Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (20 page)

A bolt of adrenaline shot down his well-caffeinated spine, and Da Silva replied, “This is Atlántico Center. Say call sign and nature of your difficulty.”

An extended silence followed, and soon both questions were answered by his radar screen. Two hundred miles northeast, at the edge of the Atlántico Flight Information Region, Perseus Flight 10 was falling like a stone.

The terrified voice crackled again over the radio. “Perseus Ten! We have structural damage! We are—” Static interrupted the transmission. “We are in an uncontrolled descent and going down. Mark position!”

“Roger, Perseus Ten! Your position is noted. What further assistance can I give to you?”

The next transmission was garbled and completely unintelligible.

“Perseus Ten, say the number of souls and fuel on board.”

Da Silva waited. He watched the altitude readout sink through ten thousand feet. Soon after, it went blank. He keyed his microphone. “Perseus Ten, the nearest emergency field is Val de Cans, one hundred and ninety miles on a course of one-niner-five degrees.”

Silence.

“Perseus Ten, this is Atlántico Center, how do you hear?”

Da Silva repeated the question twice more, and on the second try he realized his supervisor was looking over his shoulder. The two exchanged a head shake. As was his duty, and with a trembling hand, the supervisor initiated the crash response.

*   *   *

A Brazilian Air Force helicopter, diverted from a training mission, was the first on scene ninety minutes later. The aircraft homed in on an emergency beacon and discovered a partially inflated life raft that was otherwise empty. With only enough fuel to remain on station for a matter of minutes, the crew came to a hover over water nearly eight thousand feet deep and carefully plotted the coordinates of a modest debris field.

It took the Brazilian Navy another hour to reach the drifting crash site. A Marinheiro class corvette, V19, arrived on scene, and without waiting for orders the nine-hundred-ton patrol vessel used its high-tech navigation suite and motivated crew to begin a search for survivors. They found the empty life raft, and also seat cushions, a yellow suitcase, insulation, and a dissipating oil slick that covered roughly a hundred yards. Everyone kept looking. The first casualty was spotted by a sharp-eyed lookout, a traumatized body that was quickly and respectfully recovered.

In those critical first hours little else was found, and soon an Air Force meteorologist gave bad news to those commanding the rescue operation. An unusually severe weather system was developing off the northern coast of Brazil, and forecast to churn unabated for a full three days. Sensing scant hope and measureable risk, the governing authorities made the safe call and, in a decision that would soon be revisited, ordered all search teams to stand down. Ships set new courses for home port, and aircraft returned to their bases as the search for survivors from Perseus Flight 10 was put on indefinite hold.

Though no one knew it at the time, it would take less than twenty-four hours to identify the recovered body as being that of the caretaker of Santarém–Maestro Wilson Fonseca Airport, a middle-aged man by the name of Umberto Donato who had reportedly hitched a ride on what was meant to be a maintenance test flight.

Less apparent, particularly in those frenetic first hours, was the significance of his untimely end.

*   *   *

Slaton walked with a pronounced limp, and was leaning on Astrid when they entered the only clinic in Klosters.

“I’ve had an accident,” he said to the receiving nurse in French.

“I can see that,” she replied as she brought up a wheelchair.

Slaton dropped into the chair with exaggerated heaviness.

He and Astrid were both wearing ski gear, complete with boots, jackets, snow pants, and goggles around their necks, all taken from the equipment closet of Krueger’s chalet. Slaton’s ensemble was oversized, but the poor fit was indistinguishable in such typically bulky outerwear. They’d gone to great lengths to build their appearances. Their ski boots were covered in snow, and clots of white peppered Slaton’s hair. A chunk of ice was jammed into the cracked amber goggles hanging around his neck, and his right hand was missing a glove. The final prop, carried by Astrid, was a bent ski pole with a broken tip—the last inch was snapped off cleanly, an effect that had taken Slaton three attempts in levering the late Walter Krueger’s poles into the gaps of his wooden deck.

The paperwork was minimal—unbridled tort law having yet to take hold in Switzerland’s winter playground—before the nurse wheeled him into an examination room and poised over a clipboard. “Where are your injuries?”

“Where are they not?” he replied with a good-natured grimace. “I was going too fast on the east run and went over a ledge. I’m sore everywhere, but my leg is the worst.” He pointed to a tear in his pants that was oozing blood, this manufactured by reopening the original wound, and necessary in any event to erase four days of healing. “I tangled with my pole—the tip jabbed me in the leg and broke off. I can feel something in my thigh.”

“Let’s have a look.”

Together they gingerly removed Slaton’s pants and thermal undergarment, also sized for Walter Krueger’s ample frame, and a doctor soon arrived. He was a gentle old man with silver hair, and wore a turtleneck sweater under a loose lab coat. With one look he declared an X-ray was in order, and it was undertaken with predictable efficiency. The results were telling.

“There are no broken bones,” he declared, “but you do have an object lodged in your thigh.” The doctor held the ghostlike picture for all to see, his pen pointing to something that might well have been the tip of a broken ski pole. For his part, Slaton was happy the X-ray image had a narrow field of view, as there were other bits of shrapnel lodged in other recesses of his body that defied simple explanation.

After some back and forth, it was agreed the best course of action would be to remove whatever it was on the spot. The procedure was straightforward, beginning with a local anesthetic and ending with six stitches.

“The wound will be sore for a few days,” said the doctor. “I can give you a prescription for pain medication.” Slaton had no intention of taking opiates, yet for appearance’s sake he gratefully pocketed the prescription.

The extracted object ended up in a small metal bowl, and the doctor took it to a sink and rinsed it off. He seemed to study it for a time, then brought it to Slaton held by the surgeon’s equivalent of tweezers.

“This doesn’t look like the tip of a ski pole,” said a man who would certainly know. “At least not any I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure what you’ve run across.” He held it out to Slaton. “A souvenir, perhaps?”

“Why not?”

The doctor dropped the extracted object into Slaton’s open palm.

Slaton had originally imagined a chip of stone, or perhaps a mangled bullet. What he saw was in fact similar in shape to the tip of a ski pole, a cylinder half an inch long, tapering to a point on one end. Almost a bullet, yet thinner, with what looked like a fabric thread trailing the back end. Slaton had never seen anything like it. Not exactly.

But he knew what he was looking at.

And it answered a great many questions.

TWENTY-NINE

“We have to leave Klosters,” Slaton said as they walked out of the clinic.

He took Astrid by the arm and they strode quickly past a pharmacy, then a cemetery full of neatly plotted graves, proof that even death did not obviate the Swiss compulsion for order.

“Leave?” she asked. “Why?”

“Because I know how those men tracked me to Zurich.” He took the metal slug from his pocket. “This isn’t a bullet or an accidental piece of shrapnel. It’s a flechette transmitter.”

“A what?”

“A tracking device, a special ballistic round that can be fired from a standard nine-millimeter weapon. I used something similar once, probably an earlier generation—my shot was from eighty meters, one round into the backpack of a Hamas motorcycle messenger. This one is different, more miniaturized, but the idea is the same. Once embedded it can be tracked from a drone or a satellite. Possibly a dedicated receiver that’s useful out to a kilometer or two.”

“They used this device to follow you?”

“It makes sense. The men who attacked me in Malta were professionals, and I couldn’t understand how they’d missed taking me out. Now it’s obvious—they weren’t trying to. They were only flushing me, making me lead them to Walter.”

Astrid said nothing. She looked utterly confused.

Slaton continued working things out aloud. “I think someone knew these accounts existed in Zurich, but didn’t know exactly where.”

“So … you unknowingly led them to Walter?”

“I was careless. Once I arrived in Zurich, they followed me using that transmitter, watched me walk into his office, and then made their move.”

Astrid came to a stop on the sidewalk. As she stared at him a stray gust swirled a cyclone of snow around them.

“You met with Walter yesterday?”

Slaton beckoned her to keep moving, and Astrid complied. “Yes, briefly.”

“You never told me that.”

“Didn’t I? We talked for a few minutes. Then I stepped out to the hallway while Walter was calling up my accounts. I spotted them coming.”

“What did you do?”

“I went into the lawyer’s office across the hall and told them to call the police. Then I escaped through a back window.”

She went silent, and Slaton realized what she was thinking.

“I would have helped him if I could, Astrid. They came fast, and there was no time to warn Walter. They had weapons, I didn’t. I also miscalculated—I assumed they were after me.”

“But you came back.”

“I saw you heading for the office … I felt like I had to do something.”

She looked at him critically, trying to piece everything together—this from a woman who lived in a realm of spreadsheets and conference calls, not tactical assault and deception.

Slaton surveyed the streets and passing cars with renewed alertness—the tracking device in his pocket might or might not still be emitting a signal. They crossed Landstrasse, in the center of town, the streets alive with trams and cars, groups of weary skiers hauling their gear down from the mountain. As they passed a travel agency whose window held an improbable display of a plastic palm tree basking under a heat lamp, Slaton reached into his pocket and touched the tiny transmitter that had less than an hour ago been inside him. He was sure it was his imagination, but the device seemed warm and inordinately heavy—like a beacon in his pocket.

Slaton noted a delivery truck ahead on the curb, an advertisement on the sidewall tying it to a distributor of medical supplies in Liechtenstein. As they came near he watched the driver step down from the truck’s rear loading door carrying a clipboard. The man disappeared inside a building, clearly ready to seal his paperwork with a signature.

Without breaking stride, Slaton tossed the transmitter into the half-empty cargo bay.

Astrid looked back over her shoulder, but Slaton ushered her forward.

“I think you’re right,” she said, “we should leave. But where can we go?”

Slaton had already considered the question and come up with two options. His first instinct had been to put the device in the chalet and take up a position nearby with the Glock. If the two men who killed Krueger arrived, he could extract payback, and possibly get information about the greater plan. It would be a bit of well-earned justice, and satisfying to a degree. Yet he saw problems with that scenario. Given how the previous two engagements had gone, there was a good chance Ben-Meir would bring reinforcements. On top of that, Slaton gave better than even chances that no one would come at all. If his thinking was right, the assassins of Zurich and Mdina already had what they wanted.

Which left only one choice.

“We have to find a place to stay,” he said, “one that’s far from here. The chalet is compromised—it’s no longer safe.”

“You think we are in danger?”

“I don’t know, but we have to assume the worst. The car is still the safest way for us to move. I’ll approach the garage carefully, and if anything looks suspicious we’ll find another way.”

Astrid, having grown increasingly steady since yesterday, seemed to waver. She opened her mouth, and he expected her to suggest once more that they call the police. What she said was, “If we can’t go back to the chalet, I should go buy a few things. Some food and toiletries.”

Slaton’s attention broke from the street, and he pulled her gently to a stop and met her gaze. After a moment, he said, “All right.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“The ski shuttle parking lot. Be in the departure line one hour from now.”

“One hour.” She turned to go.

“Astrid—wait.”

She turned back.

Slaton moved closer and reached a hand under the waist of her unzipped jacket. To anyone watching, they would appear as lovers engaged in a parting embrace. Astrid tensed visibly as his hand curled around her beltline and found the gun. He’d made her take it when they left the chalet—that X-ray image he could never have explained. He discreetly pulled the Glock clear and slid it under his own jacket. “I might need this.”

She pulled back and smiled nervously.

“One hour,” he repeated.

She nodded and turned away, crunching over a sidewalk paved in clouded ice. Astrid turned a corner and disappeared.

Slaton began a mental clock, setting thirty seconds as his minimum interval. In that time he analyzed the variables around him. He spun a casual half-turn, paused for a moment, then did it again—to turn 360 degrees on a sidewalk invariably looked peculiar. He saw the usual crowds of a fading afternoon. Otherwise, having already walked these streets twice today, the field of play was familiar. Nearing the thirty-second mark, Slaton amended his first estimate and allowed ten more seconds.

He then set out purposefully and followed Astrid.

THIRTY

The doorbell rang, and Christine found a Dominos delivery driver on her front porch. He was probably twenty years old, with fading acne and a barbell in his nose, wearing a shirt with the pizza chain’s logo. The kid slid a flat box out of an insulated container.