The Mark of the Assassin (2 page)
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
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For Esther Newberg, my literary agent and friend.
And, as always, for my wife, Jamie, who makes everything
possible, and my children, Lily and Nicholas
And, as always, for my wife, Jamie, who makes everything
possible, and my children, Lily and Nicholas
And ye shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free.
—The creed of the Central Intelligence
Agency, taken from John 8:32
and the truth shall make you free.
—The creed of the Central Intelligence
Agency, taken from John 8:32
And ye shall know the truth,
and the truth shall piss you off.
—The staff version
and the truth shall piss you off.
—The staff version
PROLOGUE
THE CZECH-AUSTRIAN BORDER: AUGUST 1968
The searchlight played across the flat open field. They lay in a drainage ditch on the Czech side of the border: a man and woman and a teenage boy. Others had come this way on previous nights—dissidents, reformers, anarchists—hoping to escape the Russians who had invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed Alexander Dubček’s experiment with freedom already known as the “Prague Spring.” A few had made it. Most had been arrested; Dubček himself had been abducted and taken to the Soviet Union. According to the bristling rumor mill, some had been taken to a nearby potato patch and shot.
The three people in the ditch were not worried about making it out. They had been ordered to come at that time and had been assured their passage to the West would go smoothly. They had no reason to doubt what they had been told, for all three were officers of the Soviet Committee for State Security, better known as the KGB.
The man and the woman served in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Their orders were to infiltrate the dissident Czech and Russian communities in the West.
The boy was assigned to Department V, the assassins.
The man crawled on his belly to the top of the ditch and peered into the night. He put his face down in the cool damp grass as the light passed overhead. When darkness returned he rose again and watched. A half-moon hung low on the horizon, throwing off just enough light to see it all clearly: the guard tower, the silhouette of a border policeman, a second policeman walking along the gravel approach to the fence.
The man checked the luminous dial of his watch. He turned around and whispered in Czech, “Stay here. I’ll see if they’re ready for us.”
He crawled over the top of the ditch and was gone.
The woman looked at the boy. He was no more than sixteen years old, and she had been sleepless with sexual fantasies about him since they had come to Czechoslovakia three weeks earlier. He was too pretty for a boy: black hair, deep blue eyes, like a Siberian lake. His skin was pale, almost white. He had never been operational before tonight, yet he showed no signs of fear. He noticed she was looking at him. He stared back at her with an animal directness that made her shiver.
The man returned five minutes later. “Hurry,” he said. “Walk quickly and don’t say a word.”
He reached down and pulled the woman out of the ditch. He offered a hand to the boy, who refused and climbed out himself. The border policeman met them at the fence. They walked fifty meters to the spot where the gash had been cut in the wire. The guard pulled back the flap, and one by one the three KGB agents crossed into Austria.
The control officers at Moscow Center had written the script for them. They were to proceed on foot to the nearest village and find an Austrian police officer. From past experience, they knew they would be taken to a detention center for other refugees from the East. Inevitably, they would undergo vigorous questioning from Austrian security agents to make certain they were not spies. Their Czech identities had taken months to manufacture; they were airtight. Within weeks, if all went according to plan, they would be released into the West and begin their assignments for the KGB.
Department V had other plans for the boy.
There was no security on the Austrian side of the border. They crossed an open field. The air was thick with the stink of manure and the chatter of crickets. The landscape darkened as the wet moon slipped behind a stray cloud. The lane was exactly where the control officers had said it would be. When you reach the road, head south, they had said. The village will be there, two miles away.
The lane was pitted and narrow, barely wide enough for a horse-drawn cart, rising and falling over the gentle landscape. They walked quickly, the man and woman leading, the boy a few feet behind. Within a half hour the horizon glowed with lamplight. A few moments later a church steeple floated into view above a low hill.
It was then that the boy reached inside his coat, withdrew a silenced pistol, and shot the man in the back of the head. The woman turned quickly, eyes wide with terror.
The boy’s arm swung up, and he shot her rapidly three times in the face.
OCTOBER
1
OFF LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK
They made the attempt on the third night. The first night was no good: heavy cloud cover, intermittent rain, windblown squalls. The second night was clear, with a good moon, but a bitter northwest wind made the seas too rough. Even the oceangoing motor yacht was buffeted about. It would be hell in the Boston Whaler. They needed a calm sea to carry it off from the Whaler, so they motored farther out and spent a seasick night waiting. That morning, the third morning, the marine forecast was promising: diminishing winds, gentle seas, a slow-moving front with clear weather behind it.
The forecast proved accurate.
The third night was perfect.
His real name was Hassan Mahmoud, but he had always found it rather dull for an Islamic freedom fighter, so he had granted himself a more venturous nom de guerre, Abu Jihad. He was born in Gaza and raised by an uncle in a squalid refugee camp near Gaza City. His politics were forged by the stones and fire of the Intifada. He joined Hamas, fought Israelis in the streets, buried two brothers and more friends than he could remember. He was wounded once himself, his right shoulder shattered by an Israeli army bullet. The doctors said he would never regain full use of the arm. Hassan Mahmoud, alias Abu Jihad, learned to throw stones with his left.
The yacht was 110 feet in length, with six staterooms, a large salon, and an aft deck large enough to accommodate a cocktail party of sixty people. The bridge was state of the art, with satellite navigation and communication systems. It was designed for a crew of three, but two good men could handle it easily.
They had set out from the tiny port of Gustavia on the Caribbean island of Saint-Barthélemy eight days earlier and had taken their time moving up the east coast of the United States. They had stayed well outside American territorial waters, but still they had felt the gentle touch of U.S. surveillance along the way: the P-3 Orion aircraft that passed overhead each day, the U.S. Coast Guard cutters slicing through the open sea in the distance.
They had prepared a cover story in the event they were challenged. The vessel was registered in the name of a wealthy French investor, and they were moving it from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. There, the Frenchman would board the yacht, along with a party of twelve, for a month-long Caribbean cruise.
There was no Frenchman—an officer in a friendly intelligence service had created him—and there most certainly was no party of twelve.
As for Canada, they had no intention of going anywhere near it.
That night they operated under blackout conditions. It was clear and quite cold. The bright half-moon provided enough light to move about the decks easily. The engine was shut down, just in case an infrared-equipped satellite or aircraft passed overhead. The yacht rocked gently on the flat sea.
Hassan Mahmoud smoked nervously in the darkened salon. He wore jeans, Nike running shoes, and a fleece pullover from L.L.Bean. He looked up at the other man. They had been together ten days, but his companion had spoken only when necessary. One warm night, off the coast of Georgia, Mahmoud tried to engage him in conversation. The man simply grunted and walked to his stateroom. On those rare occasions when he did communicate verbally, he spoke in the precise accentless Arabic of someone who has studied the language diligently but not mastered its subtleties. When Mahmoud asked his name, the man ran his hand over his short black hair, pulled at his nose, and said if names were necessary he should be called Yassim.
He most definitely was not a Yassim. Mahmoud had traveled well for a boy from the camps of Gaza; the trade of terror made that a necessity. He had been to Rome, and he had been to London. He had stayed many months in Athens and hidden with a Palestinian cell in Madrid for an entire winter. The man who wished to be called Yassim and spoke with a strange accent was no Arab. Mahmoud, watching him now, tried to assign geography and ethnicity to the cocktail of strange features possessed by his silent accomplice. He looked at the hair: nearly black and shot with gray at the temples. The eyes were a penetrating blue, the skin so pale as to be nearly white. The nose was long and narrow—a woman’s nose, he thought—the lips full and sensuous, the cheekbones wide. Maybe Greek, he thought, maybe Italian or Spanish. Maybe a Turk or a Kurd. For a mad instant, he thought he might be an Israeli.
Mahmoud watched as the man who wished to be called Yassim disappeared down the companionway and went belowdecks. He returned two minutes later, carrying a long, slender object.
Mahmoud knew just one word for it: Stinger.
Yassim, when he spoke, treated Mahmoud as though he knew nothing of Stingers. Mahmoud knew them quite well, however. He knew the shoulder-launched version was five feet long and weighed precisely thirty-four and a half pounds. He knew it possessed heat-seeking, passive infrared, and ultraviolet guidance systems. He knew its effective range was about three miles. He had never actually fired one—the things were too precious and too costly to waste on a test firing—but he had drilled for dozens of hours and knew exactly what to expect.
“It’s already been preset to seek out a large four-engine aircraft,” Yassim was saying. “The warhead has been set to penetrate the target before exploding.”
Mahmoud nodded and said nothing.
“Point the missile at the target,” he said patiently, in his accentless Arabic. “When the guidance system has acquired its target and locked on, you will hear the tone in your ear. When you hear the tone, fire the missile.”
Mahmoud tapped out another Marlboro and offered one to Yassim, who waved his hand and went on with his lecture.
“When the missile is away, simply lay the empty launch tube in the Whaler and return to the yacht.”
“I was told to throw the launch tube into the water,” Mahmoud said.
“And I’m telling you to bring it back here. When the airliner goes down, the Americans will scan the sea floor with sonar. There’s a damned good chance they’ll find your launch tube. So bring it back with you. We’ll dispose of it farther out.”
Mahmoud nodded. He had been told to do it differently, but the explanation for the change in plans was reasonable. For twenty minutes, they said nothing. Mahmoud toyed with the grip stock of the Stinger. Yassim poured coffee and drank it on the aft deck in the cold night air.
Then Yassim went to the bridge to listen to the radio. Mahmoud, still sitting in the salon, could hear the crisp commands of the air traffic controllers at JFK International Airport.
Two smaller boats were secured to the stern of the motor yacht, a Zodiac and a twenty-foot Boston Whaler Dauntless. Mahmoud clambered down to the swim step, drew the Whaler closer to the yacht, and stepped over the rail into the forward seating area. Yassim followed him down the ladder and handed over the Stinger.
The Whaler had a dual console, split by a passage connecting the forward and aft seating areas. Mahmoud laid the Stinger on the aft deck, sat in the cockpit, and fired the engine. Yassim untied the Whaler, tossed the line onto the deck, and pushed the smaller craft away with a quick movement of his foot.
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