The Assassins (7 page)

His tracker showed the dot was moving fractionally. Eva must be walking around. Switching configurations, he called up a map of the region, but when he zeroed in, the geography grew hazy. He could make out only two rectangular buildings and what appeared to be smaller buildings, a blurred drive, and gray formless masses that were probably trees. He cursed silently. This area north of Washington was part of the nation’s security zone, and the U.S. government forbade detailed public satellite views.

He slogged uphill, pushing through branches. His boots grew heavy with snow. At last he found a deer trail. Following it, he passed a deer blind. At the crest, he dropped to his heels and surveyed the hunt club below—two large lodges and several small cabins with steep shingled roofs. Two men dressed in padded hunting jackets and armed with Uzis stood outside a white Ford Explorer parked where the drive formed a wide oval in front of the lodges and cabins. One man was smoking; the other talked on a cell phone. They held their Uzis with confidence. There were no other cars, and all of the windows in the buildings Ryder could see were dark.

Shifting his gaze, Ryder spotted Eva stumbling off a lodge porch. She was hatless, her long red hair ablaze in the afternoon sunlight. An armed guard followed, shoving her. Ryder’s jaw tightened. She fell to her knees and let out a cry. The guard grabbed her arm and yanked her up. Pushing her ahead, he hustled her into a small cabin and locked the door. Within seconds she was standing at the window, hands pressed against the glass, peering out. Her features were tight with fear.

It was unlike Eva to give an inch, yet she acted beaten. What had they done to her? Ryder’s grip tightened on his Beretta. The hum of a powerful engine sounded from the drive, and in seconds a shiny black Cadillac limousine appeared. The windows were darkened, its occupants unseeable. As soon as it stopped, the driver’s door opened and out stepped a man in a padded hunting jacket like those the three other men wore. He, too, carried an Uzi. He scanned the surrounding slopes.

Ryder crouched lower, studying the Ford Explorer, the Cadillac limo, the men with Uzis, and Eva in the window. He rose quietly to his feet. Using spruces and pines for cover, he started down the long hill.

14

The Padre was in a good mood. The sun was shining over his favorite hunt club, Catalina was making snowballs and laughing, and he was certain that one way or another he was going to have the Carnivore soon. Sitting inside his limo, comfortable in the soft leather, he touched a button and his window descended. He beckoned his longtime driver.

The man trotted over and crouched beside the window.
“Si, se
ñ
or?”

“Where is Judd Ryder?” the Padre demanded.

“Coming down. He has about fifty yards to go. He is wearing his dark peacoat, so when he stays in the shadows of the evergreen trees and keeps low, he is difficult to spot. His training has been excellent.”

“He was military intelligence. Deep cover.” The Padre had learned everything possible about Judd Ryder, just as he had learned everything about Eva Blake. One or both must know where the Carnivore was, and if they did not, then Tucker Andersen would deliver the information. But he did not want to wait for all of that to happen.

“We are ready for Ryder,” the chauffeur assured him. “Where the forest ends, he must choose between crossing open space or using bushes for cover. Of course he will choose the bushes. He will not get past our Uzis.”

“I want him alive,” the Padre said sharply.

“Por supuesto.”
He touched his cap deferentially.

The Padre smiled to himself, pleased, feeling a moment of warmth for his faithful servant. “
Bueno.
As a reward I will show you a very valuable secret, a strange wonder you will not see the like of again.” He enjoyed tormenting his employees with what they could never have.

As his chauffeur watched, the Padre took from his trouser pocket a leather pouch. Loosening the drawstrings, he turned it over onto his palm, and out slid three smaller leather pouches. He opened one, showing a large, uneven chunk of limestone. Excitement spread through him as he turned it over so the cuneiform symbols showed.

He held up his hand. “Do you know what this is?”

The man frowned, puzzled. “No,
se
ñ
or
.”

“It buys freedom from a blackmailer, and it’s the secret to millions of dollars.”

The chauffeur’s dark eyes grew as large as the bells of San Sebastian’s Good Shepherd Cathedral. “So much for a rock?”

The Padre chuckled and returned it to its pouch. He did not mention he had only three pieces and needed to acquire the rest of the tablet to win.

Suddenly he felt restless. He looked across the circular drive. The woman stood motionless in the window, a statue of misery.

He gestured at her. “Bring her out. I am weary of waiting for Ryder. Seeing her will inspire him to come more quickly.”

As the chauffeur trotted away, the Padre checked his iPhone, but there was no message from Tucker Andersen. Disappointed, he sat back again to survey his secluded haven. Whenever he’d had business in North America, he had treated himself to a visit here, indulging his love of fishing and hunting. All of that was before Catalina, before his new life with her. She filled the void his many activities had filled before.

As he watched her bend over to scoop up snow, her wide smile and childlike delight, he thought again about his mother, Esti. He had named this place for her—the Esti Hunt Club. He sighed deeply.

Gazing up, he saw his man bringing the woman from the cabin. The Padre opened his limo door and stepped out into the crisp air. Stretching, he studied the hillsides. He wanted Ryder. Now.

Turning to the chauffeur, he pounded his fist once into his palm. The signal told him to hit the woman. That would bring Ryder tearing down the slope.

Puzzled, worried, she peered first at the Padre, then at his four men, and finally at his young wife. But Catalina had laid down on her back on the snowbank beside the limo and was swinging her arms and legs, making a snow angel.

The chauffeur nodded, faced the terrified woman, and pulled back his fist. The Padre did not see what happened next. Instead, he felt one excruciating nanosecond of pain, and then he felt nothing. A sniper bullet had exploded his skull. The rest of the sniper rounds fell like a deadly rain on his wife, his men, and the woman who looked like Eva Blake.

15

By the time the last shot was fired, Ryder knew the source was one of two snipers working in concert among the trees at the top of the hill to the north. Although they were at least a half mile from their targets, their accuracy was pinpoint. The tally—five males, two females. So fast it was over before any of the armed victims had a chance to aim and return fire, not that they could have seen the shooters. Not that their Uzi rounds could have reached that far. There had been nothing any of them could have done. Nothing Ryder could have done.

I couldn’t save Eva. I couldn’t save her.

Ryder plunged down the wooded slope, his boots sinking into the snow, his heart aching. A black crow shrieked and flapped low across tamped animal tracks, a narrow trail. Ryder jumped onto it, running and sliding and falling and running again. The trail followed an ice-coated creek that streamed down through the forest.

Almost out of the trees, Ryder saw a man leave one of the lodges and dropped to watch. Like the others, the man was dressed in hunting clothes and carried an Uzi. A sixth man. A survivor. He must have been indoors the entire time. Without a glance around, he went from one victim to another, kicking away weapons, testing for vital signs. He showed no shock, not a moment of remorse, no surprise.

Moving quietly downhill another twenty feet, Ryder hid behind a hedge of juniper bushes then crab-walked along it to an opening where he was behind the man. When the man closed in on two male corpses near the Explorer, Ryder sprinted to the rear of the limo. Dropping low, he waited. The man moved to the last two victims. The more distant was a teenaged woman, lying on her back in a snowbank. She had been making a snow angel and died smiling, a bullet between her eyes. The man hurried past her to a stout, older man, who was sprawled beside the limo’s passenger door.

Ryder studied the corpse’s coarse features. With grim satisfaction, he nodded to himself. He had at least one answer—the dead man was the Padre, whom he recognized from the surveillance video Tucker had e-mailed. Thinking back, Ryder remembered the snipers had begun shooting only when the Padre had climbed out of the limo, and the Padre had been the first killed.

He focused again on the last man, who was sitting on his heels above the Padre. He held his Uzi in one hand while he fished through the Padre’s jacket pockets with the other. It looked to Ryder that he expected to find something important.

Standing up, Ryder fired a single round into the driveway beside the man. The noise was like a thunderclap in the winter hush.

The man jumped up and whirled around. He had a head shaped like an anvil, big and angular, as was the rest of his body.

“Put your weapon down!” Ryder shot a second bullet into the driveway. Brick chips sprayed, cutting the man’s cheeks. “Now!”

“Mierda!”
Swearing in Spanish, he set down his Uzi. Standing erect again, his eyes widened, as if he recognized Ryder.

“You know me. Tell me what’s going on here,” Ryder said. When the man hesitated, Ryder fired a third round so close the bullet blew snow off the man’s boot.

The man’s words tumbled out. “You are Judd Ryder. The Padre made us memorize your face.” He gestured at the guards. “They were tracking you. I did not know you were here so soon.”

“How were they tracking me?” Ryder demanded.

“The Padre put a bug in the tracker you found in Eva Blake’s house. That way he could follow your progress here and interrogate you when you arrived.”

Ryder swore loudly. While he had been electronically dogging Eva, her kidnappers had been dogging him. And now Eva was dead. A bitter taste filled Ryder’s mouth. “Toss me your billfold.”

The man produced a canvas billfold from his back pocket. He flung it onto the drive.

Ryder scooped it up, opened it, and saw an international driver’s license in the name Tom
á
s Lara. “Okay, Tom
á
s. Is this about locating the Carnivore?”

“The Padre believed you or Eva Blake could say how to find him.”

“Was it the Padre who had me doubled?”

Lara gave a slow nod. “You have powerful friends. It was a problem that they might go looking for you, so the Padre found a way to cover for a while that you were missing. But then you arrived a day early from Baghdad. The Padre did not have everything ready to snatch you.” He gave Ryder an earnest look. “It is not necessary to shoot me. I will leave as soon as I fetch something from the Padre. It will be as if you and I never met.”

Ryder gestured at Eva and the teenaged girl. “Unarmed. Innocent. No reason to kill them unless someone’s afraid they’d identify you—or what you’re taking. You’re working for the snipers. Who are they?”

Sweat broke out on the man’s forehead. “Eli Eichel hired me. He partners with his brother, Danny. They were the shooters. Eli is retired Kidon.”

Ryder paused. He had expected the Carnivore to be the man’s employer. Kidon was Mossad’s highly regarded kill department, renowned for orchestrating successful wet jobs around the globe. And now a Kidon-trained assassin and his brother had killed six people and Eva so they could get their hands on something the Padre was carrying.

“Keep searching,” Ryder ordered.

Lara sat back down on his heels. He pulled a leather pouch from inside the Padre’s coat. Using his teeth, he loosened the drawstring and spilled three leather bags onto his palm. He opened them. Each contained a chunk of limestone.

Ryder frowned. “What are they?”

“Eli said they are special rocks. See, there are marks on them.” He turned one over.

Ryder recognized the symbols. Cuneiform writing. “How are you getting them to Eichel?”

“I am supposed to phone him. Then he will say where to meet.”

Ryder considered. “Tell him to come here.”

The man’s eyebrows rose in fright. “They will kill me if I betray them.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t. Make the call. Put it on speakerphone.”

As if in slow motion, Lara took out his cell and tapped numbers.

Ryder listened as a man with a deep bass voice answered:
“Shalom.”
The low growl of a car engine sounded in the background.

Lara took a deep breath. “
Shalom.
I have the rocks. They are just as you said.”

“You’ve done well. Walk out of the hunt club and turn left—”

Shoulders tensing, Lara interrupted, his voice quivering. “Come here. Please. It would be better than someone seeing me on the roadway.”

The bass voice sharpened. “You’re afraid. Why?”

Ryder caught Lara’s gaze and stared hard at him.

Lara sighed. “There are many dead people. Much blood. More than I—”

“We’ll be there soon.” The connection went dead.

Lara pocketed his cell phone, his expression wretched.

“You’re Jewish?” Ryder asked, remembering the exchanges of
Shalom.

“Yes, from Bilbao. Most Basques are like the Padre—Catholic. But plain-door synagogues have always been around; you just have to know where to knock. There is an old Basque saying—we know who the Jews are because we used to be Jews.”

Lara’s being a rare Basque Jew would give Eli Eichel a powerful link to him.

Ryder nodded. “Put the rocks away.”

As the man bent over to do so, Ryder quickly lifted his knee and slashed the heel of his boot down hard onto his skull. With a thick grunt, he toppled, unconscious. Ryder scooped up the limestone pieces, put them into their individual pouches, and then all into the larger leather pouch. He buttoned them into his peacoat’s inside pocket.

Taking a deep breath, he walked over to Eva. She was on her right side, crumpled like a broken doll, her face turned away. A bullet had severed her carotid artery. Her head lay in a pool of freezing blood.