The First Casualty (6 page)

13

Sark, Channel Islands

Five Minutes Later

Jason made a circuit of the cottage's great room and bath before entering the kitchen and testing the lock on the back door. Not substantial enough to resist a determined assault but sturdy enough to cause a racket before yielding. Satisfied he had done everything he could, he was returning to the stairs when he stepped on something soft, something that emitted a hair-raising yowl loud enough to send Jason staggering backward in astonishment.

“Goddammit, Robespierre!” he muttered, “Why can't you stay put at night like the rest of us? I could have shot you by mistake.”

From wherever he had taken refuge in the dark, Robespierre maintained an unrepentant silence.

Still grumbling about the perverse nature of cats in general, and this one in particular, Jason sat, shivering in the cold invading the space that had been heated by the stone fireplace. Relighting the fire was a temptation, but one easily dismissed by the necessity of a visit to the woodpile behind the house. Instead, he moved quickly upstairs, snatched the eiderdown comforter from the bed, and wrapped himself in it so that only his eyes and the hand holding the Striker were uncovered. He returned to his vigil, this time the same bent wood chair Momma had occupied. Its hard back and seat would diminish the chances of falling asleep.

Not that there was any great chance of that. Nothing like being shot at to get the old adrenaline flowing.

From upstairs, he could hear Pangloss's resumed snoring. Having done his duty in detecting the intruder, the dog had obviously washed his paws of the matter, leaving Jason to deal with the problem. Whose best friend? For that matter, a fine pair, Robespierre and Pangloss. At this moment, had there been a public animal shelter or a pound on Sark, both might have been in jeopardy of having to find new homes.

He moved his thoughts to a potentially more useful purpose. Who had taken the shot, or, more realistically, who had sent the man who had taken the shot? Elementary logic suggested whoever sent the man in the Mercedes to Liechtenstein. But elementary logic didn't name him. Or them.

Jason's first guess would be the followers of Mullah Mahomet Moustaph, one of the 9/11 plotters, and the only man Jason blamed for Laurin's death. He was, of course, no more responsible than his co-conspirators, but he was the only one free and still alive. Maybe. Jason had been largely involved in the terrorist's capture and transport to an interrogation site someplace where due process was usually administered with hard objects and car batteries. The thought of the mullah's discomfort was as pleasing as the idea of his followers finding Jason's hideaway was disturbing.

Of course, the mullah's cadre of crazies weren't the only people who would not mourn Jason's passing and would be happy to expedite it. Most in that category were dead, but the number of those surviving made it difficult to be certain of the source of the would-be assassin.

Whoever, Jason had been found here on Sark, and the island was no longer sanctuary. The first step in terminating someone was to locate them, and that step had obviously been completed. No matter his martial skills, it was only a matter of time till the next attempt, or the one after that, succeeded. He had to leave Sark.

Jason gave a sigh of frustration. He had been forced to vacate a beachfront home in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then a house on a cliff on Ischia, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. And now Sark. All since he had initially quit Narcom.

Some retirement benefits, spending your golden years as a fugitive.

If you lived that long.

So much spilled milk. Time to think of where next. It was a decision that would take time he might not have. He needed to disappear right now. How . . . ?

Momma, of course. Take up whatever task she had for him, that would provide an escape. All he had to do was finish the job in the month or so before Maria was to rejoin him and find a new residence.

Somehow the hours passed, the darkness lightening like coffee as cream is added. Trained to lie in waiting for days at a time if necessary, Jason remained motionless in the chair. One part of his mind was thousands of miles and a dozen years away. He and Laurin, laughing in the spray over the bow of the small Super Snark as she came about, sail luffing, in the choppy winter waters of the Potomac. Firm breasts pressed into his back, arms around his waist, as the artist's palette of the Blue Ridge Mountains' autumn foliage sped by a in blur of color to the tune of the BMW 1000's exhaust. Laurin, her swimsuit barely adequate to cover the strategic places . . .

His reverie shattered like fine crystal dropped on a stone floor as another part of his mind took command, cruelly depriving him of what came next. He was surprised to note his cheeks were wet with tears, but he had no time to consider. Something had drawn him back to the present.

He stood, the eiderdown comforter slithering to the floor with a whisper. He was both resentful of the interruption and careful the chair made no sound as it was relived of its burden. Dawn's gray veil covered the windows and he could see it had stopped snowing. Upstairs, Pangloss stirred. Robespierre eyed Jason curiously from the top of a pine china cabinet as though wondering if his altitude alone would insure no further encounters such as last night's.

All normal here. But what . . . ?

Then he heard it, the crunch of footsteps on the crust of ice that had formed on the front walkway. Jason had noticed it last night when he arrived. He stood back from the door, the collapsible stock of the Striker pressed into the hollow of his shoulder.

Hold it,
he told himself.
What kind of an enemy announces himself with noisily crushed ice and an arrival at your front door?
He risked a side on glance from one of the front windows. Just above the edge of the road cut, a dapple gray horse's head shook, nostrils expelling jets of steam quickly swallowed by the crisp morning air.

Old Bess, the horse that had been bringing Jason's twice-a-week delivery of milk and butter for over a year now. Not that Jason needed the dairy product. Indeed, Maria eschewed butter as though it were a magic potion sure to add inches to her slim waist and hips. But Jason knew the value of blending into a community, particularly one as small as Sark. He not only subscribed to milk and butter, but fresh eggs and, in the summer, vegetables as well. A good customer was a good neighbor. And a good neighbor was someone you watched out for.

There was a barely audible thump as the milk came to rest just outside the door. Jason watched the retreating back of Mr. Dunn, on his way to more deliveries. Jason cracked the door and extended an arm to blindly grope for the bottle. Suddenly, beside him was a warm furry body, purring loudly. Jason had not heard Robespierre pounce from the cabinet to the floor. But then, he rarely did. Jason had no problem imagining some ancient feline relative, lost in history, depending on stealth to seek out a living between saber tooth tigers and cave bears.

A product of evolution or not, Robespierre was now the picture of a docile, human loving house cat. The animal knew milk had been delivered and milk meant cream.

Make that stealth
and
deception.

14

Creux Harbour

Sark, Channel Islands

Twenty-Five Minutes Later

Puddles of melting slush along the dock were tiny lakes in some arctic tundra. Jason hardly noticed. He was intent on the yacht slowly tugging at her mooring outside the harbor, as subtle among the working craft as a moose in rut. Although the temperature was struggling toward Sark's comparatively moderate maritime climate, there was no one in sight. The half dozen fishing boats, the ones that would be full of sport anglers in summer, had left at sunup in pursuit of the mullet, sole, and mackerel that haunted the rocky shores. The fishing was actually better in fall and winter, sufficient reason for professionals to brave the churning, angry Channel waters.

So, how was he going to contact Momma? The president's cell phone number was a less tightly guarded secret than hers, and Narcom existed in no directory, telephone or otherwise.

Overhead, a gannet cried out as it cut circles in an empty blue sky. With nothing better to do, Jason watched the bird peel off into a dive that would have done credit to a fighter. Its bill barely rippling the water, the fowl struggled back to altitude, a shiny silver morsel in its beak. Jason wondered why the bird didn't rest in the swells to enjoy its catch.

A sound of an outboard motor distracted him. A launch was departing the yacht. He was chagrined to realize she had been expecting him.

Once aboard, Samedi, still clad all in black, conducted him across a shiny teak deck to a pair of French doors of the same wood with brilliantly shined brass handles. Opening one, Samedi ushered him inside, closed the door, and disappeared on silent feet.

Jason was in the ship's grand salon, standing on what he guessed was an Oushak carpet that was worth more than most houses on the island. The bulkheads were of dark wood and hung with oils, two of which were either by seventeenth-century Bolognese painter Guido Reni or damn good copies. Two near-life-size gilt Nubians guarded the far door, possibly as expensive as they were tacky.

The light came not from windows—there were none—but from an indirect source in the deck above. It shone down on a Boulle desk, lined in bronze and inlaid with fruitwood. Momma sat behind it.

She displayed her usual dental brilliance. “Mornin', Jason.” One massive hand indicated a pair of equally ornate wing chairs upholstered in red velvet. “Have a seat. Had breakfast yet? This boat has a full kitchen. Or should I say ‘galley' ”?

Jason sat carefully, uncertain if he was lowering himself into a priceless, if gaudy, antique or a reproduction. “Coffee would be nice.” He gazed around the room. “Must be good to have friends with nice toys.”

With this degree of opulence, must be a very successful Mafia don. Or head of a medium-size oil sheikdom, someone more prone to extravagance than taste.

“Convenient, anyway. You have a chance to read the book I left with you?”

“I, ah, got interrupted.”

Momma's eyebrows arched. “On this island? By what, an escaped cow?”

Jason was spared the necessity of an answer by the arrival through the far door of a man in a white jacket. He carried a silver tray bearing a steaming Meissen pot with matching sugar bowl, cream pitcher, cups, and saucers. Jason had no idea how he had been summoned.

Momma waited until he had set the tray down on the desk and departed before she began to pour a stream of fragrant black coffee. “You showed up, I figured you'd read the book.”

He stood to take the cup she was offering him. “Maybe you can just tell me about it?”

She did.

Jason was uncomfortable balancing his cup and saucer on a knee, wishing there was a table nearby to set it on. “Sounds more like sci-fi.”

“A lot of people wish.”

Jason took a long sip of the coffee. There was something in it. Chicory, perhaps? “And you really believe this, this force, whatever it is, took down the Air France Airbus. That there was some kind of directed weapon, like a laser beam? We're talking a death ray, like out of the comic books?”

“The people at both Le Bourget and Toulon don't see anything comical about it. Some bunch call theyselves the Islamic Maghreb claim credit for it.”

“I didn't see that in the news.”

“You won't. No point in starting a world panic.”

“Then how do we know they really are responsible?”

“We don't. But we may be fixin' to find out in the next ten days.”

“How's that?” Jason asked, skeptical.

“Last week, they broadcast a demand over Al Jazeera, say we got two weeks to release every prisoner at Guantanamo or they going to shoot down another airliner.”

“You believe that?”

Momma shrugged. “There's them what don't want to find out. You got ten days left.”

“The BEA and the manufacturer believe.” It was a statement, not a question.

Momma refilled her cup.
“
From the voice and flight recorders, as well as the parts of the plane the French were able to retrieve, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is of the opinion there is no known force in nature that could twist and bend metal like that, nor any that could have caused the readings on the flight recorder.”

Jason stood to place his empty cup on the desk, shaking his head no as she held up the coffeepot. “So what makes them so sure of the source?”

“If you'd read the book, you'd know.”

“You tell me.”

Momma lifted an arm to consult a diamond-encrusted antique Girard-Perregaux that Jason knew had at one time belonged to Elisabeth, wife of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph. The empress had been considered one of the most beautiful women in Europe, even by 1898, at age sixty, when she was stabbed on the streets of Geneva. Her assassin, an Italian anarchist, supposedly snatched the watch as he plunged his homemade dagger into her chest. He still had it when arrested. How its present owner came by it was a subject upon which Jason could only speculate.

The watch was a shiny mole on an arm larger than a leg of lamb. “Ain' got time to go into all that.” She produced a manila envelope, handing it cross the desk. “It's all in there.”

Jason took the envelope. “You in a hurry?”

“Nope. You are. You got a flight outta Guernsey into Heathrow in a couple of hours. Only ten days left, remember?”

Jason was suddenly aware his mouth was open. This was the height of presumption even for Momma. “Oh? And just where am I going?”

“You decide once you read what I just gave you, that and the book. The job pays one million, no taxes. You're going to want to put together a team. I'll cover those expenses.”

“And just what, may I ask, makes you think I want the job?”

“Among other things, your old pal, Mahomet Moustaph, is involved.”

Jason ignored the sound of grinding of his own teeth.

“Last I heard, he was in some CIA hellhole of an interrogation center off the map.”

“He escaped.”

“But how . . . ?”

“Not like them spooks over to Langley going to hand out press releases ever time they screw up. What I hear, though, is some of Moustaph's throat-cutting buddies bribed the native guards.”

That was the problem with detention and interrogation centers located in places too remote to come to the attention of U.S. officialdom: The incentive to the locals in allowing such a place to exist was purely financial, not patriotic. Consequently, the natives were often for sale to the highest bidder.

Momma continued, “Thought of you the minute I heard.”

Well she might. Jason made no secret of the fact he viewed Moustaph as his own personal quarry. If there had been any doubt he would take the assignment, it vanished with the possibility he might be able to track down the man responsible for his wife's death. Still, he wasn't going to let Momma think she could evoke a Pavlovian response every time the man's name came up.

“9/11 was a long time ago. Other than Moustaph, what makes you think I want the job?”

Momma's brow furrowed as though she were in deep thought. “Well, first, you're bored.”

“You're guessing.”

“And you need to leave the island.”

“I can make my own arrangements.”

“And you came here.”

For that, he had no answer.

He turned to leave, stopped, and turned again. “If the location of this, this . . .
thing
is known, there are any number of ways to take it out without putting boots on the ground.”

Mamma nodded her agreement. “True. But a drone carrying a bomb can't sift through the wreckage to make sure the machine is destroyed. Since it's inside, the drone can't confirm even if it's there, for that matter.”

“No, but a team of Marine Force Recon, SEALs, or Delta Force could if confirmation is essential.”

“That would be putting those boots on the ground, wouldn't it? No, way it is, the country has enough enemies in that part of the world to be sending in troops to blow up a mosque.”

“A mosque?”

Momma pointed to the envelope in his hand. “Jason, you really need to read this stuff yourself, 'stead of wasting time and maybe missing your plane. We know the area from which the weapon came. Some kind of triangulation I don't pretend to understand. We have an idea of the size of a machine that could strike from that distance. Only building big enough to hold it around there is a mosque, a rather famous one as it turns out.”

A job too dangerous for uniformed professionals in a hostile and volatile area. Sometimes Jason wished he had a higher boredom threshold.