The Perfect Assassin (25 page)

Roth nodded and Khalif raised his voice to summon the two guards. “Escort Sergeant Roth to his quarters. He will return to Tripoli in the morning.”

As he left, Khalif reminded him, “Nine days, Mr. Roth. Nine days.”

The makeshift control room was set up in the officers’ mess aboard
Hanit
. The room had been chosen for logistical reasons — adequate electrical supply, good ventilation, and right next door was the ship’s hardened Weapons and Maneuver Control Center. The ship’s officers were not consulted, most finding out at the evening meal that their lone retreat had been commandeered by the annoyingly chipper little man who had boarded two days earlier in Marseille. Paul Mordechai had transformed the dark, formally decorated dining area into an entropic scattering of equipment and wires.

The ship’s captain looked over Mordechai’s shoulder as he sat glued to a video monitor. The sprightly engineer had been in the same seat for over three hours, yet showed no lack of patience or enthusiasm. He wore a headset with a boom microphone and his face was illuminated by the machine’s flickering glow.

The ROV was a “fly out” model. Sent to the bottom on an umbilical, it then separated and took guidance signals out to two hundred meters. A 50-watt quartz halogen light was boresighted to track the digital camera, and images were transmitted to the docking rig, then relayed topside by way of the umbilical.

To the uninitiated, the pictures might have seemed relentlessly monotonous. The flat mud on the ocean floor had almost no contour, like the moon without craters. The highlights for the last hour had included a crumpled beer can that looked like it might have been there since World War II, and a pair of undulating worms who poked their heads out of the muck, miniature cobras swaying to the song of some unseen charmer.

“Shouldn’t we have found something by now?” the captain asked.

“Needle in a haystack, Captain.”

“But we’re still getting two good signals from those beacons. Strong signals.”

Mordechai manipulated a joystick and the view on the monitor began a shift to the right. “Just makes the haystack smaller, needles don’t get any bigger.”

The captain frowned.

“Our biggest problem is stability.” Mordechai pointed to the display. “Your ship is drifting. Not much, but enough to screw up our search matrix. We can only use the engines to adjust forward and aft. I could make a better system. Put a differential GPS on the drone, something to compare its exact position and drift relative to the ship. Then we’d install some side thrusters with digital control on
Hanit
and write up software to automate the corrections. The way it is now, with everything done manually and only one axis of movement, by the time we correct one way, the drone is drifting to the other. Ends up with divergent oscillations. Same thing can happen in aircraft flight control software.”

“How comforting,” the captain deadpanned, obviously lost.

Mordechai smiled and keyed his microphone, “Ten forward.”

In the adjoining control room a lieutenant engaged the screws to push a thousand tons of warship gently ahead, then reversed them momentarily to stop.

“Still seems to me we should have found something by now.
Polaris Venture
was 150 feet along the waterline. Even if she broke up, there ought to be some pretty big pieces down there.”

Mordechai had no reply, primarily because he was more and more bedeviled by the same question. They had locked onto both beacons, getting good signals every thirty minutes. By his own calculations, considering antennae errors and thermal deviations, there was a ninety percent chance that
Polaris Venture
was within a two-square-kilometer area on the ocean floor below. They had covered that entire search box once already and found nothing. The other ten percent was weighing greatly on Mordechai when he finally saw something.

“There!” he shouted.

A grainy, squarish image appeared on the monitor.

Mordechai yelled into his microphone, “Mark one!” He worked the joystick furiously, repeatedly pressing a button that took magnified pictures of the image almost two miles below. Rocking nervously in his chair, he now understood why
Polaris Venture
had been so hard to find. “Where’s the other one? Where’s the other?” he mumbled.

“I don’t know what that is you’ve found,” the captain said, “but it’s not part of a ship. At least not any part I recognize.”

Mordechai held his drone directly over the small box, then tilted upward so the camera and beam of light spread out level across the bottom. He then slowly rotated to the left. The small cone of illumination arced across a barren submarine landscape, a tiny lighthouse in one of the world’s darkest corners. After ninety degrees of rotation he stopped and zoomed in.

“There,” Mordechai said.

Another object, a twin to the first, came into view.

“Mark two, bearing three-three-zero, ten meters from mark one. Captain, have the radio operator stand by for a secure uplink. We’ve got a very important message to send.”

“That’s it? I thought we were looking for a ship.”

“We are,” said a dispirited Mordechai. “But we won’t find it here.”

Chapter Twelve

Christine guided the small Ford through Dorset countryside as they made their way back to the region where the odyssey had begun, the rural Celtic counties of the southwest coast. They had abandoned the rented Peugeot in Southampton, leaving it a few blocks from The Excelsior in a crowded lot. How David had acquired this car was a mystery to Christine. It seemed mechanically sound, but was frightful to look at. Probably twenty years old, it seemed held together by an amalgam of rust and putty. The back window was plastered over with stickers, supporting the likes of the Green Party and a musical group called Throbbing Gristle. The odometer had simply stopped working at 217,768 and both rear fenders displayed damage from what looked like two separate incidents, although Slaton had assured Christine that all required lights and vital moving parts were functional. She guessed that he’d stolen the car, hoping no one would miss it, or perhaps figuring the owner was likely a budding criminal or an anarchist, the type of person who would avoid any intentional contact with the police.

David was asleep in the passenger seat. Christine had offered to drive, knowing there was no way she’d be able to get any rest. The image of two masked men and the flashes of their weapons kept flooding her thoughts. Once again her protector seemed to be a step ahead of these madmen, but how long could it last? She heard David rustle, as he’d done time and again over the last two hours. He wasn’t sleeping well, but Christine suspected it had nothing to do with what had gone on at The Excelsior. His eyes opened groggily.

“Where are we?” he asked, with a glance at his watch.

“Almost to Dorchester.”

He straightened up and stretched. “You made good time.”

“Feel any better after the rest?”

“Sure.”

Christine thought he still looked tired. In the days she’d been with him he’d never slept more than a few hours at a time. That wasn’t good. She’d worked enough twenty-four hour shifts in her residency to know that recurring lack of sleep could seriously cloud a person’s judgment.

“So where did you find this beauty?” she asked with a glance up at the ripped headliner. “Is it hot?”

He laughed, “You mean stolen? No, I bought her fair and square. Nine hundred pounds sterling.”

“The seller won. Who was he?”

“A young kid. Heroin addict, I think. Wanted to sell the car fast, probably for a quick fix. Once I offered cash, he signed it right over. I made a copy of the papers, then sent off the registration, but I neglected to sign at the bottom. Some clerk will see the mistake in a couple of days and send it back to an address that doesn’t exist. It will all take time, and for a few days we’ll have a beat-up car that’s been legitimately signed over to us.”

“Whose name is it in?”

“Yours.”

“Mine?” she exclaimed.

“Well, Carla Fluck’s.”

Christine smiled, and then from somewhere deep within a laugh emerged, followed by another and another. It was contagious and he succumbed until both were laughing uncontrollably. It felt good, and Christine realized that even through all their troubles, all the death and deception, there could still be laughter. There could still be life.

She sized him up.

“What?” he asked, clearly wondering what was on her mind.

“Oh, I’ve just never seen you laugh like that. I suppose I thought a person like you would always be … serious or something.”

“A person like me?” he said, his voice harsh. “A killer, you mean. That kind of person.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, yes, we’re serious. One has to be when all you do is go around killing people all day. But we do all the rest. We laugh, cry, feel pain, a whole spectrum of emotions.”

Christine fixed her gaze on the road ahead, not sure what to say. The ensuing silence was stifling.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“You don’t have to explain. I know how much pressure I feel like
I’ve
been under. I never stopped to think that you might—”

“Get ready to turn off!” he interrupted.

“What?” She noticed he was concentrating on the side mirror. Christine looked back and saw a pair of headlights in the distance behind them. A chill spiked down her back and her grip on the wheel tightened.

“Is someone following us?”

“Probably not.” The little Ford went around a curve and the head lights behind disappeared temporarily. “Turn! Turn there!” he said, pointing to a small gravel side road.

Christine braked quickly and swerved onto the road.

“Take it in another fifty feet, up next to those bushes. Kill the lights and put it in park.” Christine did as he instructed. “Make sure your foot’s off the brake pedal or else the brake lights will stay on.”

Christine moved her foot as far away as she could and they both sat in silence. A long ten seconds later the car whipped by behind them, showing no signs of slowing.

“Okay, turn us around and be ready to go.”

Christine extracted the car from the side road, did a three point turn, and backed into their hiding spot. They sat silently for nearly ten minutes, the little Ford’s feeble engine idling.

“All right,” he finally said, “we’re safe. Let’s press on.”

Christine let out a deep breath. “You haven’t told me where we’re going.”

“We’re going to put some distance between ourselves and The Excelsior. We still need to get lost for a day or two, and I think I know just the place.

Prime Minister Jacobs’ morning staff meeting ended at 10:00. He had tried to show interest in the daily crises briefed by his various Cabinet members and their underlings. More Katyusha rockets flinging in from the Lebanese border, a severe influenza outbreak in the primary schools, and the Americans again. This time their Senate had tied up an international aid bill, threatening the start of the new Hadera desalination project. In spite of his efforts, Jacobs’ distraction was evident to all. When the meeting finally dragged to a close, the staffers were asked to leave, while Cabinet Ministers remained. General Gabriel and Ehud Zak looked worried. Sonya Franks and Ariel Steiner eyed one another contemptuously.

Jacobs got things going. “What’s the latest, Anton?”

The creases in Bloch’s brow seemed to have attained a permanent etch. “We found the ELTs. But not
Polaris Venture
.”

“What does that mean?” Steiner pounced.

“The ELTs were exactly where we expected to find them. Only they weren’t in the wrecked hull of a ship. They were simply lying next to each other on the ocean floor.”

It was a result no one had predicted, and silence prevailed as the group digested the information.

General Gabriel said, “So the ship might have been hijacked, and whoever did it threw these things into the ocean to throw us off?”

“Maybe,” Bloch said. “All we can say for sure is that somebody’s trying to confuse us. The question is,
why
?”

Jacobs forced hope into his voice, “
Polaris Venture
is a big ship, Anton. Surely if she’s still sailing around somebody will spot her soon.”

“Yes, I’ve already sent out a message to watch for her. And our satellite people are going to give all the Arab ports a good look over the next few days.”

“A few days might be too late,” Steiner suggested.

Franks said, “I have to agree. Isn’t there something else we can do?”

Jacobs was stung by the rebuke from one of his closest allies. He sensed the political sands shifting.

“There’s more,” Bloch said. “I sent a flash message yesterday, about our London Chief of Station being killed in a gun battle.”

“I know Anton, I saw it. It’s an awful thing. We’ll do what we can to solve that when the time comes, but for now we have to concentrate on
Polaris Venture
.”

“This
is
about
Polaris Venture.
This morning I talked to London. It seems our people got a good look at the assailant.”

“You don’t mean —” General Gabriel started.

“I’m afraid so. It was David Slaton.”

Jacobs felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “God Almighty,” he said.

“What’s going on, Anton?” Zak demanded. “One of your people sabotages our most delicate operation in years, then runs off and starts killing his co-workers?”

Bloch said, “We don’t know that he was responsible for hijacking or sinking
Polaris Venture
. And we don’t know why he’s been on a tear through England.”

Zak showed a rare glimpse of impatience, “You can’t justify what he’s done now, Anton. This man is a menace.”

Franks said, “I agree. He’s turned against us, for whatever reason. We don’t know what happened to that ship, but we know he was involved somehow. And there seems to be no doubt he’s responsible for decimating our London station.”

The room fell quiet. Political allies exchanged knowing glances, adversaries glared at one another. All waited for Jacobs to speak.