The Mark of the Assassin (20 page)
“Who are you?”
“Put down the telephone now, and I won’t hurt you.”
Carson charged up the stairs, barking wildly. He crouched in the hallway, baring his teeth at the intruder. The man calmly raised the gun and shot the dog twice. The silenced weapon emitted virtually no sound. Carson yelped once, then went quiet.
“You bastard! You fucking bastard! Who the fuck are you? Did Elliott send you? Tell me, goddammit! Did Mitchell Elliott send you?”
“Put the phone down. Now!”
She looked down and punched the nine and the one.
The first shot struck her head before she could enter the last digit. She fell backward, still clutching the receiver, still conscious. She looked up. The man stood over her and pointed the gun at her head once more.
“Not in the face,” she pleaded. “Please God, don’t shoot me in the face.”
His mask of rage softened for an instant. He lowered the gun a few degrees, the barrel pointed at her chest. She closed her eyes. The gun emitted two brief bursts of sound. She felt one brief instant of excruciating pain, then a flash of brilliant light. Then only darkness.
Calahan reached down to take the receiver from her grasp, and replaced it in the cradle. The kill had been quick, but it had not been completely silent. He needed to work quickly. The police would tear the place apart. If they discovered evidence the woman was under surveillance, there was a chance they could connect the slaying to Elliott.
The cleanup job took less than five minutes. As he walked out the front door Calahan held the notepads, the two room bugs, the bug from the telephone, her handbag, and her laptop computer.
He headed out Pomander Walk, crossed Volta Place, and climbed into the surveillance van; he’d return later for his car. As he sped away he punched Mitchell Elliott’s private number into a cellular phone.
“I’m afraid we have a bit of a problem, Mr. Elliott. I’ll call you on a secure line in five minutes.”
Calahan severed the connection and threw the phone against the windshield.
“Goddammit, why did she come back early? Fucking bitch!”
17
BRÉLÉS, FRANCE
Delaroche concluded he needed a woman.
He reached that judgment after reviewing the disk a second time, this time on his desktop computer at the cottage in Brélés. Two of the three remaining targets were known womanizers. Delaroche knew their routines, knew where they ate and drank, knew where they did their hunting. Still, getting close to these targets would be difficult.
A woman would make it easier.
Delaroche needed a woman.
He had one day to spend in Brélés. When he finished with the dossiers he went for a bicycle ride. The weather was good: clear, for November, light winds from the sea. He knew it would be a long time before he would ride again, so he pushed himself hard. He pedaled inland several miles, into the soft wooded hills of the Finistère, then down to the sea again. He paused at the ruins on the Pointe-de-Saint-Mathieu, then headed north along the coast back to Brélés.
The early afternoon he devoted to preparation. He cleaned and oiled his two best guns—a Beretta 9mm and the Glock—and checked and rechecked the firing mechanisms and the silencers. He had a third gun that he kept strapped to his ankle in a Velcro holster, a small Browning automatic designed to fit in a woman’s purse. In the event a gun was not appropriate, he would carry a knife, a stout six-inch double-bladed knife with automatic release.
Next he gathered his false passports—French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Egyptian, and American—and saw to his finances. He had the two hundred thousand francs from the gallery in Paris, and in Zurich he would collect the half million dollars. It was more than enough to finance the job.
He went out while it still was light and walked to the village. He bought bread from the boulangerie and sausage, cheese, and pâté from Mademoiselle Plauché. Didier and his friends were drinking wine at the café. He gestured for Delaroche to join them and, uncharacteristically, Delaroche agreed. He ordered more wine and ate bread and olives with them until the sun was gone.
That evening Delaroche had a simple meal outside on the stone terrace overlooking the sea. He had always been dispassionate about killing, but for the first time in longer than he could remember he felt an excitement rising within him. It was not unlike the feeling he had when he was sixteen, the night he killed for the first time.
He cleared away his dishes and washed them in the sink. Then, for the next hour, he systematically worked his way through the cottage and burned anything that suggested he ever existed.
Delaroche took the morning train from Brest to Paris and a midday train from Paris to Zurich. He arrived one hour before his bank closed. He left his small grip in a locker at the station and converted some of his French francs at a
bureau de change.
bureau de change.
He walked along a glittering street lined with brightly lit, exclusive shops. In a Gucci boutique he used cash to purchase a simple black attaché case. He told the clerk he did not require a bag, and a moment later he was walking along the sidewalk again, the attaché dangling from his right arm.
It was snowing lightly by the time he reached the austere front entrance of his bank. The only clue as to the nature of the establishment was the small gold plaque beside the door. Delaroche pressed the buzzer and waited while the security guard inspected him through the lens of the video camera mounted over the door.
The door lock snapped open, and he was let inside a small secure entrance room. He picked up a black telephone and announced he had an appointment with Herr Becker. Becker arrived a moment later, immaculately dressed and polished, shorter than Delaroche by a bald head that shone in the fluorescent light.
Delaroche followed him down a silent, dimly lit, beige-carpeted hall. Becker led him into another secure room and locked the door behind them. Delaroche felt claustrophobic. Becker opened a small vault and withdrew the money. Delaroche smoked while Becker counted it out for him.
The entire transaction took less than ten minutes. Delaroche signed the receipt for the money, and Becker helped him stack it neatly inside the case.
In the entrance room, Becker looked out at the street and said, “One can never be too careful, Monsieur Delaroche. There are thieves about.”
“Thank you, Herr Becker. I think I can handle myself. Have a pleasant evening.”
“Same to you, Monsieur Delaroche.”
Delaroche did not want to walk a long distance with the money, so he took a taxi back to the station. He collected his bag from the locker and purchased a first-class ticket on an overnight train to Amsterdam.
Delaroche arrived at Amsterdam’s Centraalstation early the following morning. He moved quickly through the crowded hall, eyes red-rimmed from a night of fitful sleep, and stepped outside into the bright sunlight. The sight of the bicycles struck him: thousands of them, row upon row.
Delaroche took a taxi to the Hotel Ambassade in the Central Canal Ring and checked in as Señor Armiñana, a Spanish businessman. He spent an hour on the telephone, varying his languages in case the hotel operator might be listening, speaking in the coded lexicon of the criminal underground. He slept for a time, and by late morning he was seated in the window of a smoky café a short distance from his hotel.
The bookstore was there, across a busy square. It had developed a well-deserved reputation for snobbery, for it specialized in literature and philosophy and refused to stock commercial fiction or thrillers. The hotel clerk said the manager once physically removed a woman who dared to ask for the new book by a famous American romance writer.
It was a perfect place for Astrid. Twice, he caught a glimpse of her—stacking books in the front window, giving advice to a male customer who was clearly more interested in her than in any book she might be recommending.
Astrid had that effect on men, always did.
It was why Delaroche came to Amsterdam in the first place.
She was born Astrid Meyer in the town of Kassel near the East German border. When her father walked out on the family in 1967, her mother abandoned his name and reclaimed her own, which was Lizbet Vogel.
After the divorce, Lizbet settled in a lakeside cottage in the mountains of Switzerland, outside Bern. It was familiar territory. Late in the war, in July 1944, her family fled Germany and sought refuge in a nearby village. It was there, alone in the mountains with her mother, that Astrid Meyer began her lifelong fascination with her grandfather, Kurt Vogel.
A heavy smoker his entire life, Vogel died of lung cancer in 1949, ten years before Astrid was born. In the end his wife, Gertrude, had tried to bring him down from the mountains, but Vogel believed the alpine air held his salvation, and he died at home gasping for breath.
Trude Vogel knew next to nothing of her husband’s wartime work, but what she did know she told to Lizbet and Lizbet told to Astrid. He had given up a promising legal career in 1935 to join the Abwehr, the German secret service. He had been a close associate of the chief of the Abwehr, Wilhelm Canaris, who was executed for treason by the Nazis in April 1945. He had deceived Trude for years, telling her that he was Canaris’s legal counsel. But late in the war he admitted the truth—he had recruited agents and sent them to England to spy on the British.
Lizbet remembered the night.
Her father had moved the family to Bavaria, because Berlin was no longer safe. She remembered her father arriving at the house, very late, remembered his presence in her bedroom, framed against the faint light of the open doorway. Later, she remembered the sound of her mother and father talking softly in the kitchen, and the smell of her father’s supper. And then she heard the sound of dishes shattering, the sound of her mother gasping. She and her twin sister, Nicole, crawled to the top of the stairs and looked down. Below, in the kitchen, they saw their parents and two men wearing the black uniforms of the SS. One man they did not recognize; the other was Heinrich Himmler, the most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler.
For years Lizbet Vogel believed her father had been a Nazi, an ally of Himmler and the SS, a war criminal who had chosen to die in the mountains of Switzerland rather than face justice in his homeland. Her mother, she concluded, secretly believed the same. When her mother was dead, Lizbet told the story to Astrid, and Astrid grew up believing her grandfather was a Nazi.
Then, on an afternoon in October 1970, a man telephoned the cottage and asked if he could visit. His name was Werner Ulbricht, and he had worked with Kurt Vogel at the Abwehr during the war. He said he knew the truth about Vogel’s work. Lizbet told him to come. He arrived an hour later—gaunt, pale as baker’s flour, leaning heavily on a cane, a neat black patch over one eye.
They walked for a time—Werner Ulbricht, Lizbet, and Astrid—and then sat on the grassy bank of the lake and drank coffee from a thermos bottle. Despite the snap of autumn in the air, Ulbricht’s face was bathed in sweat from the exertion. He rested for a time, sipping his coffee, and then told them the story.
Kurt Vogel was no Nazi; he hated them with a passion. He came to the Abwehr on condition he not be forced to join the Party, and Canaris had been more than happy to grant him his wish. He was not an in-house legal counsel to Canaris. He was an agent runner and a damned good one at that: meticulous, brilliant, ruthless in his own way. One of his agents in Britain was a woman. Together, they learned the most important secret of the war—the time and place of the invasion. They also learned that the British were engaged in a massive deception to conceal the truth. But in February 1944, Hitler fired Canaris and placed the Abwehr under the control of Himmler and the SS. Vogel kept his information to himself, and joined the anti-Hitler plotters of the
Schwarze Kapelle,
the Black Orchestra. When the July 20 coup attempt ended in disaster, many of the
Schwarze Kapelle
plotters were arrested and executed. Vogel fled to Switzerland.
Schwarze Kapelle,
the Black Orchestra. When the July 20 coup attempt ended in disaster, many of the
Schwarze Kapelle
plotters were arrested and executed. Vogel fled to Switzerland.
Lizbet’s eyes were damp when Ulbricht finished the story. She stared at the lake, watching the wind ripple the surface. “Who was the other man who came with Himmler to my mother’s house?” she asked.
“He was Walter Schellenberg, a very senior officer in the SD. He took over the Abwehr when Canaris was fired. Your father deceived him about the invasion.”
“The woman who was his agent . . . ?” Lizbet asked, voice trailing off. “Was he in love with her? Mother always thought he was in love with someone else.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Tell me the truth, Herr Ulbricht.”
“Yes, he loved her very much.”
“What was her name?”
“Her name was Anna Katerina von Steiner. Your father forced her to become an agent. She never came back from England.”
Astrid’s obsessive fascination with her grandfather began that afternoon. Her own grandfather, an ally of Wilhelm Canaris, a brave
Schwarze Kapelle
resister who tried to rid Germany of Hitler! In the attic she found a chest of his things her mother had saved: old law books and a few ancient photographs, brittle with age, some clothing. She studied them for hours on end. When she was old enough she even imitated his appearance: the spiky hair that looked as though he had cut it himself, the pebble-lensed eyeglasses, the dour undertaker’s suits. She tried to imagine the agent named Anna Katerina von Steiner, the woman he had been in love with. In her grandfather’s papers Astrid could find no trace of her, so she painted a portrait of Anna in her imagination: beautiful, brave, ruthless, violent.
Schwarze Kapelle
resister who tried to rid Germany of Hitler! In the attic she found a chest of his things her mother had saved: old law books and a few ancient photographs, brittle with age, some clothing. She studied them for hours on end. When she was old enough she even imitated his appearance: the spiky hair that looked as though he had cut it himself, the pebble-lensed eyeglasses, the dour undertaker’s suits. She tried to imagine the agent named Anna Katerina von Steiner, the woman he had been in love with. In her grandfather’s papers Astrid could find no trace of her, so she painted a portrait of Anna in her imagination: beautiful, brave, ruthless, violent.
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