Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (10 page)

Slaton followed the Greek through a charmless maze of narrow passageways. The air below was stagnant, etched in grease and fuel oil, and a line of wire-framed bulbs snaked along the ceiling. Passing what were clearly crew’s quarters, Slaton saw sea bags stacked on bunks and walls plastered with photographs—wives and kids, tear-out centerfolds of naked women, a few callous souls mixing the themes.

The captain stopped and opened the door to what looked like a closet. Slaton saw a rusted circular drain in the center of an eight-foot-square space. Brooms, buckets, and mops had been shoved to one side, making room for a single brown-stained, sheetless mattress.

The skipper held out his hand, and Slaton filled it with a thick envelope. The Greek didn’t bother to look inside—there would be plenty of time for that later. He said, “It is good you are a man who travels light. We will make port in Marseille in three days. You may leave this room only to eat and to use the head. The mess hall is three cabins forward and the head is next to it. You eat after the crew. Any questions?”

“Customs in France?”

“Leave that to me.”

Slaton didn’t like the answer. The man had asked about his papers, yet hadn’t bothered to inspect them. He
should
have looked.

The master of the vessel started to leave, but then turned. “If you have anything of value—there is a safe in my cabin. In spite of my best efforts, some of the crew can be … how should I say it … curious?”

“You’ve already taken everything I have.”

The Greek studied Slaton’s bulky jacket, then smiled. “Then you are a man with no worries, my friend. Bon voyage.”

*   *   *

The engine mechanics arrived in Santarém at dawn, the only passengers aboard a chartered Beechcraft-1900 from Guatemala City.

Umberto had been expecting them, and he greeted the two Guatemalans as soon as they stepped onto the tarmac. It turned into an awkward affair—even if his Portuguese welcome escaped the men, his smile should have sufficed, yet the two Spanish-speakers only walked past him ungraciously. They went straight to work, pulling their tools out of the cargo bay, and everyone clambered into the airport’s truck. An undeterred Umberto took the wheel and steered toward the MD-10 on the far side of the airfield.

After helping the men unload in silence, Umberto left the mechanics to their business. He went to the operations office, built a cup of sweet light coffee, and stood under a mango tree as the Guatemalans set up camp under the big jet’s wing. They opened toolboxes and uncrated expendables—altogether it was a heavy load, one that Umberto imagined must have stretched the little Beechcraft to its maximum gross weight.

After thirty minutes the men asked to borrow the largest work stand available, and Umberto complied. It turned out to be just tall enough, the service lift jackknifing up to the midpoint of the starboard engine. From there they unlatched cowling panels and went to work. Umberto did not know what they were inspecting—oil levels or hydraulic fluid, he supposed, whatever was necessary to make a fifty-thousand-pound thrust engine spin in the designed manner. Then, disturbingly, he saw the mechanics shake their heads and begin lowering the stand.

One of the Guatemalans stepped down to the ramp and approached a watchful Umberto.

“You have for bugs?” was what Umberto heard, the Portuguese-Spanish disconnect strong as ever.

“Bugs?”

The man made a swatting motion with his hands, then pantomimed holding something as he made the noise, “Ssshhh! Ssshhh!”

“Spray? Kill bugs?”

A big nod. “Yes, kill.”

Umberto went into the operations office and began rummaging through cabinets. Twenty minutes and two cans of insecticide later the job was done. A massive nest of stinging insects, the likes of which he had never seen in the Amazon—not that he was any expert—fell from the starboard engine and splattered onto the tarmac like a rotten melon. The mechanics moved cautiously to the port engine, and apparently found no further infestations. One man climbed onto the spine of the aircraft and walked back to the tail section. He briefly inspected the third engine, which was centrally mounted and integrated into the vertical tail, and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

The Guatemalans spent the balance of the morning on the starboard side until, with the torrid sun peaking and lunchtime near, they put down their tools, wiped their hands on a common rag, and asked Umberto, “Where is beer?”

This request passed without language barrier, and Umberto answered with a combination of words and hand gestures to guide them toward the second-nearest bar which was owned, not by chance, by his cousin Leonardo.

The two trod off, more duty than excitement in their strides, and Umberto wondered if they would be back today. He heaved a sigh.
With Central Americans you never knew
.

*   *   *

Slaton slept lightly through the morning and past noon. After waking, he stared at the ceiling with an arm bent behind his head. He heard the occasional crewman transit the hallway outside, and noted regular mechanical thumps from somewhere behind the walls. Sounds that were all to be expected, along with the steady drone of the ship’s screws. Less predictable—his thoughts as he again tried to work out who was trying to kill him.

It all eventually tapered to one manageable question. Who knew that he’d taken up residence in Malta? In the end, he had a concise list of one. As far as he knew, only the former director of Mossad, Anton Bloch, was aware of the refuge he’d chosen. Indeed, only a handful of people knew that Slaton was still alive after surviving a mission gone wrong sixteen months ago on the western shores of Lake Geneva. Aside from Bloch, this included Yaniv Stein, whom he had already called into service, a certain retired Swedish policeman, and last and most ominously the new director of Mossad, Raymond Nurin.

Yet it was not so simple a net to cast. There were always other possibilities, most involving pure chance. A stray document or a slipped conversation at Mossad. An inadvertent paper trail. Or the most simple of all—an old enemy, visiting Malta, who had simply turned a corner at the wrong time and recognized a hardworking stonemason as something else.

Only too late did Slaton see the folly of his self-imposed exile. Disappearing had done nothing to keep his wife and son safe, and in fact had brought a severe handicap—today he was on one side of an ocean and his family the other. Christine and his son were exposed.

His son
 …

It struck Slaton like a hammer blow—he didn’t even know his child’s name.

He abruptly rolled off the mattress and stood, forcing his mind to matters at hand. He deleted the question of who was acting against him, and pushed aside his protective instincts for his family. With newfound clarity, he saw that he needed two things immediately—information and means. Both lay in Zurich, where his private banker kept a discreet office in the shadow of the Bahnhofstrasse giants. What happened later could not be considered. Not yet.

Zurich had to come first.

TWELVE

It was midafternoon when Slaton emerged from his quarters, if a converted utility closet could be termed as such. In the mess hall he was given a bowl of brothy soup and a heel of French bread by the cook, a young Filipino, he guessed, who then began silently clearing dishes that had been strewn carelessly about the officer’s table. The man didn’t meet his eyes once, which Slaton took as an ominous sign.

He dipped his bread into the soup and chewed off a corner. “This food is good,” he said.

The cook didn’t reply. There was a chance he didn’t speak English, but Slaton reckoned that if he knew any four words in the language it would be the ones he’d just said.

He tried a second time with the only phrase that might top it. “What’s for dinner?”

“Menu in hall,” the cook said.

“Have you been on this cruise long?”

“Just signed second two-year contract.”

“Two years? I’ll bet you’ve been a lot of places. Seen a lot of things.”

No reply.

“How about the captain? It was good of him to let me come aboard. Is he a good skipper?”

Still nothing.

“You Filipino? I’ve been to the Philippines a couple of times. Once to Manila and another time—”

The cook disappeared into the kitchen.

“Nice talking to you,” Slaton muttered into his bowl.

He found the cook’s rebuff unaccountably frustrating. In his years with Mossad Slaton had often worked solo, loneliness his customary companion. Had Virginia changed that? During exile in Malta he’d found it increasingly difficult to distance himself from people: neighbors, shop owners, mail carriers. A ten-year-old named Kid. Now circumstances were driving him back into reclusion. The position of cook was among the most humble on any ship, and if anyone on board was going to talk to him it was the Filipino in the stained apron.

Like it or not, he was alone again.

Slaton put his empty bowl and spoon neatly on a tray, and shouldered out into the passageway. There was no one in sight, and he turned away from his room and walked down the corridor. He passed a door labeled
ELECTRIC BUS 4,
followed by staterooms where, if the stencils on the doors were accurate, the second officer and chief engineer were quartered. After these he came to an unmarked door, and Slaton nudged it open to find a storage closet that was filled from top to bottom. There were sea bags and suitcases, fishing poles and snow skis. Two folding bicycles leaned against an old surfboard. It was overflow storage, he supposed, a community repository where officers and crew could stow outsized items that didn’t fit in their cramped berths.

Slaton heard footsteps and looked up just as a uniformed officer turned the corner. It was one of the men who’d been in the bar with the captain yesterday, the large man with the bent nose who’d been eager to back his skipper with his fists. His name tag and epaulets identified him as the ship’s second officer.

“What are you doing?” he barked. “You are supposed to be in your quarters.”

Slaton pulled the door of the storage room shut. “I was looking for a head that didn’t smell so bad.”

The man came closer and glared at Slaton with olive-black eyes. “There is only one—you know where it is.”

The man was roughly six foot four, maybe two hundred forty pounds, which gave him a size advantage over Slaton. But only a slight one. He was clearly the kind of man who used his bulk to intimidate. His breath was rotten, something between sour milk and yesterday’s fish, and Slaton weighed the merits of bringing this to his attention.

In the end, he said, “Yeah, I think I remember where it is.”

Slaton turned down the passageway toward the head. He felt the black eyes follow him all the way.

*   *   *

The Guatemalans returned after a surprisingly short lunch, and if there had been beer involved Umberto saw no sign of it in their steady gaits.

They were joined by two new men who’d arrived on a scheduled midday flight. The second pair was from Lima—was there a Portuguese-speaking aircraft mechanic anywhere in the world?—and their first request was more conventional than the bug-slaying Guatemalans’. Umberto, under instructions from the city council to do whatever he could to help, used a utility tug to pull the airport’s only ground power cart next to the big jet. The unit was twenty years old, a Cummins diesel on bald tires, purchased when the airport was in higher times and seeking ICAO certification. But the old cart cranked to life on the third try, and was soon feeding 400Hz AC power to the jet’s distributive electrical busses.

While Santarém drank its afternoon coffee, the Peruvians removed boxes from the equipment bay, ran checks, and eventually wrote down a few part numbers. They gave their list to Umberto, who dutifully relayed it by way of the operations office fax machine to a number scribbled on top.

Everything seemed to be going well.

Two hours later the Guatemalans called for a fuel truck. The tanker was prompt, and they hooked up a high-pressure hose and began filling the main tanks. It was on the stroke of three that afternoon, under a steaming midday sun, that Umberto saw one of the mechanics rush to the fuel truck on a sprint and begin pounding on a red emergency shutoff switch. The switch worked, although not without a delay, and everyone watched in silence as two thousand gallons of Jet A fuel vented from a seam in the jet’s wing, splattered to the tarmac, and coursed a river of amber into the surrounding rain forest.

*   *   *

“Is it a goner?” Christine asked.

“No, just a loose wire on the plug. I’ll have it reconnected in no time. These garbage disposals are notorious for loose leads. It’s because they vibrate so damned much.”

She looked on gratefully. She had always considered herself a capable person, but when it came to electrical work she drew the line—that was better left to the professionals. Or at least to someone she trusted. In fact, the man underneath her sink was not an electrician but a neurosurgeon, undeniable overkill for a dodgy garbage disposal. She supposed having delicate hands on spinal columns didn’t necessarily translate to fixing three-quarter horsepower InSinkErators. Still, Dr. Mike Gonzales she trusted.

“That should do it,” he said, standing with a screwdriver in his hand. “Give her a try.”

Christine flipped the switch and the motor whirred like an empty blender.

“You’re a genius. What do I owe you?”

“Maybe a clean rag and a cup of coffee?”

Ten minutes later they were together on the couch while Davy navigated the room, alternately standing and falling on his diaper.

“You know, Christine, I think he’s gotten bigger since you brought him into work last month. He’s beginning to look a lot like you.”

She smiled appreciatively, thinking,
He’s his father reincarnate
.

“Hey, the Cleveland Orchestra is coming to town next week. I’ve heard it’s a great show. Would you like to go?”

“Davy doesn’t like loud noise.”

The two exchanged an awkward look.

He said, “I’m not sure if Tchaikovsky would appreciate that. And you
could
get Annette to watch him.”