Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (51 page)
Read Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel Online
Authors: Ward Larsen
“It’s okay, David. We’re both fine—it’s over. Please come home.”
Every set of weary eyes in the Langley Ops Center followed the odd aerial procession through two border crossings and an aerial refueling. It was nearly an hour later, following an uneventful traverse of Yemeni airspace, that Ruger 22’s flight lead made her last transmission of the night.
“Feet wet, we’re handing off and heading home.”
“Feet wet” conveyed that they had crossed the coastline and were headed out to sea. From there a pair of FA-18 Hornets, launched from the carrier
Stennis
in the Arabian Sea, took over the job of babysitting the pilotless MD-10. Within the hour, the Hornets also refueled as the gaggle headed south, passing the Horn of Africa and skimming uncomfortably close to the tip of Somalia. Six hundred and twenty nautical miles later, halfway to the Seychelles Islands, the end played out.
The Hornet pilots gave a running commentary as the MD-10’s port and starboard engines flamed out almost simultaneously. The aircraft slowed as the autopilot tried to maintain altitude despite the loss of thrust. The number-two engine, mounted high on the tail, and thus having longer fuel lines drawing from the starved main tanks, ceased combustion one minute later. The autopilot did its best, but on reaching minimum speed gave up trying to hold altitude, reverting to a controlled descent.
No sooner had the new aerodynamic trim been set when, with the engine generators no longer supplying electrical power, the autopilot succumbed to a bus transfer and disconnected. At that point, CB68H was little more than a three-hundred-thousand-pound falling leaf. Her final downward glide took less than a minute. She hit the Indian Ocean at 02:58 UTC, bounced once in the gathering dawn, and cartwheeled in a massive splash that was recorded by the gun cameras of both Hornets. The old workhorse airframe—which had been rusting away in the Amazon only days earlier, and with two neat new holes in its forward windscreen—sank quickly in what would eventually be charted as 13,810 feet of water.
The Night Over Ghawar, as it would come to be known in Langley’s internal after-action report, had reached its inglorious end.
For forty-eight hours the D.C. intelligence community held its collective breath. Yemen never so much as made an inquiry about the strange blip that had invaded its airspace on the night in question, only to disappear over the southern ocean on a course to nowhere. There were no reports from ships in the Indian Ocean of an aircraft going down, nor any mention of an emergency locator beacon sounding in the early hours of that morning.
More quantifiable was what happened in the oil markets, which was to say nothing. There was a blip the first morning when a Nigerian oil rig caught fire, and a burble the next day when Russia announced election results with a modestly nationalist sway. Not a whisper was heard of the disaster that had nearly befallen the Ghawar oil fields. Even unfulfilled, the very idea of what
might
have happened, had the plot come to public awareness, would have rocked the markets to their core.
The funds in the Barclays account, along with a half dozen other deposits identified with Slaton’s help, were quietly frozen. What to do with that bloodstained fortune was a question for another day. The Fairfax County Police were diverted away from a suspicious incident in a quiet neighborhood, the situation quietly addressed at some opaque federal level. The next of kin of a homeless man, one Nathaniel Morris, was notified of his passing, and no one seemed surprised that the longtime drifter had succumbed to the elements in the middle of a particularly harsh winter. A second body, whose identity was never made public, was quietly cremated and buried at sea, the only persons in attendance for the deep-sixing of the remains being the crew of the small Navy patrol boat and a rightly flummoxed rabbi. The house from which the bodies had been recovered was made spotless by a cleaning service that, professional as it seemed, was not listed in any online or print directory, and certainly did not advertise.
In Malta and Switzerland the investigations into a string of killings went cold, even more so when the U.S. State Department intimated that the man responsible had met a violent end in the hills north of Beirut. There was little hard evidence, and no body to prove the point, but a report, sourced from the charges d’affaires of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, made a convincing case that the suspect had perished in a firefight with smugglers in the shadows of Mount Lebanon. The report went on to certify that a man matching the description of the assailant from Europe had flown from Frankfurt to Larnaca International Airport on a timetable that meshed perfectly with the events on either end. This much was easily verifiable, and seemed enough to sate weary Swiss and Maltese investigators. Dead or not, the man was out of their hair.
The most disquieting loose end involved Iran. Certain equipment found discarded at Wujah Al Hajar Air Base, along with a stack of oil drums uncovered in a barn near Al-Basrah, were attributed with a high degree of certainty as being sourced from Iran. More definitive yet was the trove of identities NSA had revealed on the computer of a faux dental office in Ahvaz. The last and most speculative link came out of the blue, an NRO intercept suggesting that a shipment of gold bullion had arrived at Reagan National Airport, on an Iranian diplomatic flight no less, one week before the affair had begun. Taken together, the evidence hinted strongly at Iranian involvement. More was needed, however, to launch a formal accusation.
No more was ever found.
* * *
Two weeks later a slim letter reached Salvino’s Ristorante in the village of Mosta. It came at the usual time, the carrier from Malta Post as reliable as the sun. Mario Salvino saw no return address on the envelope, and he opened it to find a bank check drawn in the amount of 10,302 euros. Attached was a typewritten note:
THANKS FOR THE LOAN. THE €302 IS REPAYMENT IN FULL FOR WHAT WAS IN THE CASH DRAWER. THE REST IS TO REPLACE THE PIZZA OVEN I LIKELY RUINED.
A stunned Salvino stared dumbly at the check, wondering if it was a joke of some sort. He checked his watch, saw the bank was still open, and fifteen minutes later had his answer. When he arrived back at the restaurant, drinks were on the house.
The Chesapeake of early April pledges neither hope nor despair. A day that begins with warmth and steady breezes can yield to gales and snow by midday. Calm waters seem only to be organizing the next battering swell, and fishermen mindfully track safe coves in which to lay up. On this particular morning the conditions had so far been agreeable, a cool breeze and steady sun, with a layer of marine mist clinging to the shorelines.
Where the bay turns seaward, near the discharging York River, a lone sailboat carved a path through the strikingly calm waters. Her name was
Windsom II,
forty-six feet of glimmering fiberglass, canvas, and rigging that had yet to be tested by the open sea. Christine was at the helm, watching with considerable amusement as her husband stood in the cabin trying to wrestle their son into warmer clothes. Hands accustomed to rigid gunstocks and impervious brick walls were predictably helpless against energetic infant limbs.
“All right,” Christine called out, “let’s try another.”
“Barcelona, summer,” Slaton said. “You see a car driving slowly, maintaining a block behind you. It’s midday, so the traffic is ordinary. In front of you is a bank, an office building, and a big retail store.”
“What day of the week is it?”
“Good question—Tuesday.”
“How long has the car been following me?”
“You just spotted it. You don’t know for certain if it’s a problem.”
A gust of wind brushed past, and Christine referenced the telltales before adjusting a few degrees to port. “I’d turn into the retail store because it must have another entrance. That will force them out of their car, right? If they’re following me, it’ll make them commit and show themselves.”
Slaton came out on deck, leaving a freshly dressed Davy to cruise the cabin amid the low-lying furniture. Their son was thirteen months old now, starting to walk, and clearly enjoying his strange new home. Slaton sat next to her on the lazarette hatch.
“Well?” she asked.
“Good and bad,” he said critically, a teacher handing back a C+ term paper. “You’re correct that the retail store forces their hand. But you don’t want to do that. You don’t want confrontation. The bank is out because there would clearly be no back door. That said, if you knew the people in the car were definitely coming after you, especially if they were armed, you could use the bank guards as a buffer—in Europe bank security is serious business, and they carry heavy weapons. But the office building is the best place to disappear. There are always multiple ways in and out, lots of hallways and doors and elevators—it’s very difficult to follow someone in that environment.”
She heaved a sigh of defeat. “I’ll never be any good at this.”
“You’ll do fine—you only have to instill the right mentality. Just like I have to learn how to cruise the seven seas with an infant on board.”
She watched Davy throw an Elmo doll at his playpen. “We’ll have to be careful,” she said, “very careful. But it can be done.”
Windsom
passed over the tunnel of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and soon they were heading east with the Atlantic stretched out before them.
Slaton regarded the cobalt expanse that would soon fill the horizon on all points of the compass. “Following the trade winds, no destination in mind. It’s hardly a bedrock existence for raising a family. Are you sure you’re up for this?”
“It’s the only thing I
am
sure about, Deadmarsh.”
“Not my name anymore.”
“I never liked it anyway.”
She looked across the deck at shining new winches and unfrayed lines. “We paid too much for this—I could have gotten a used boat for a fraction of the price.”
“There was no time to shop. Besides, we can afford it.”
“Can we? You never told me exactly how much gold was in that trunk.”
“Do you really want to know?”
She turned away and pulled on the main sheet.
“Enough to take care of us for life,” he said.
“Are you suggesting neither of us ever works again?”
“Not at all. You’re a doctor—that’s an act you can take on the road.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. At some point in the last couple of years I’ve acquired a new perspective on things. Living in the States—it’s a pretty sheltered existence. If my MasterCard gets compromised, I’m having a really bad day. I’ve never had to worry about whether the water will give me cholera or if there’s a land mine in the schoolyard. The idea of getting out there and offering some basic care to help a small number of people in a big way—that appeals to me. And I never thought I’d admit it, but after what Stein and his cohorts tried to do … I think the world needs people like you too.”
“A first-class stonemason?”
Her gaze went effervescent, the trace of a smile. “Exactly.”
Neither spoke for a time, and soon the twin shorelines on the bay behind them faded to mist. “We’re at sea now, David. You said you would explain the agreement.”
“All right. We’ve been given our freedom, along with what you found in the trunk of that car. Where we go, what identities we use—that’s up to us. If we ever need security, all we have to do is ask.”
“And in return?”
“In return, both Israel and the U.S. will have a way to contact me. It won’t happen often, but they can present proposals.”
“Proposals?”
“All right—missions. I don’t
ever
have to accept one. There will be stringent criteria, and only one source of approval.”
“You?” she surmised.
“No—you. You have to make the call.”
Her expression hardened. “You’d put me in that position? To decide whether to put you at risk? Whether to send you out into the world to kill someone?”
“Can you think of another way? One that we can live with?”
Christine considered the logic, and her voice softened. “It’s a hell of a way to live.”
“No, that
isn’t
how we live—let’s get that straight right now. You’re a doctor, I build walls. Ninety-nine days out of a hundred, we raise our son and do our damnedest to make things better.”
“And the hundredth day?”
They sat in silence for a time watching Davy, his legs moving in rhythm with the boat as gentle swells announced their passage into open water. Dark skies loomed in the distant north.
“Well,” she said, “where do we go now?”
“I have no idea,” he said, sliding an arm around her waist. “But if we turn right … in about a week things will get a lot warmer.”
This novel could not have been created without the assistance of others. My enduring thanks to my editor, Bob Gleason, who is never at a loss for either ideas or enthusiasm. To Elayne Becker and the staff at Tor/Forge, you are second to none. Also, much appreciation to NaNá Stoelzle for her faultless, and much-needed, copyediting skills. As always, thanks also to my agent, Susan Gleason, for her intrepid guidance and irrepressible good nature.
Of particular help in deciphering medical physics was my brother, Dr. Kent Larsen. For both detail and inspiration, thanks to my longtime friend and raconteur General Walter “Nap” Bryan, USAF (Ret.). I have taken a few minor liberties for the sake of convenience, in particular the precise location of Wujah Al Hajar Air Base and the standard crew complement for a USAF C-17. Any other technical inaccuracies are fully my responsibility.
Finally, thanks to my family, both for your inputs to the early manuscript and your perpetual understanding. Rose, Lance, Jack, and Kara—without you there would be no stories to tell.
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