Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (39 page)

The director turned. Coltrane opened his mouth as if to speak, but then seemed to have second thoughts.

“Does that name mean something to you?” Sorensen asked.

“Yes.” Nothing more came until Coltrane said, “You should both get back to work.”

Sorensen and Kelly stood frozen for a moment, and exchanged a
What the hell is going on?
look. They were heading for the door when Coltrane added, “This man who’s contacted us in Beirut…”

Both turned.

“Give him anything he wants.”

After the two analysts were gone, the director remained at the window with the name fixed in his head. David Slaton. Coltrane
had
heard it before, but only once, during a late-evening, martini-laden discussion with the outgoing director when he’d assumed command of the agency. It wasn’t from any official record, or even an off-the-books operation. Closer to a legend, really.

“There was a favor for Israel. We took in one of their operatives, a man who recently saved them great embarrassment. He’s a killer, as pure and simple as they come, who ended up in a delicate situation. Mossad wanted him to disappear with a faultless identity. They were very concerned, so I offered our help. The name is David Slaton … or at least it was. I doubt you’ll ever hear it again…”

From his predecessor’s words, one phrase looped again and again in Coltrane’s head.

He’s a killer, as pure and simple as they come …

FIFTY-SIX

He thought he might get the CIA’s help, but Slaton wasn’t going to sit idly while they made up their minds. He’d taken a circuitous route after leaving Les Palmiers, patient countersurveillance measures on the sidewalks of Dbaiyeh. Among the details he had not shared with Langley was the observation of the self-appointed concierge, passed on by Nassoor.
The truck turned north, onto Armenia Boulevard. The driver would only do that if he was heading north, away from the city.

It was the thinnest of trails. In northern Lebanon lay the seaport of Tripoli, and beyond that Syria, with its rudderless government and a populace reeling from civil war. Farther still were Iran and Iraq, always at odds with one another and each unpredictable in its own right. Then the most terrifying scenario—Turkey, a full member of the E.U., and thus the perfect geographic conduit for sending a load of gamma-laden terror anywhere in Europe.

Slaton considered that the initial turn north could be a false assumption, or even intended as misdirection. For all his grievances with Mossad and the government of Israel, he retained a strong kinship with the Jewish people and their homeland. Could Ben-Meir be heading there? He thought it unlikely. Unless Ben-Meir was working for Israel, which Slaton strongly doubted, that would mean crossing one of the most closely guarded borders on earth. A veritable brick wall.

He saw but one certainty—no one would undertake such a ruthless quest, killing to steal nuclear material, only to hand it over to authorities for safekeeping. He was watching the world’s worst nightmare unfold, a radiological attack that could be unleashed at any time, against any number of targets. Contaminate a food or water supply, blanket a major city in radiation. Or perhaps irradiate a religious shrine—the Middle East was the cradle of civilization, littered with holy sites that could be defiled with foreseeable outrage. The kind of outrage over which wars were fought.

Slaton’s only option at the moment was to pursue Ben-Meir. The man had a considerable head start, but he was transporting a heavy and valuable load which would require extreme caution. North was the most likely route, so Slaton would move in that direction, hoping that as he made up ground the CIA could more narrowly focus his search—help him zero in on a killer hauling fifty-two canisters of radiological hell.

First, however, Slaton had to prepare for his hunt to succeed. Ben-Meir had been alone in Geitawi, yet he was not operating solo. Nor would he be without firepower. So Slaton’s immediate objective was clear. From Dbaiyeh he headed away from his quarry, boarding a city bus that would take him back to Beirut. There he would apply the most fundamental of an assassin’s tenets.

Never go into a gunfight empty-handed.

*   *   *

Sorensen returned to the Operations Center to find Davis hunched over a computer display. She knew he’d been sweeping through satellite images for the better part of an hour, ever since they’d gotten word that a closetful of nuclear material had gone missing in Beirut.

“Anything?” she asked.

“No,” he said distractedly, not altering his flow. “I’ve been over every active airfield in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. No sign of our jet.”

“There had to be a connection. We’ve got a stolen aerial tanker that someone’s been going to great lengths to keep out of sight, and a cache of hijacked nuclear material. It all fits too perfectly.”

“Yep.”

“What time frame are you using?” she asked.

“I allowed a ninety-minute flight from Basrah, and from there I’m right up against real-time stuff. That’s about a nine-hour window. It narrows our search a lot—there aren’t many airfields in the region with a runway long enough to support an MD-10.”

“Could it have landed and gone straight into a hangar?” Sorensen asked.

“There are even fewer of those—maybe ten that are big enough, and most are already occupied.”

“Could it still be in the air?”

“Doubtful. We’ve got two guided-missile cruisers and an aircraft carrier in the area, and all have top-of-the-line radar. It wouldn’t even matter if they turned their transponder off. We can see everything in the air right now that doesn’t have feathers—and a few targets that do. No, they’ve done something else.” He broke away and sat straight in his chair. “I think we should look at abandoned airfields.”

Sorensen frowned. “I don’t think we target those for surveillance.”

“But can you get images?”

Sorensen didn’t know, so she collared a technician from a nearby workstation who provided the answer. “We have coverage of the entire area—that’s no problem. But we don’t store the coordinates of unused airfields.”

“There must be dozens in the area,” Davis said.

“There are,” said the tech, “but we don’t keep track of them. No reason to. If you give me coordinate sets, I can have images in a matter of minutes.”

“How do we do that?” Sorensen asked.

When the technician didn’t answer, Davis knew he had his work cut out for him. “The old-fashioned way. We get our hands on some aeronautical charts and start plotting. Do you have anything like that around here?”

Sorensen dispatched Kelly on the mission. “Lower level, where the archived documents are kept.” He acknowledged the order and disappeared. She then gave Davis the latest from her meeting with the director.

“The Barclays account,” he commented, “everything invested in oil. I think that’s important.”

“So do I. And there was something else about the account. The ownership had recently been altered. The new name on the account is David Slaton. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Nothing at all,” Davis said.

“Well … it meant something to the director.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t want to talk about it.”

“You know what your problem is around here?” he said. “You people keep too many secrets. In the military everything is right out there. The information might be good, or it might stink, but it’s always available for everybody to see.” Davis went back to his search as a woman arrived with a message for Sorensen. When she read it a look of pain washed across her face.

“What now?” he asked.

“It’s from our team at the airport in Basrah. I told you they’d found two bodies in the desert nearby. Well, it seems there were also two shipping containers in the bed of that pickup truck. They were stenciled in Cyrillic, so it took some time to figure out what had been in them—apparently our friends loaded up a couple of Russian-manufactured industrial agitators.”

Davis turned to face her again. “Agitators? Like … for mixing things?”

She nodded. “On a big scale, apparently.”

“What’s the status of that team you sent into Syria? Have they confirmed whether this threat is real?”

Sorensen checked her watch. “No word yet. But we should find out soon.”

*   *   *

The Rapid Reaction Team lived up to its name.

Hurriedly dispatched from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, an armored Chevy Suburban drove at breakneck speed toward the Syrian border while advance warning was forwarded through diplomatic channels: a Red Crescent medical facility outside Damascus was in dire need of emergency supplies. The lead guard at the border checkpoint might have gotten the word, because he waved them through, although not before inspecting a single passport in which the driver’s photograph was obscured by a hundred-dollar bill.

The special embassy detail was comprised of two men and two women, and when they pulled to a stop at the tiny farmhouse outside Aadra thirty minutes later, all four doors of the specially equipped Suburban rocked open simultaneously. For any other CIA station in the world it would have been an astonishing response—four qualified personnel assembled within minutes, and sent across an unfriendly border with all the equipment and training needed to quantify a radiological threat. For the Beirut station it was a well-practiced drill.

The team trained endlessly, and during the last year had been scrambled on no fewer than four occasions, all reports of chemical weapons that had turned out to be spurious. Perhaps softened by these false alarms, the team’s leader was casual as she stood regarding the house. It was a beaten-down affair, even by local standards, the roof warped and the square windows footed by broken glass. The front door was open, swinging aimlessly on the breeze, and there was not a trace of smoke from the stovepipe chimney on a chilly February afternoon. By all appearances the place was abandoned.

The leader spun an index finger in the air. Everyone knew what to do. One of the men, the best linguist, went to the house and began calling out in Arabic to ask if anyone was home. The other man stayed near the still-running vehicle—their best escape if it came to that. The second woman came to stand by the leader’s side.

Getting no response to his calls, the linguist cautiously stepped inside. As the team leader waited, she studied the workshop in back, which had figured centrally in the briefing. The shack was sided by the biggest tree on the property, a leafless acacia that looked like a pencil sketch in the falling late-day light.

“Should I put on a suit?” the woman at her side asked.

The leader looked left and right. The nearest neighbor was five hundred meters away, but somebody might be watching. The last thing they wanted was to start a panic. “No, not yet.”

“House is clear!” called the Arab-speaker from the open doorway.

The two women walked around the side of the house watchfully, steering toward the workshop. The second woman carried a radiation detector tuned to sense gamma emissions, a bulky handheld device. They were halfway between the workshop and the house when the team leader saw a fuzzy mound at the base of the acacia tree. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yep,” her second replied.

It was a carcass of some kind, the species indistinguishable—nothing remained but a pile of bones and a few shards of hide.

“Goat?” the leader asked.

“Or a big dog. And look over there.”

In the distant field were two larger carcasses, either sheep or calves, judging by their mass.

“Anything on the meter?”

“Crap!” said the second woman. “I forgot to turn the damned thing on!” She activated the device, and both immediately heard a crackling electrical buzz. The needle on the gauge jumped straight into the red zone.

The two women instinctively took a step back, and the one in charge announced the obvious, “Yeah, Brenda, I think we’d better go put those suits on.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

Beirut is a place with a great many guns. The police and military have their share, and dozens of religious and ethnic sects keep extensive arsenals. After a long and bloody civil war, the perceived need for protection is universal. Unfortunately for Slaton, even in the midst of so much firepower, there was little chance of a weapon being cheerfully issued to an Israeli assassin.

He arrived at the Central Beirut bus station at 4:21 that afternoon. Near the ticket counter he found a brochure detailing the system schedule, and after buying a kebab from a grizzled sidewalk vendor, he sat on the steps of the old municipal hall and studied the map. He concentrated on routes that paralleled the Green Line—even today, few modes of public transportation crossed the demarcation zone, the city remaining split into a Christian east and Muslim west.

Along this line, the factions had dug in during the tenuous peace, like contemporary, urban variants of the trenches of the Somme and Ypres. The official cessation of hostilities had been over twenty years ago, yet truces here were a fluid concept. The more recent civil war in Syria had spilled into Lebanon, driving flare-ups and divisions among the belligerents that were smiled upon elsewhere. Israel, for one, was perfectly happy to sit back and watch ISIS tap swords with Hezbollah. So it was, all along Beirut’s wavering Green Line, militias held their ground determinedly, flew their flags with swagger, and stockpiled weapons for the next battle. And during the intervening lull in action, as was typical of armies everywhere, the mood of the troops would be a lazy one.

Slaton boarded a bus for what turned out to be a short ride, finding what he wanted two hundred yards west of Martyr’s Square, in a zone controlled by Sunni Arabs. He remained in his seat until the next stop, then exited and backtracked, and studied everything for a second time.

The building that had caught his eye was no more than a shell, the upper half wrecked by artillery barrages, and rubble piled high around the bullet-scarred foundation. The first two floors, however, appeared largely intact, and at the only viable entrance Slaton saw two armed men. One was tipped back in a chair with a shotgun in his lap. The other stood casually, his Kalashnikov resting against a nearby wall as he thumb-typed on the screen of a mobile phone. They were Sunni, certainly, evidenced by the blue scarves of the Future Movement, two men who’d been given guns and told to keep an eye out for nothing in particular. The building was a militia stronghold, proved by the banner hanging over the entrance, and by the fact that Slaton had not seen a policeman or a Lebanese Army soldier, in a city that crawled with them, within five blocks of the place.