what you’re saying, Mike, and I appreciate the offer. It’s just that I’ve got Davy to deal with, not to mention work. Life just seems too complicated right now.”

Dr. Gonzales forced a nod. “Okay. I guess I’ll have to call the escort service again.”

She laughed. “Yeah, right. And thanks for understanding.”

Two cups of coffee later, she gave Mike an appreciative hug and saw him to the front door. When it closed she felt blue, and not wanting to mope around the house, she soon had Davy bundled up and strapped into his car seat.

“Groceries and the gas station, buddy. Another rockin’ night out with Mom.”

She sat next to him, kissed him under the chin, and got a throaty chuckle in return. There almost seemed something familiar in his voice, but Christine knew that was ridiculous. She stared at her son, as she often did, and wondered how things might have been different if she’d had the good sense to fall in love with a schoolteacher or a sales rep. Even a neurosurgeon. It was her regular guilt trip, misgivings that still came every day. The last time she’d seen David he had been faced with an excruciating choice. If he didn’t kill a particular man, he was told his family would never be safe. And what had she done? She’d made the situation impossible by adding her own ultimatum.
If you kill that man, don’t ever come back to me.

Up against that, David had gone into harm’s way. She never saw him again. There was a memorial service in time, three weeks after “Edmund Deadmarsh” was officially declared deceased by the Commonwealth of Virginia. She’d stood in the church vestibule holding Davy, and Annette was there, along with a handful of neighbors, and a priest who talked fast because he had a noon flight from Dulles to reach an ecclesiastical conference in Florida. The day was dreary and the crowd sparse, probably all one could expect from God and the world when a Protestant minister gives final blessings to a Jew in a place the dearly departed had called home for barely a year. To his credit, the priest had tried to prepare, asking for details on David’s good and kind life. Embarrassingly, Christine had fumbled for a response.
He killed a great many people, but would have been a terrific father if he’d survived his last assassination mission.
Hardly the stuff of a virtuous eulogy. Yet David
was
good—that much she knew and would keep in her heart forever. It was his situation, the realm in which he’d existed, that was hopelessly scored in sin.

Davy reached up from his car seat and put a finger to her face. Only when he touched the wetness on her cheek did she realize what had caught his eye and put a serious look on his face. She bent down and kissed him, again and again, until the throaty laugh returned. She gathered herself and took the driver’s seat, and minutes later had the car moving slowly along the snow-edged street. Though Christine had no reason to chronicle the fact, it was the first time in a week she had left home with her son.

Less than a minute after she was gone, the garage door at Ed Moorehead’s house opened. A dark Chevy backed out of the blackened garage, performed a neat turn in the road, and accelerated briskly in the same direction.

THIRTEEN

Slaton reckoned that
Ionian Star
would bypass the Tyrrhenian Sea and skirt the southern edge of Sardinia, likely passing no more than a few miles from the coastline. He estimated this near-landfall to occur roughly two hours before sunrise, after which could be expected a full day of blue water, followed by a second night, before the lights of Marseille would materialize on the misty horizon. Uneasy with the reactions he’d been getting from the crew, Slaton had no intention of waiting that long.

He rose at five that morning by the alarm in his head, a long-hewn skill that was more reliable than he sometimes wished. He filled the pockets of his jacket with his remaining cash and passports, and then stuffed the folded jacket into a plastic bag taken from the trash can in the head. Listening at the door, he heard only a muffled conversation from one of the nearby berths. Slaton eased the door open and slipped into the hallway. He’d advanced no more than two steps when a door ahead opened.

The second officer stepped into the hall, his long arm blocking Slaton’s progress down the passageway. He was clearly off duty, clad in sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt, and his black hair was matted on one side. “Where do you think you are going?” he asked.

Slaton stopped a few steps away. “Does it matter? I’m not bothering anyone at this hour.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” He looked pointedly at the bag under Slaton’s arm. “What have you got there?”

Slaton opened the bag enough to show him. “It’s my jacket. I got sick earlier and I made a mess of it. I need to find a washing machine.”

The seaman grinned the way seamen did when landlubbers lost their stomachs. His smile faded quickly. “It’s been dead calm since we left Valletta. And five thirty in the morning is a funny time to do laundry.”

Slaton didn’t reply.

“Marco!” the officer barked.

There was an interval of silence, followed by shuffling, and the door immediately behind Slaton creaked open. The bleary-eyed chief engineer stepped out in his underwear—the other man he had bought a beer for in the bar in Valletta. The man had streaks of shaving cream on his face and a cheap disposable razor in his hand. He wasn’t as big as the second officer, but a blunt jawline and ham-hock fists gave him the look of a pugilist.

The second officer stared at Slaton’s bag, furrows grooved into his thick brow. “I think we should have a look at that,” he said. “It’s my duty to be on the lookout for contraband.”

In that instant a line was crossed, yet Slaton gave no sign of it. Quite the opposite, his expression softened in an accommodating way and his body seemed to relax. Only the mineral-gray eyes might have suggested something else as they began to log new variables, updating the changes of the last thirty seconds. One sailor was standing behind him with a plastic razor in his right hand, another in front, the larger of the two. Both were casually dressed with little chance of a concealed weapon, yet the officer’s right shoulder was flush to the cabin door, his arm out of sight and held in a distinctly unnatural set. If there
was
a weapon, that’s where it would be.

With that Slaton’s appraisal was complete, confirming an advantage that contradicted what might be assumed. In spite of the fact that these men had lived on
Ionian Star
for months, if not years, Slaton had home field advantage. If they had walked this passageway a thousand times, neither had ever weighed it in the manner he had over the course of the last twenty-four hours. They did not grasp that the corridor’s narrow confines and thick-gauge steel walls could serve as weapons in themselves. They had never registered the delicate electrical junction overhead which, with one good pull, would create an electrical short to send the entire hall into pitch darkness. Neither man grasped the potential of the wall-mounted fire ax three meters away, the latch of which Slaton had discreetly loosened earlier, nor the thick fireman’s hose and valve that with one turn would discharge a hundred gallons of seawater per minute under high pressure. In a frantic moment, they would not recall that the nearest watertight door, perfect to seal an escape, was ten paces away after a 90-degree right turn at the first connecting hallway.

No,
Slaton thought without a trace of hubris
, these men see none of it because they don’t live as I do.
Belying his confidence, Slaton stood with a passive air. He would not force the issue.

Inadvisably, the Greeks did.

Slaton saw a brief meeting of their eyes, and noticed the second officer’s arm shift slightly behind the door. The sailor named Marco edged closer from behind. Almost imperceptibly, Slaton altered his stance, grounding the outside of his right foot firmly against the floor joint. He choreographed his first three movements, hoping these sailors were as thuggish and sleepy and simplistic as they appeared.

They were.

The door flew open.

Slaton focused absolutely on the big man’s right hand, and the expected knife did not appear. Instead a thick iron bar came flying toward his head. He dropped low, and the bar clanked into the steel wall. From a crouch, and with one shoulder grounded against the wall, Slaton lashed a full-weighted kick to the bigger man’s left knee. It ruined the knee, and consequently his balance. In the same plane of motion, Slaton pivoted and guided the falling officer’s head into a wall of half-inch-thick steel. There was an audible crunch, and the iron bar clattered to the floor.

Slaton lunged backward just in time as the predicted right-handed haymaker whistled past his ear. He found the iron bar with one hand as he lunged toward the engineer, driving with his legs, and put a shoulder into the man’s midsection that lifted him off his feet. The engineer hit the wall and spun a half turn before Slaton hammered the iron bar into the base of his skull. The man collapsed in a heap, the only sounds a lungful of expelling air and the rub of cotton over steel.

Twenty-four hours of planning. Six seconds of execution. The math of preparation.

Slaton stood stock-still. He watched and listened, every sense on alert. There were no shafts of light under nearby doors, no shout of alarm or call to general quarters.

He moved quickly, and in thirty seconds had both men piled onto the mattress in his closet-berth. The engineer was groggy, and would recover to appreciate his pain. The second officer seemed to be breathing, but was otherwise motionless. Slaton had no time for, nor interest in, either man’s prognosis. Outside the room he jammed the iron bar into the door handle, retrieved his jacket, and walked briskly down the corridor.

In the peaceful predawn hours that morning, with a dim glow footing the eastern sky,
Ionian Star
reached her nearest passage to the Sardinian coastline. Things were quiet on the ship’s bridge as two sleep-deprived men, the watch officer and an ordinary seaman, swilled coffee to stay alert. Another pair of crewmen roamed the decks, an apprentice engineer who was there for a smoke, and a junior man ending his four hours of night-watch duty. None of them noticed the seven-foot surfboard that fluttered thirty feet down from the aft quarterdeck into a flat obsidian sea.

Equally unnoticed was a black-clad figure that dropped in a free fall seconds later.

FOURTEEN

Hakim Ghazi stood on the bank of the Shatt Al Arab waterway with his head craned upward. His hands moved deftly to keep the reel of kite string taut. At his side stood two children, a boy and a girl, wonder in their eyes as they watched his every move.

Two hundred meters over their heads—perhaps a bit less as the upper wind was keeping the string at an angle—a bundle of forty helium-filled Mylar balloons stood clear in the cobalt morning sky over southern Iraq. Kites were more typical here, and it was perhaps the novelty of the balloons that held the children so enraptured. Ghazi had bought an entire case of the things a month ago from a shop in Al-Basrah, five kilometers north, explaining to the proprietor that he was planning a big birthday party for his three-year-old son. Ghazi, in fact, did not have a son. Not yet anyway. But perhaps someday.

“Can I do it yet, Mr. Ghazi?” asked the boy. He was holding a second reel of string that ran to the same bunch of balloons. Ghazi had given firm instructions to keep this line slack as the arrangement gained altitude.

“No, not yet. But it is almost time.” Ghazi pushed his round-framed glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, and addressed the other child, the boy’s older sister. She was twelve years old, and had been given the more demanding task. “Are you ready?”

The girl smiled and pointed Ghazi’s smartphone toward the sky. She tapped the screen once and said, “Yes, we are recording.”

“All right. Take in the slack.”

The boy complied, winding up the professional-grade kite spool until the line was nearly taut.

Here Ghazi paused, taking a moment to check all around. They were two miles from the nearest house and it was still quite early. All the same, the local farmers occasionally wandered from their wintering fig and olive groves. Across the waterway, a mile distant, were the disquieting shores of Iran. Ghazi had never seen anyone there—useless wetlands predominated that side of the delta—but everyone in this part of Iraq kept a wary eye toward the east. The most regular problem was ship traffic, oil tankers and freighters riding the slow brown waters, merged from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, to the Persian Gulf and seas beyond. He saw nothing today in either direction along the waterway.

Ghazi double-checked the wind, an estimate taken from a small but accurate windsock he’d planted near the center of the berm they were standing on. The little cone hung nearly limp, indicating surface winds below 5 knots. Finally, he double-checked the reference mark on his string, ensuring it was at the two-hundred-meter point. Satisfied, he began a countdown that was quickly echoed by two high-pitched voices.

Ten … nine … eight …

He always tried to make it fun for the children.

When their count hit zero, the boy yanked hard on the second string, and they all watched the plastic container beneath the balloons. It was fashioned from a five-gallon olive oil decanter, and when inverted by the pull of the string it dispensed its contents—a cloud of red liquid blossomed into the soft morning breeze.

“Follow it!” he said to the girl as the atomized liquid drifted toward the ground.

She tracked the red mist with the phone for a time, but then said, “I don’t see it anymore.”