Assassin (26 page)

Patterson’s chin sunk to his chest.

“He was the best of the best,” the DSS man said softly, “Ripper was the best guy I had.”

“I’m sorry, Tex.”

“This son of a bitch is ripping the heart out of my organization, Alex.”

“No, he’s not. You’re the heart, Tex.”

“That’s what I meant.”

B
LESSED AND ACCURSED.
T
HAT IS MY LIFE, THE FATE
I
HAVE
made for myself, Snay bin Wazir thought, gazing upon the lovely face of his Rose. The Pasha and the Rose, lounging atop silken pillows scattered across the parquetry flooring, watched the two sweating sumos inside the
dohyo,
the ring, watched them collide, grunting loudly as they did so.

Snay bin Wazir was also watching Rose, keenly aware of her reaction to the private demonstration he’d arranged for the two of them, alone, in the beautiful shrine he’d had built for his sumos. Her lips were parted and she was breathing rapidly. Her bosom swelled rhythmically. There was a light sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Far from being repelled by the sight and sounds of two nearly naked giants grappling with each other, she was, it seemed, decidedly excited.

The sight of her erect nipples, etched in perfect relief against the taut yellow silk of her chemise, was having an increasingly noticeable effect on the Pasha as well.

The Pasha looked down upon this growing evidence of passion beneath his robes and sighed. The potent admixture of desire and frustration was something he’d always dealt with badly.

All of his latest efforts to bed this most prized of all the
hashishiyyun
in his seraglio of assassins had failed. Since Francesca had arrived at his palace from Rome, he had plied her with jewels, enormous rubies and diamonds. One sapphire as big as a plum. Gifts of sable and myrrh and gold. Nothing, it seemed, had any effect on this most sublime of creatures. She was, as he constantly reminded himself, one of the world’s most beautiful and desirable women.

Francesca. Even her name stirred him, inflamed him, ignited fireworks of fantasy deep in his brain.
Francesca.
Sleeping alone in the desert, a fortnight ago, he’d written the word in the sand outside his Bedouin tent. Awakening, he saw the wind had erased her name. Why did he torture himself? It was foolishness. This forlorn desire of his did nothing but demean him. She was a world-famous film star with a considerable personal fortune. A creature of such transcendent beauty, she could bat one of her enormous brown eyes and instantly have any man she might desire groveling at her feet.

Hopeless!

He could not force himself upon her, she was far too valuable. Should he lose her, there would be hell to pay with the Emir, who rightfully considered her a great asset. Born of a Roman father and a Syrian mother, Francesca had grown up begging on the backstreets of Damascus. Abused as a child by her cruel Italian father, she had, since childhood, nursed a fevered hatred for the impious Westerners who ruled the world. Her celebrity cover, achieved over the last decade, was ideal. A rabid holy warrior in the guise of a glamorous Italian film star. It was too delicious for words.

Still, it meant he could not buy her affection with gems or gold. Yet there was something powerful between them. A bond. A thirst, a hunger that bound them together. A kind of lust, yes. Bloodlust?

He had been afraid this rejection was because of his recently acquired girth, his now enormous size. But, no, watching her watching the massive sumos, it was clear this was not the problem. Ah, well. This was not the first time he’d faced this insoluble and most distressing dilemma. Nor would it be the last. He could have as many wives as he wished, of course, as long as they were approved by Yasmin. And Yasmin approved only drudges and dogs. Thus, Francesca was forbidden fruit.

He was as eternally bound to Yasmin as the sea is to its bed, as the earth to its orbit, as the moth is wedded to the flame. Yes, he loved her, he supposed. In his way. And she him. But it was love without passion.

His anger for this gilded steel trap called his life, on the other hand, blazed with passion. Fueled each day as, in a thousand tiny ways, his wife Yasmin threw oil on the fire. A look, a word, a stare.

The Emir’s daughter was both his salvation and his doom. With all his money and power, he was still Yasmin’s slave. A prisoner here, inside his own palace. As long as he behaved himself, he could keep his head.
Keep your head down and you might keep it,
he reminded himself daily. Meanwhile, the Emir was biding his time, waiting for him to make a single misstep. Even a cross word with Yasmin behind closed doors somehow got back to her father. A word floated into his feverish mind, the word that came to him whenever the impossibility of his marital situation reared up and seared his brain.

Poison.

He wasted endless hours plotting his escape, as if it were remotely possible. Yes, he lay beside his wife, awake those countless nights, conjuring up accidents, mishaps, catastrophes that might befall this woman he no longer desired. Over the years, love had atrophied, which was not unusual. But resentment had grown in its stead. All because of her father’s sword, dangling over his head. A situation she never hesitated to exploit in even the smallest disagreement. Even though she claimed to love him deeply!

To the Emir, and to the Pasha’s world at large, they were a picture of mature wedded bliss. But, as the old saying has it, one never knows what goes on inside a marriage unless one sleeps under the tent. Unbearable.

So he fantasized endlessly of slips and falls; he conjured Yasmin’s tragic demise and his ensuing freedom. Yet, no matter how delicate and elegant the scheme, no matter how sublimely he plotted his dreams, in the end, the Emir always found him out. His would be just one more among the countless heads the Emir had sent dry and scuttling across the desert sands.

Now, if the Emir himself were dead…

Suddenly, he couldn’t breathe. His ribcage was taking a terrible battering from his heart, an organ that threatened to detonate at any moment. He looked down, startled and astounded to see Rose’s beautiful white hand resting lightly upon the folds of crimson silk that draped his thighs. The hand traveled upwards, the fingers parted, searching. He was hard as stone when the hand seized the object of its desire.

“My Pasha,” she said, turning those eyes toward him as she caressed him through the silk, wrapped him in it, tightening and then easing her grip.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she pressed a finger to his lips and stopped whatever mad, mindless, unspeakable words he was about to utter.

“No, Pasha,” she whispered hoarsely, taking his hand and crushing it against her lush bosom where he felt one nipple already engorged under the silk. “My lips will speak for both of us.”

He collapsed back against the pillows as she bent her head to his lap, parting the hem of his robes, yanking them upwards and then taking him in, her thick mane of blond hair cascading over the great expanse of his girth, her darting tongue everywhere at once.

Licks of fire.

Suddenly, her mouth was at his ear, nibbling, her breath hot and loud.

“I want you,” she whispered. “Here. Now.”

“But the sumos…Ichi and Kato…”

“In front of the sumos. I want them to see. Now.”

That night, the four sumos carried the lovers through the orange groves in the Pasha’s sedan chair. Once the sumos had been dismissed, the two alighted and walked deep into the heavily scented gardens. The evening sky was shot with stars, blazing in the clear mountain air. She was his now, and he took her, roughly, and pressed her to him.

“Put a dagger in my heart,” he said, “we might as well get it over with.”

“The two sumos’ lips are sealed,” she said. “She will never know.”

“Yasmin knows everything.”

“No one knows everything.”

“In this house there are no secrets. How do you know the sumos—”

“Trust me.”

He laughed then, almost giddy that such a woman as this could care for him, let alone exist. He could only imagine how she had managed to guarantee their silence.

“Venice was thrilling, but Paris was exquisite,” he said, kissing her forehead. “
Grazie mille.
”

“You enjoyed watching it,
caro?
”

“Yes. But, far more importantly, the Emir is ecstatic. He went so far as to say that it was good.”

“
Grazie.
”

He smiled at her and said, “She is first-rate, this Parisian one. This Lily. But, then, she learned from the best.”

“I thought the white phosphorus would be more cinematic on CNN than a simple shot to the head.”

It was such a perfectly outrageous statement he threw his head back and laughed, entwining a lock of her hair in his fingers.

“Genius,” he said. “Pure genius.”

“The hard part was thinking where to put it. The idea of the shoes, it was Lily’s.”

“It was perfection itself. Now, you must listen. Business. I have spoken to the Emir. We move to the next phase.”

“Yes. It’s time. To be honest, I was myself enjoying this first part. But already we have the Americans running in circles.”

“The next few moves will be the more challenging. Far more complex, intricate. It will not surprise you to learn that this assignment is yours.”

“I am ready.”

“I know.”

“Tell me, Pasha.”

“There is one more ambassador.”

“He’s a dead man.”

“No, no. You are not to kill him. We will do that when we have what we want from him. We want him alive. He has certain information that is vital to our purposes.”

“What, then?”

“A clean abduction. Snatch him. I will arrange for him to be brought here.”

“How?
Caro,
it’s one thing to kill. The…how you call it…logistics…of a kidnapping of such a public figure…
molto difficile.
”

“You’ll think of something, my precious Rose.”

He kissed her hard on the lips, crushed her against him, wanting to do more than possess her, wanting to both devour her and own her at the same time. Have his cake and eat it…he bent his head to her bosom.

Blessed and accursed.

“What was that,” Francesca whispered, whirling her head about.

“What, darling girl?”

“I heard a sound. Over there. In the jasmine bushes.”

“It is nothing. A peacock, perhaps. Come, now. To bed.”

The man lingered in the bed of jasmine for an hour after the two lovers had returned to the palace, savoring both the scent of the flowers and the sweetness of his situation. Finally, he rose and went to the fountain he still visited daily, listening to the songs of the splashing waters, longing to hear the voice that haunted his every waking moment.

He lowered himself to the broad rim of the fountain and spoke quietly to his love. His words were full of hope and joy and promise.

The heartbroken sumo, Ichi, enslaved by the Pasha for so long, now had both the means and the opportunity to escape this prison and return to his homeland, to the source of the sun, his beloved Michiko.

He stole back through the gardens.

Ichi moved as quickly and as quietly as his great bulk would allow. Someone was waiting for him. He would find her sitting on the small marble bench, she said. The far end of the reflecting pool in the secret heart of her private meditation garden, she had told him. What he would say to her would both break her heart and steel her spine. But, no longer would Ichi be alone in his determination to be free of bin Wazir’s velvet bonds.

He would have an ally in his struggle.

Yasmin.

A
MBROSE
C
ONGREVE’S FEELINGS REGARDING THE SHOOTING
of upland game birds were rivaled only remotely by his feelings as regards to fishing. He would as soon grasp a wriggling, slimy creature and wrench its lips from a fishhook as he would pluck a bloody pheasant from the gorse and stuff the still warm corpse inside his waxed jacket, which was precisely what he was doing at this very moment.

A fishhook, the symbol used in logic to represent an “if-then” proposition, captured his sentiments at this moment perfectly. If you catch something, or shoot something, you’ve ultimately got to
do
something with the bloody thing.

He was still amazed he’d managed to hit the damned bird. His gun, a fine prewar Purdey twelve-bore, one of a brace lent him for the occasion by Alex Hawke—Alex being an ardent practitioner of the sport and one-time runner-up for the King’s Cup—had not seen a lot of action today. The birds got up quickly, often too close or too far away to get off a shot, and, every time he mounted the gun to his shoulder, all he could see were dogs, beaters, and his fellow guns. He was so terrified of perhaps shooting any of them, that, until just moments ago, he hadn’t pulled a trigger all day.

It was late in the day, and he was cold and wet and thoroughly tired of mucking about in the thickets of gorse and bramble in tight-fitting green gumboots. And more than ready to head home, shed these damp tweeds, and settle in for a cozy whiskey by the crackling fireside. His morning had gotten off to a rotten start, with Alex practically lecturing him,
lecturing,
for all love, about sporting behavior in the field. Not that he didn’t need such a tutorial; God help him, he hadn’t picked up a shotgun in years.

On one of the many bookshelves in his small flat in London was a book he’d read and loved as a child. One of his favorites, actually, an extraordinary book by a man named Dacre Balsdon. Its title still spoke volumes to Congreve.

The Pheasant Shoots Back.

Congreve had been a successful young inspector at Scotland Yard when he first met Alex Hawke, age nine. The trail of a notorious jewel thief had led him to the smallest of the Channel Islands, a fog-shrouded place called Greybeard Island. In the course of his investigation, he visited the home where Alex lived in the care of his elderly grandfather, the chief suspect in the bizarre case.

The very idea that one of England’s wealthiest men, an island recluse named Lord Richard Hawke, had pirated his own late wife’s jewelry in a daring daytime heist at Sotheby’s in London had drawn the young inspector to the matter. Congreve, with the assistance of his suspect, Lord Hawke, solved that case. Ironically enough, it was the butler who had done it. A fellow named Edward Eding, who had faithfully served in his lordship’s employ for decades, had masterminded the crime. In the process, priceless emeralds, tiaras, and Fabergé eggs belonging to Alex Hawke’s late grandmother were returned to the London auction house. And Ambrose Congreve’s burgeoning reputation as a master criminalist was solidified.

The clever young detective and the aging inhabitant of the drafty old pile known as Castle Hawke thereafter became fast friends. Congreve became a frequent guest at the great house on a rocky bluff overlooking the channel; and he was to prove an important figure and mentor in the life of young Alex Hawke.

Brutally orphaned at age seven, Alex was easily the most curious boy Ambrose had ever encountered. As Congreve would remark years later, “He questions the questions more than the answers.” So Alex Hawke had relied on young Detective Congreve and his aging grandfather, Lord Hawke, to teach him everything they knew of the nature of the world and its inhabitants.

These early years of his childhood were spent covering even the most arcane of subjects; and for Ambrose to sit here now, silently feigning rapt attention while Alex Hawke, his erstwhile pupil, expounded on the art of killing small animals with high-powered weapons, was tiresome in the extreme.

He had learned, at breakfast that very morning, that to wound birds by very long shots was almost a crime. And that to destroy game meant for the table by shooting birds that were too near was almost as serious an error. A man who can shoot, Alex had informed him later, as they bounced along in the mud-splashed Range Rover, picks off his birds in the head or neck so as to avoid damaging the body for the cooks and the table.

“Look here, Alex, I must say,” he’d replied, “I haven’t picked up a field gun in thirty years and now you’re telling me I’m supposed to shoot the wee beasties only in the
head?
”

So, whilst all around him guns had been blazing all day long, his beautifully engraved and checkered Purdey side-by-side had been notable only for its silence. The poor dead fellow he’d just stuffed into the game pocket of his waxed jacket was the result of a bit of bad luck on the bird’s part, brought down without benefit of dog or beater.

Ambrose had just emerged from a remote covert where he’d gone to answer nature’s call, and was quite alone. He had paused for a moment, contemplating the notion of pulling out his pipe, watching, with some degree of pleasure, the spaniels working a distant field, when a crowing pheasant suddenly rose up from a nearby bramble patch, perhaps some fifty yards to his left.

“My word,” he said aloud, and instinctively mounted the gun to his shoulder, sighting down the twin barrels. The bird’s low route of flight would bring him right past Congreve, neither too near nor too far nor too high. He swung his gun, aimed, and shot. Three pounds of flesh and feathers dropped on the spot. “My word,” he said again, walking toward the fallen prey. Despite his mixed emotions about the shoot and thoroughly dampened spirits, he’d been delighted to find that it was indeed a head shot, no damage at all to the body.

Ambrose relished the moment of handing the bird over to Alex to add to the bag at day’s end.
Head shot, you see, dear boy. Wouldn’t be sporting otherwise.

There was one added bit of drama as they headed home, down the back roads of Gloucestershire leading to Hawkesmoor. In the rapidly fading sunlight, they were bouncing along the muddy, deeply rutted single country lane, Alex at the wheel, Patterson in the rear. Privet hedges lined both sides of the road, a good fifteen feet high. As they rounded a sharp hairpin bend, another vehicle, going ridiculously fast, came round from the opposite direction and both cars fishtailed, swerving to avoid a collision, skidding to a muddy stop, their front bumpers inches apart.

“Christ,” Alex said, angrily eyeing the driver of the other car. “That was bloody close!”

“Sketchy lot,” Congreve allowed, eyeing the men inside the vehicle. There were six thoroughly disreputable-looking chaps crammed into the offending car, a battered old Land Rover, all of them covered with mud and blood.

“Poachers, by God,” Alex Hawke said, glaring at the driver and his passengers. “Let’s bust ’em, Constable. Here’s my mobile. Quick call to Officer Twining at the local constabulary and the game warden wouldn’t hurt.”

When Alex started to open his own door, a gun protruded out of the other Land Rover’s driver’s side window. The face of a rough-looking chap appeared in the window above the barrel. “Move yer arse, damn yer eyes!” the ruddy-faced and red-eyed driver shouted, slurring his words. “Move yer bleedin’ arse out of me way!”

“Moving smartly, old chap!” Alex shouted, opening his door and climbing out. “Very smartly, as it were.”

“Wot’s up wit you, guv’nor?” the driver snarled as Alex approached the window, seemingly oblivious to the double-barreled twelve-bore aimed at his midsection. Congreve had seen the man load two shells into the chambers as Hawke approached him. He could hear Patterson in the back, spinning the cylinder of his old six-shooter, ready to step in.

“No need for that, Mr. Patterson,” Congreve said, flipping the mobile shut and turning to the rear. “Alex will make short work of these sods. Couple of lads from the local gendarmerie on the way, at any rate. Should arrive in about two minutes.”

“Wot’s up? I’ll tell you wot’s up,” Alex said, smiling at the inebriated poacher. “The jig is up, for one thing. Poaching is illegal, as you know.”

“Bugger off, mate, and get yer bleedin’ car out of my way then, before I—”

“Before you what?” Alex said, grabbing the shotgun’s muzzle in his right hand. He ripped the gun out of the man’s grasp and flung it backwards over his shoulder in a single motion.

“Wot the bloody—”

Alex then tore open the driver’s door, grabbed the lout by the scruff of his neck, snatched him from behind the wheel, shook him like a rag doll, and then slammed him face down across the mud-spattered bonnet. From a sheath on his belt, Alex produced a stubby hunting knife, the tip of which he now inserted into the man’s left ear. He leaned down on the bonnet to whisper directly into his right ear.

“What you’re doing is against the law,” Hawke said, quietly. “If I ever see you out here again, you’re going to meet with a very serious accident. Got that?”

“Back in the car, lads,” Alex said, as the rusted-out rear doors swung open and two of the driver’s fellow poachers started to get out, guns in hand. “I’m not a qualified surgeon, and if I have to remove your friend’s ear, I might make a bad job of it. You gentlemen are under arrest. Cops should be here in a tick. Hear that siren? That’s them now. Sit tight. Shouldn’t be long, I don’t think.”

“A good afternoon’s sport, wouldn’t you say, Tex?” Alex Hawke said, stamping the mud from his knee-high rubber boots and stroking the feathers of a dead bird he held in his hands. He’d arranged the shoot as a brief and much-needed respite in the middle of Patterson’s encampment at Hawkesmoor. Since Hawke and Patterson had arrived back in England ten days earlier, the house had become an absolute beehive of DSS intelligence operations and communications.

Senior intelligence staff from both the United States and Britain were swarming about the place, and occupied most of a warren of rooms of the east wing’s upper floor. Hawke and Patterson had a briefing at six every morning with senior staff. Impromptu meetings were held throughout the day and night as necessary. No one was getting much sleep. A forest of the very latest electronic eavesdropping devices had been mounted on the rooftops, and the normally sleepy household was now a twenty-four-hour-a-day hubbub of activity. An intense hunt for the Dog was on but, so far it least, the Hawkesmoor spooks had met with only limited success. Hawke thought a few hours out in the field might rejuvenate them all.

What outraged Hawke most was what he saw on television.

Al-Jazeera, the Arab television network, had long been broadcasting images of gleeful celebrations over the deaths of America’s soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. A terrorist fires a shoulder-mounted missile and an Apache helicopter full of young American boys explodes in a ball of fire. A truck bomb explodes outside the American command post. People in the streets below erupt into cheers. Now, in the homes and coffee shops, a new reality show: the murder of American diplomats and their families. Each assassination was professionally filmed and edited. No grainy, shaky, hand-held images here. Every gory detail was shot in close-up. And so the grisly deaths of these innocent men, women and children were now broadcast daily for the rapt enjoyment of an increasingly bloodthirsty segment of the general population.

Hawke, Patterson, and Congreve were stowing their gear and muddy boots in the gun room, having bagged sixty-some birds, not to mention six drunken poachers. The gun room was one of Alex’s favorite rooms at Hawkesmoor. In addition to the rows of mounted stags’ antlers on all four walls, a row of Georgian servants’ bells hung above a large oak armorial. The faded names beneath each bell had fascinated him since childhood.
Blue Room, Water Room, Chintz Room, King’s Room, Priest’s Room, Dressing Room.
Below the bells hung a warrant to execute Mary Queen of Scots in 1587.

“Drinks are waiting in the library, m’lord,” said Pelham, standing in the doorway. “Dinner will be served promptly at eight, which is in one hour. You have an intelligence briefing at nine, sharp, and a video conference with Mr. Sann at Langley at ten.”

“Thank you, Pelham,” Hawke said. “Ample warning. That gives Mr. Congreve here exactly sixty minutes to consume as much whiskey as he possibly can.”

“Really, Alex,” Congreve muttered. “You do try my patience on a regular basis.” Ever since Hawke had stopped drinking whiskey, he’d been on this bloody holier-than-thou jag.

“Just teasing you, Constable. To shore myself up.”

“I stopped drinking once,” Congreve said, “Worst twelve hours of my life.”

“If I may, Mr. Patterson,” Pelham continued. “Another courier arrived earlier, down from London by motorcycle, with a personal message for you. I’ve left the envelope by the telephone on the desk in your room, sir.”

Ten minutes later, a showered, shaved, and much-refreshed Hawke stood with his back to the fire in the eighteenth century library. The room contained some three thousand volumes. Two globes, celestial and terrestrial, stood on either side of the hearth and, peering down from the ceiling cove above Alex’s head, were the marble busts of classical authors. As a boy, curled up and reading his adventure stories on a winter’s afternoon, Alex had always imagined them fiercely critical of his reading habits.

All three men had briefing papers in their hands in preparation for a meeting immediately following supper. There had been some progress during the hours of their absence, but it promised to be a long night.