Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (3 page)

Altogether, three avenues of escape—two covered and the third in question. The first possibility was that he was being overly suspicious, sensing another false alarm. If so, no reaction was necessary. The second option: he was being watched. This implied trouble, though not necessarily a threat. The third possibility was more problematic, and one that demanded immediate resolution.

“I need you to do something for me.” The mason took the broom from the boy’s hand. “I’ll clean up. I’d like you to take the tools and walk toward the gardens. Keep a good watch until you make the turn onto Triq Inguanez.”

Kid looked at him quizzically.

“You have good instincts—trust them. If you see any other men up the street, anyone who looks out of place, put the toolbox on the ground as if it’s too heavy, then switch hands and keep going. Don’t look back at me, and whatever you do, don’t stare at anyone.”

The boy nodded.

“If there is someone else,” the mason continued, “don’t go home tonight. Do you have a relative who lives nearby?”

“An uncle in South Rabat, near the old seminary.”

“Good. If it comes to that, go straight to his house and stay inside. Tomorrow take my tools and sell them. You know what they’re worth.”

The boy nodded again, a teasing smile at the corners of his mouth. The prospect of a good payday? the mason wondered. Or was it the implications of what he was being asked to do? He would lay odds on the latter—the excitement of his first op plan.

“And if there is not anyone else?” the kid asked.

“Then meet me at the Catacombs tomorrow morning. And don’t be late.”

The kid grinned openly at that. He was never late. He picked up the tools with a show of effort and waved, adding a loud, “
Arrivederci,
sir.”

The mason turned toward the ladder. He climbed two rungs and began running his hand over a stone cornice. He glanced when the boy was thirty meters away, then again at fifty. He was just past the alcove of the Nunnery of St. Benedict, standing in a strong shaft of light, when he set down the tool case. The kid shook out his arm as if it was cramped, then picked up the case with his opposite hand. He walked no more than ten steps.

Then he did it all over again.

TWO

For the second time in his life David Slaton had become careless. The first had occurred not long ago, at the end of a problematic year in Virginia. He had gotten too comfortable, and his wife and child had nearly paid the ultimate price. He vowed never to let that happen again, and carried through on his pledge by the most tried and true method—distance.

For fourteen months Slaton had taken up a quiet and solitary existence in Mdina. He never made international phone calls and avoided the Internet. He rarely left the city, and had not once ventured outside the country. His lone contact with the outside world was an obscure e-mail account he rarely accessed, and then only from random Internet cafés across the island. He rented a small flat and made a few casual friends—to be a complete recluse would only raise suspicion—and allowed the occasional dinner out, even then only during off-hours. As far as he could tell, he’d blended in perfectly. Or as perfectly as a six foot two, sandy-haired stonemason could manage on a Mediterranean island.

Someone had found him anyway.

He knew how it had happened—his mind-set. That healthy mistrust so essential to his former life had gone slack. He had become a stonemason. Slaton knew because he went to sleep each night with fading thoughts that did not involve safe houses or zeroed sight pictures. Now it was corner joints and rubble veneer, and in the morning vague dreams recalled of a family he would never know. At some point, he had stopped taking precautions, the result being that a ten-year-old boy had seen what he should have seen. Four men covering all the angles.

The questions of who they were and why they were here he discarded for the moment. Of far greater relevance were the where, when, and how of the situation. The answers came quickly.

A man emerged from the shadows of the café, tall and lean, with wireless glasses over high cheeks and a patch of black chin whiskers. He moved with the air of a hurried mortician. Slaton thought he looked familiar, although in that moment he couldn’t put a name to the face. He next spotted the two in the alley, where the kid had alerted. This pair were swarthier, two-hundred-pound sacks of muscle with comparable squat builds. The most discriminating feature between them was the color of their shirts—one drab green, the other mud gray. The crew cut was still there on Triq Mesquita. Slaton watched him scrape the last gelato from his cup before taking to the cobble street.

Was there a chance they were here to talk? Could they want to hire him?

No, Slaton decided. He had never been a mercenary, and anyway, such negotiations would not require four men. He gave up pretenses and looked directly at each man, one by one. If their pace did not alter, there might still be a peaceful way out. All four began moving more quickly. They dodged passersby with quick, purposeful strides, and when one put a hand under his shirttail the charade was officially over. Slaton was watching a well-orchestrated takedown, and from the worst point of view.

They were doing a good job of it. The time of day was ideal, indeed when he would have chosen. Minimal street traffic led to fewer bruised elbows, fewer bystanders to accidentally screen a shot. The light was nearly gone, but adequate for a marksman and offering the target no cover of darkness. It was also the time of day, Slaton knew, that shift changes took place at police departments, leading to a period of sluggish response. The opposing pincer along Triq San Pawl was nicely staggered, the twins shouldered against the eastern wall, and the man with the glasses keeping to the west. Slaton recognized this for what it was—an attempt to deconflict firing lanes. They were smooth and well-coordinated. Certainly disciplined. In sum, they were very much like him.

They were assassins.

Slaton found himself under a stone arch and surrounded by high walls. He had no weapon with which to respond. With his closest pursuer a mere thirty yards away, he saw only one viable option. He scrambled up the ladder.

He was halfway up when the first shots rang out, followed by shouting all around. The wooden rung near his head shattered, and Slaton bypassed the step and vaulted upward, launching himself the last few feet onto the top of the arch. A kick sent the ladder tumbling sideways to the ground. It gave them a way up, of course, but hopefully bought precious seconds.

More shots echoed, and bullets chipped stone all around him. The arch was three feet wide, enough to cover him shoulder to shoulder if he hugged close and kept his face planted. But he had to move. They would soon find elevation, better angles that would leave him exposed. The rooftop behind him was blocked by a knee wall, but straight ahead the arch blended perfectly into a flat roof. Slaton fast-crawled on his elbows and knees, bullets pinging into the stone on either side. Then the first impact—a vicious bite in one thigh.

He kept moving.

Reaching the relative safety of the roof, he rolled until his attackers no longer had line of sight, then rose to a crouch and ran. His right thigh hurt like hell. He dashed right, paralleling Triq San Pawl, as the gunfire gave way to shouted commands—he didn’t understand the words, but the accent was distinctly eastern European. Slaton kept to the center of the roof for cover and at the first side street encountered a ten-foot chasm. He jumped across in full stride and landed in a heap, gravel grinding into his hands and arms. He scrambled to his feet and a shot rang out, the round pinging into a water tank to his right. Slaton glanced back and saw the crew-cut soldier—he had climbed the ladder and was giving chase. The others were likely below, moving by his instructions. The high ground that had briefly protected Slaton would quickly become a snare, limiting his avenues of escape.

But he was not without advantages. Slaton knew a great deal about rooftops, as all men with his training did. He was also on familiar terrain, and no amount of reconnaissance on their part could match the local knowledge he’d acquired by living and working in these neighborhoods for nearly a year. He found the place he wanted, a raised stairwell shaft with a crumbling stone exterior—the very façade he had been hired to repair last October. Slaton knew the door would be open because he had personally removed the old rusted lock, and the owner, who enjoyed stargazing with his mistress, had insisted he not replace it.

Slaton burst inside and slammed the door shut behind him. The stairwell beckoned, but he paused and studied his surroundings. Over his head a pair of thick wooden beams supported the vaulted tile roof, and the doorjamb was sided by a vertical series of cavities where he’d removed the ancient hinges of the original door. Slaton put a foot into the first notch, testing. He gripped a higher one with his hand, and lifted himself up. Seconds later he was perched high in the rafters.

It took ten seconds.

Slaton heard a one-sided conversation, this time in hushed, heavily accented English.
“No contact. Do we pull back yet?”
A pause, followed by more words that were indecipherable. The man outside was talking over a tactical comm unit.

The door flew open under a heavy boot, and Slaton watched the crew-cut soldier edge inside. He cleared the space expertly from the threshold, the muzzle of his weapon methodically sweeping left and right. But not up.

Slaton dropped like an anvil, his knee aimed at the man’s head.

His adversary reacted, but too late as Slaton’s two-hundred-plus pounds crashed down mercilessly. Both men tumbled onto the stairs, a rolling mix of arms and legs that came to a hard end at the first stone landing. Slaton heard the metallic clatter of the man’s gun skittering down the staircase. The soldier was dazed, but he was also big and strong, with the thick muscles of a weightlifter. Slaton had a more pragmatic strength, earned from ten-hour days hauling stone and mortar. He began with an elbow to the face, the crush of cartilage audible. A knee to the diaphragm hammered the air from his opponent’s lungs. The man doubled over, and a kick to his temple with a steel-toed work boot finished the job. He nearly back-flipped down the next flight of stairs, ending facedown and completely still.

Slaton rushed down and rolled him over. The man was out cold, his breathing shallow and ragged. Slaton performed a quick pat down but found no ID, nor any weapon besides the one that had bounded down the stairwell. He also noted a lack of body armor. They’d known he would be unarmed. A comm device was clipped to the man’s belt, a unit Slaton didn’t recognize with controls labeled in English. It looked damaged and he left it where it was. Then he found something more useful—on the man’s inner bicep, a familiar tattoo. A swooping, long-winged bird of prey with a lightning bolt in its talons. Polish Special Forces—GROM.

The breathing stopped, and in the next moment he heard a sound from below. Reinforcements had arrived. Slaton strained to see down the darkened stairwell. The man’s gun was nowhere in sight. Ignoring the burn in his thigh, he ran back out to the roof. A siren blared in the distance, the police responding. He doubled back in the direction he’d come, retracing his steps, loose stones and broken bits of tile scattering as he ran. It was a counterintuitive move, and not without risk. Mdina was a classic fortress, hundred-foot walls and gated entrances, an ideal design for repelling marauding Byzantines. Yet as with any such defense, once the bastions are breached the fortress becomes a trap.

At the roof’s end he looked straight down and saw what he wanted—twenty feet to his left, a second-floor balcony. They were common in the otherwise flat-faced tenements, added by noblemen over the centuries as platforms from which available daughters could be advertised for marriage. Slaton slipped over the roof’s edge, hung briefly by his fingertips, and dropped ten feet to the balcony. The next fall was slightly more, and he landed on the cobbled street in a parachutist’s landing, bent knees followed by a roll onto his left hip and side. He ran east, away from the building where he imagined his pursuers were cautiously climbing stairs and clearing rooms.

He was wrong.

Thirty meters ahead, at the next corner in the medieval maze, he saw one of the squat twins. The man spotted him immediately, and after a frozen moment Slaton turned. The man with the glasses was behind him, reaching into a shoulder holster.

Cut off in both directions, there was only one option—he sprinted up a staircase that led to an observation deck. The overlook was empty, no lingering tourists appreciating the glittering jewels of Malta at dusk. Slaton veered right, and where the deck ended he mounted a two-foot-wide ledge that topped the outer bastion. A sheer stone wall vaulted upward on his right, and to the left was simply a black precipice. Arms outstretched for balance, he traversed the granite ledge like a man on a high wire.

A bend in the wall approached, and Slaton knew what lay beyond—the patio of a popular restaurant, a sea of comfortable wooden chairs and square tables under candy-striped umbrellas. He had dined there some months ago, a lazy Sunday with pasta and bread, a steaming espresso his companion afterward. He remembered looking out over the island on that bright autumn day and seeing all the way to Sicily. Now he saw only distant lights and blackness, felt a chill wind swirling.

Rounding the bend, the restaurant was there. The place was alive: waiters scurrying beneath strings of naked bulbs, early diners waiting for meals and drinking down bottles of the harsh house red. He rushed past a waiter who was furling patio umbrellas, cranking them closed one by one as the sun had given way to stars. Slaton jumped down from the wall, ran inside, and skidded to a stop near the maître d’ station. Diners and servers looked at him uneasily, and a hush fell about the place.

The realization struck too late—from his earlier visit he recalled crates of greens and wine being wheeled in through the front door. Which meant there
was
no back door. He looked through the entrance and saw a street bordered by old revetments—the restaurant had been wedged neatly into an otherwise dysfunctional corner of the district. He spotted two familiar silhouettes trotting up the street, alert and purposeful. The only other way out was the way he’d arrived, the narrow ledge that was certainly covered.