Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (2 page)

Within a week of the first deaths, another dozen patients arrived with like symptoms. Dr. Kibrit knew from his interviews that there were others who’d been affected, men, women, and children who refused to come to the clinic. This he understood all too well. The Aadra clinic was run by the government, such as it was, and therefore subject to widespread suspicion. Indeed, in this corner of the world—a region that seemed to have cornered the market on mindless violence and ethnic cleansing—public suspicion ran rampant that outbreaks of illness were only some new method of terror, a weapon introduced by one tribe in order to thin the ranks of another. Dr. Kibrit considered that he might be seeing the results of a chemical or biological weapon, something the clinics had been told to watch for, yet none of the symptom profiles seemed to match.

The clinic’s rudimentary lab produced no shortage of results: aplastic anemia, low platelet and red blood cell counts, all correlating to precipitous drops in blood pressure. Unfortunately, when summed with his clinical findings, the lab data only added to Dr. Kibrit’s disheartening volume of ambiguity. He elected to not share this diagnostic vacuum with his hard-working staff, nurses and technicians whose efforts had been nothing short of heroic. Things continued to degrade, each day bringing more patients, more deaths, and increasingly conflicted test results.

It was the end of the second week when a young man arrived from Beirut on a mission to repair the clinic’s only viable X-ray machine. A beleaguered Dr. Kibrit let loose his frustrations, and over endless cups of sweet tea he vented while his guest listened politely.

The younger man was a trained health physicist. He had an earned PhD, with a thesis in medical physics, and had been hired to calibrate and repair machines that either contained radionuclides or emitted radiation. There were few such devices in this part of the world, and none of the more advanced models: no radiation therapy with intensity modulation or image guiding techniques. But there was enough to keep one educated man busy—particularly when he was responsible for Syria and Lebanon in their entirety, and the bulk of Jordan.

After two hours, a disconsolate Dr. Kibrit went back to his work, leaving the young physicist both highly caffeinated and pensive. Regarding Dr. Kibrit’s story, the man thought, but did not say, that the collection of symptoms presented was not altogether inconsistent with radiation poisoning. His interest piqued, the young man performed his own investigation into the outbreak, one that was simple and highly focused. It took no more than one bedside to get positive results.

By that time the physicist’s caffeine was ebbing. His thoughtfulness, however, was not. At the nurses’ station—with Dr. Kibrit’s blessing—he requested and was given a list of addresses for every patient involved in the epidemic. In a quiet side room he used his tablet computer to plot the addresses on a map. The subsequent collage of red dots only hardened his convictions. He quickly repaired the clinic’s X-ray machine—a vacuum tube on the fritz—and bid the staff of Aadra’s besieged clinic good-bye and good luck.

In his rattletrap car he drove eight kilometers north to the village of Al Qutayfah. He navigated to the densest grouping of dots on his map, and at the southern edge of Route 7, where the gravel siding relented to dust, he found a collection of small farmhouses. Pulling the car off the road, he presented himself at the first residence, claiming to be a hospital representative on a mission to return personal effects to the families of the recently deceased. He spoke tactfully and with respect to a frightened old woman, who told him she was happy to at last see some kind of official interest in the neighborhood plague. Three front doors and two cups of tea later, by a combination of gossip and logic, the physicist suspected he was nearing ground zero.

He found it at the fourth house—if five hundred square feet of corrugated tin and scrap lumber could be referred to as such. The place was completely vacant, which he suspected was for the best. The physicist nudged the door open with his toe, and saw unwashed dishes in a tub and clothing on the floor—signs of a hasty departure. In his hand was a small case, inside which were not pairs of old shoes or wedding rings, but rather a small and very accurate dosimeter, the same one he had used at the clinic bedside. He began at the kitchen and found a high radiation exposure rate, enough to cause him to wish he had brought protective equipment.

Analysis of the rest of the home was less convincing, and so he moved outside. On the path behind the house the meter again went wild, particularly in a small ditch that had been graded to drain the property. He gazed over the place, and in the distance saw row after row of salvaged machines and cars in various states of disassembly, which only deepened his suspicions. The physicist followed his dosimeter probe into a workshop, and then out the back door. There, in late morning air that carried down from the Lebanon Mountains and across the Bekaa Valley, an old wheelbarrow leaned against a wall, and in the shade of a towering acacia tree he saw what he was after.

Or at the very least, what he expected. If there was a hesitation, it was brief.

The man, whose name was Moses, knew precisely what he had to do.

ONE

Twenty months later

Centered on the sun-soaked island of Malta, the ancient city of Mdina stands tall and brusque, a defiant island of brown whose vaulted bastions amplify the country’s most prominent hill. Though incorporating no more than one square kilometer, the palaces and narrow streets of the medieval city have stood the tests of a thousand harsh summers, dozens of military campaigns, and in a more contemporary test of endurance, the annual invasion of a million tourists each year. For all these reasons, Mdina is a place in constant need of repair.

Most in demand are good stonemasons.

On the falling afternoon, with a classic portrait of burnt orange clinging to the western sky, a solitary mason put his finishing touches to the foot of an arch near the Nunnery of St. Benedict. The repair, a reissue of a simple decorative façade that bore no weight, was the kind of touch-up that had played out regularly over the last millennium. And while the cement was perhaps a more uniform mix than the mud used by craftsmen of past eras, the hammer and chisel the mason used to shape the flat faces and fitted angles were virtually unchanged, notwithstanding the likes of rubberized handles and carbide tips. Stoneworkers in other towns on the island had relented to more contemporary instruments—heavy masonry saws and compressed-air power tools—yet such advances were not favored in the Old City. The patron who today commissioned repairs here, a city formerly administered by the likes of knights and noblemen, was the Maltese Ministry for Tourism, Culture, and Environmental Affairs, a body with an unyielding eye for absolute authenticity. In a curious twist of fate, the fact that this craftsman was not a native Maltese was squarely in line with tradition. Having existed for so long at the geographic crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, the time-tested stonework of Malta had been raised almost exclusively by journeyman masons.

The man stood back to regard his work, a chisel and damp cloth in his calloused hands. After a ten-hour day he was gray-suited in sweat and dust, the only exception being a pair of clear gray eyes, and tiny streams on his face and neck where rivulets of sweat had washed the skin clear. The heat and sun were a constant here, although in early February the Mediterranean winter was at the height of its relief. All the same, the city seemed to draw a long breath as its shadows leaned to darkness.

The mason compared the column he’d repaired to its sister four meters away. It was good, he decided. The cuts were accurate, and the color of the stone a reasonably close match. Those effects he could not simulate were the ones carved by time—the gentle erosion of mortar channels, edges nicked by handcarts, stains from spilled wine. These would come in due course.

He bent down with his hammer and chisel and made his mark next to another, an artisan’s signature that had, he guessed knowledgeably, most likely been hewed sometime in the late sixteenth century. That done, he began packing his tools in a hand case. Tomorrow he would regard his work in better light, perhaps make a few alterations, and wash things down for the last time. And then? Then he would move on to his next job—two collapsed pillars in the Catacombs of St. Paul. For a mason, Mdina and the surrounding city of Rabat were not a series of day jobs—they were a career.

A spindly young boy scurried up the street with a broom in his hand and stopped next to the mason.

“All done, sir?” he asked in Maltese.

The mason kept to the language he’d picked up over the last months, if only in a colloquial sense. “Done for the day.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a two-euro coin, and flipped it through the air. The boy snatched it cleanly.

“When you’re done cleaning up, take the tools with you. Meet me tomorrow at the Catacombs.”

“The Catacombs? That is very far from here, sir.”

The mason grinned and reached into his pocket. His second coin was a one-euro denomination, and his second toss less accurate. Not that it mattered—the kid caught it effortlessly. Indeed, in the three months of their association he had never once missed. He was ten or eleven years old, the mason guessed, although never having raised a child himself he couldn’t say with any authority. They didn’t know each other’s names because neither had ever asked. Sir and Kid sufficed, both words conveniently shared between English and Maltese. “Kid” was a straight bean of a child with a mop of curly black hair, and he invariably appeared in worn tennis shoes and a shirt with a corporate sponsor’s name on the front and a large number on the back. He loved soccer with a passion, and lived in the Old City with his mother. That was all the tradesman knew—indeed, all he wanted to know. The kid did what he was asked to do, smiled more often than not, and showed up on time.

He was the perfect employee.

“
El Clasico
is tonight,” the boy said, referring to the semiannual clash of Spanish soccer giants Real Madrid and Barcelona. “You should watch. Their new forward is better than Messi.”

“I’ll try to catch it,” said the mason as he raised his ladder against the crest of the arch for the day’s final inspection.

“There is a man up the street watching you.”

The mason stopped what he was doing. “A man?”

“He has been there since I brought you the water.”

“The water? That was two hours ago.”

“Yes.”

A long pause ensued. “And you think he’s watching me?”

“Oh, yes.”

The mason stood very still, his eyes locked on the sturdy stone arch. It began as no more than a tremor, a cautionary jolt he’d felt twice since arriving on the island. Once it had been a gunshot out of a quiet night, probably a misguided celebration from some drunk who didn’t realize that bullets sent into the sky still come down. The second occurrence had greater basis, a team of policemen with weapons maneuvering outside his rooming house—as it turned out, there to raid a nearby apartment where a drug dealer had bunkered up. In both instances he’d felt the surge of adrenaline, but waited with well-practiced patience until the threat was disproved.

Now he did it again. In the ensuing minutes of uncertainty, the mason went through the motions of his business. “Where is he exactly?” he asked the boy, his hand flicking away a bit of loose mortar.

“You can’t see him from here—he’s near the Cathedral Museum, sitting in the courtyard behind the gift shop. It was very shady there this afternoon, many customers. Now he is the only one remaining, and still watching you through the open door of the shop. I walked past twice to be sure.”

“He’s alone?”

“Yes. But I saw another tea cup on the table.”

Right then, the mason decided the kid had a future. One that didn’t involve kicking a ball.

The boy smiled eagerly. “You want me to go look again?”

“No,” said the mason quickly.

He considered his position. The archway he was repairing was situated at a T-shaped intersection. He glanced ahead, along the length of Triq San Pawl, and saw the gift shop with the open front door. In the opposite direction the street reached its southern end near the Xara Palace, and the third leg of the intersection was made by Triq Mesquita, a narrow cobbled path that ran toward the Piazza Mesquita. The walls bordering all these streets ran the same, indeed like every other street in Mdina, thirty-foot tan stone faces with minimal ornamentation. There were no windows at street level, and the doors came at odd intervals, brilliant blue and red invitations that the mason recognized as no more than temptations to chance—doors here were famously sturdy, and some had been bolted shut for centuries. He admonished himself for not knowing in advance which were accessible. In years gone by he would never have made such a mistake.

He turned to face Triq Mesquita. The crowds had thinned considerably with the setting sun. A street vendor was pushing his handcart home for the day, and an old man walked an old dog, a pronounced resemblance in their uneven gaits.

He spotted the second man easily.

He was standing with a gelato, his back against a wall, a stone-sober image in a spill of stray light. On appearances he wasn’t Maltese, and he showed no apparent purpose beyond scooping ice cream from a cup. He was dressed in khaki trousers and a loose-fitting shirt, dark wraparound glasses in the waning sunshine. He was tall and thickly built, with fair skin and hair, the trim a close burr-cut that would have passed any military inspection. What concerned the mason most, however, was how the man wore his shirt—free and untucked. It might have been a carryover from an unseasonably warm afternoon, or perhaps he’d eaten too many gelatos and his trousers were tight.

Yes,
the mason reasoned,
it could be any of that.

He turned and looked to the third leg of the T, the far end of Triq San Pawl. He saw a mother and a small girl walking toward him in a flurry of skipping legs and bright fabric. Two men walking in the opposite direction wore matching yellow bibs of the Cleansing Directorate, the pair deep in an animated conversation whose words and cadence were clearly Maltese. The mason saw no one on this street that he could stamp as a threat, yet he noted a number of intersections and alcoves. The kinds of places he might once have sought himself.