Reckoning (5 page)

Even if Sonderberg had noticed, being under surveillance in a Nevada casino would not have surprised him. Like everyone else,
he knew that both players and dealers were under constant surveillance in the big casinos. It kept everybody honest. In fact,
it was said that the observers had other people watching
them
.

The man watching him had been tailing him from
Santa Barbara and had caught the same plane as he to Vegas. He was a big man with close-cropped fair hair, not unlike Sonderberg
himself in appearance. After Sonderberg had turned over his hired car to a parking attendant and followed a porter with his
luggage inside the front door of the Tropicana, the man with fair hair ran his own hired car from beneath the concrete entrance
canopy and parked it in an unattended section, next to a Chrysler New Yorker. He found the right key on his ring, then got
out of the car and inserted the key in the Chrysler door lock. No trouble. Inside, he opened the glove compartment. All it
contained were some road maps, a pair of sunglasses and an air pressure gauge.

Two cars over was a new Honda Acura. He selected a key for it before leaving the Chrysler. In the Honda’s glove compartment,
he found what he had been looking for, more or less. The gun was light, semiautomatic, only .22 caliber, a cheap Japanese
make, probably not too reliable, what used to be called a lady’s gun. In the right hands, it was just as deadly at close quarters
as any other.

He slowly played the slots near the elevators while waiting for Sonderberg to show. It didn’t take long. Most of the hotel
guests were probably like that—didn’t stay in their room long enough to unpack their bags before they hit the casino. While
Sonderberg played craps, he played roulette. When Sonderberg switched to blackjack, he went back to the slots, all the time
keeping his distance, aware of ceiling cameras and house
detectives. There was no way he could hit Sonderbeg in the casino. The event would be recorded by at least half a dozen cameras.
He might as well do it on national television. He would bide his time.

Dockrell was uneasy. Sonderberg must have been informed by now that he was on a hit list. Why hadn’t he gone to his sister’s
family like he was supposed to? Had he suspected someone might be waiting there? Was coming to Las Vegas suddenly his pathetic
idea of hiding himself? If that was so, why wasn’t he glancing nervously around him and jumping at every sudden noise? Sonderberg
wasn’t, that was for sure. He looked more bored than anything.

When he headed for the elevators, the man with fair hair was not far behind him. He did not rush to get in the same elevator
as Sonderberg, who was alone in it; he merely watched the floor indicator until it lit on twelve. Then he quickly stepped
into a waiting elevator and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. He stepped out of the elevator in time to see Sonderberg
opening his room door down a long corridor. Sonderberg went in the room without glancing around to see who had stepped out
of the elevator. He seemed to think he had dropped into a sea of anonymity here in Las Vegas.

A used tray from room service lay outside one room door. The fair-haired man stooped over it, arranging the metal cover over
the plate, straightening the cutlery and tapping on the cap of an empty Heineken bottle. He then picked up the tray, walked
briskly down the corridor and rapped on Sonderberg’s door.

There was a pause. Finally a voice asked, “Who is it?”

“Room service, sir. A snack, compliments of the management.”

“I’m tired. I don’t want anything.”

“You don’t want it, sir? Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong.” Sonderberg peered through the peephole and saw the tray.

“Compliments of the management, sir. Leave it on your side table. Perhaps later—”

“Oh, very well.”

Gary Sonderberg unlocked the door and found himself looking into the muzzle of a small pistol. He backed inside as the man
with the tray in one hand and the gun in the other advanced into the room and eased the door closed behind him with his heel.

“My money’s over there, on that chest of drawers,” Sonderberg pointed.

The man with fair hair nodded and put the tray down on the chest. “Lie face down on the floor.”

Sonderberg didn’t argue. He did what he was told, lying on the right side of his face and watching the gunman.

“Point your nose in the carpet. I don’t want you looking at me.”

Again Sonderberg did what he was told. The fair-haired man pulled two pillows off the bed. He placed one on top of the prone
man’s head. Then he pressed down with the gun into the pillow until he could feel Sonderberg’s neck.

In a muffled voice, Sonderberg said, “Why don’t you just take the money?”

He pressed down with the muzzle into the downy pillow. Using his left hand, he covered his hand holding the gun with the second
pillow. Then he pulled the trigger. There was hardly any sound, certainly nothing that could be heard through the walls of
the room. Sonderberg’s body stiffened and relaxed for a moment.

He lifted the top pillow and a puff of acrid gunsmoke rose in the air. Both pillows were blackened by powder burns. He lifted
the lower pillow. The bullet had penetrated through the back of Sonderberg’s neck, near the base of his skull.

The gunman did not take any of Sonderberg’s money from the top of the chest, but he did remove the room service tray and replaced
it where he had found it in the corridor. It was always his habit to cover his tracks.

Charley Woodgate and Herbert Malleson were talking about the recent indictment of a Virginia arms company while waiting at
the farmhouse for Richard Dartley to show. The company was accused of selling El Salvador $4.7 million in cheap inferior Yugoslav
ammunition, which the company had imported, repackaged as first rate American ammo and exported to Central America for top
dollar.

Charley was annoyed. “People read stories like that and think that’s the kind of business I must be in.
No one even knows what a craftsman is anymore. It’s all repackaging and hype.”

“You don’t do that kind of work?” Malleson teased.

Charley refused to rise for the bait. “They all get caught in the end. If they put as much work into honest deals as they
do into cooking up frauds, they’d make even more money. What bums me up is the way just a few people give everyone in our
business a bad name.”

Dartley arrived soon after that. As usual he had no time for greetings or small talk. “What did you find?” he asked Malleson.

“I called your uncle earlier today,” Malleson said, “and told him Gary Sonderberg would probably be the next victim.”

“I had just got word myself he had been murdered in Las Vegas,” Charley volunteered.

“I wasn’t certain he would be the one,” Malleson went on. “Now that he was, I think we’ve cracked the system they are using.
Sonderberg was the sixth man to die. Working with the five men killed previously for some kind of pattern in the order of
their deaths, I fed all kinds of data into my big computer. A few weird coincidences cropped up, but nothing that seemed to
lead anywhere. Then I started playing about with one of the more obvious things about them—their names. The computer came
up with an odd fact.”

He handed a sheet of paper to Dartley, who looked at the names printed on it.

John Arnold (Kuwait)

Bernard Phillips (Texas)

Joseph Donovan (Saudi Arabia)

Roger Elliott (Indonesia)

Leonard Hill (Massachusetts)

“They’re listed in the order in which they were killed,” Malleson explained. “The initial letters of each man’s either first
or last name spells out a common Arabic first name, Abdel. Now I know that’s really reaching. But I had nothing else worth
a damn. So I put every possible combination of the five remaining names through the machine. The memory spat back at me stuff
I had keyboarded in only a month ago. The second five oilmen’s names yielded the name Saleh. Abdel Saleh. When Sonderberg
was hit, that confirmed it for me.” He handed Dartley a second sheet with five names on it.

Gary Sonderberg (Global, California)

Nicholas Avedesian (Shell, North Sea)

Peter Ligeti (unemployed, whereabouts unknown)

Paul Egan (Global, Zaire)

Harrison Murdoch (National Science Foundation, Antarctica)

“Abdel Saleh is a power in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards,” Malleson resumed. “The vast majority of members of the Guards
are still illiterate peasant fanatics, the sort that throw themselves in a human wave
against Iraqi machineguns. The top leaders are skilled manipulators and power brokers, vying with one another to show which
of them is the most zealous in doing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s will. Rafiq Dost has been the acknowledged top dog for some
time.”

Charley said, “He’s believed to have backed the Hezballah group in Lebanon, the one responsible for bombing the U.S. Marine
barracks and embassy in Beirut.”

“Right,” Malleson agreed. “Nowadays Syria seems to be backing Amal militia in its fight with the Hezballah militia in Beirut.
Furthermore, Syria has withdrawn its support from Iran in its war with Iraq and is helping Iraq move its oil to the Mediterranean
through a Syrian pipeline. Abdel Saleh may be using Rafiq Dost’s previous ties in the Revolutionary Guards. He’s spelling
his name out in dead Americans. That’s the kind of writing the Ayatollah understands.”

“What are we doing?” Dartley asked.

“I’ve been in touch with World American and Global about Avedesian,” Charley said. “They have already warned him of course,
but will now stress to him that he’s next on the list, so far as we can see. They have contacts at Shell who know all about
this and they will be contacting me. So far as I know, Avedesian is on one of their installations in the North Sea, about
halfway between Scotland and Norway. He should be reasonably safe there.”

Malleson shook his head. “I wouldn’t bet on it,
Charley. I agree that Sonderberg was working offshore from Santa Barbara and was not hit until he went to Las Vegas. But these
people are careful not to repeat themselves. They’ve hit some of these targets while at work, others during off-work hours,
Hill and Sonderberg while taking pleasure trips. I wouldn’t bet on them waiting for Avedesian to come ashore.”

Dartley asked, “Did you tell them I’d take the job?”

Charley nodded.

“Anything of special interest about the Sonderberg hit?”

Malleson nodded. “From what your uncle tells me, it points to a lone operator. A man or woman gave the Hill boy that cassette,
we have to assume, certainly not a heavily armed guerrilla band. There were no signs of forced entry to Sonderberg’s hotel
room—the local cops suggest he might have known the person or that it was a sexual assignation. Again, in all probability
it was a lone operator. The hotel and casino security people would have spotted terrorists lurking about the place. They would
also have noticed anyone of conspicuous Middle East appearance. So I think we can be fairly sure that if these killings are
all the work of one person—and I now believe they are, without being able to prove it—that person, male or female, is not
immediately recognizable as an Iranian or an Arab. The fact that things have gone so smoothly for him or her makes me feel
that these executions have a certain professional
slickness about them. That of course could mean only one thing.”

“What’s that?” Charley wanted to know.

Malleson stubbed out his cigarette. “The Iranians have hired themselves a professional assassin. Dartley here may be up against
someone with the same skills as himself.”

Dartley changed planes at Heathrow, without going into London, and flew on to Aberdeen, high on Scotland’s eastern coast.
He’d flown overnight from Washington, D.C., getting into Heathrow at nine a.m. local time. Here at Dyce Airport in Aberdeen,
it was eleven and he still had a ways to go. He looked around for the Shell representative who was supposed to meet him. The
place was crowded with men in down jackets, jeans and work boots, lugging duffel bags. The man he was supposed to meet had
said he would be the only one there in a pinstripe suit reading
The Economist
. In spite of the crowds, Dartley found him easily enough. He was also the only one there with a furled umbrella and black
derby or bowler hat.

“Penrod’s the name,” he said jovially, shaking Dartley’s hand. “Jeremy Penrod. So pleased to meet you.”

Dartley nodded. “What’s my name?”

Penrod took an envelope from inside his jacket. “Everything’s in here. We’re going to call you Hank Washington. I hope that’s
all right with you. Does it sound American enough?”

Dartley smiled.

“One group felt you should be called Bud or Lou,” Penrod went on, “but I thought ‘Hank’ was going far enough. Anyway I’m glad
that’s settled. Hank, call me Jeremy. I’ll accompany you as far as the Shetlands, which will give us time for a little discussion.”
He glanced at his watch. “We should really get going, if you’re not too tired.”

Dartley smiled again. Did Penrod know that this man he was fussing over and giving a ridiculous name was a hired assassin?
Probably not, Dartley decided. Dartley did not know what cover story Shell had been given about him—presumably he was supposed
to assume a completely defensive rather than offensive role, since he had not been allowed to bring any weapons, not even
Mace. He would be careful about what he said. Outside the windows, choppers were taking off in rapid succession.

“Most of them are heading for the oilfields off this coast. You go to the Brent field, between the Shetland Islands and Norway,
quite a way north of here.”

They took off in an old two-engine turbo prop. As the plane lifted above the cloud cover and they lost sight of the land and
sea beneath, Penrod got down to business.

“Frankly we are not too happy with all this. We offered Mr. Avedesian a paid leave of absence, which he refused to accept.”

“I guess he feels safer on a rig in the middle of the
North Sea than he would on the mainland,” Dartley said.