The Assassin (17 page)

“How do I look?” I asked George.

“That sports coat doesn’t really go with those trousers.”

“The next time I go shopping, I’ll take you along.”

One of the embassy staff took me to the airport to rent a car. Since Uncle Sugar was paying the tab and I have a certain image to maintain, I rented a Porsche 911. As I drove it back to Paris to pack and check out of the hotel, I decided that I would buy one of these if my old Benz ever went lame and I had to shoot it.

I was late getting out of Paris and got caught in rush hour. It was dark and raining by the time I had cleared the last of the suburbs. The pistol in the small of my back felt like a rock, so I put it in the pocket of my sports coat.

I called the duty officer in the embassy, as per Grafton’s instructions, and was told the women had gone to a castle on the Rhine River.

“A castle?”

“Yep. It’s owned by Wolfgang Zetsche, who is the chairman of the largest shipping firm in Europe.” She named it. “He retired as CEO last year.” She gave me directions to get there.

“Better get me a room in a hotel or inn nearby for tonight.”

“Already did.” She gave me the name of the place and more directions.

As I drove toward Nancy and the northeast corner of France, I thought about what I should do. I almost called Jake Grafton to get his opinion, then decided not to. If he had had instructions he would have given them to me before I left the embassy. I was on my own. Or semi on my own, anyway; he was as close as my cell phone.

Jake Grafton spent most of the evening in the SCIF on his telephones. He had three on his desk—two encrypted landlines and an encrypted satellite phone. He had received telephone calls from Per Diem and Speedo Harris, giving him the latest info on both the British and French investigations of the two poisonings. He also had a computer on his desk, which he used to send encrypted emails. He was pounding keys this evening, talking via the Internet to Sal Molina, who was at his desk in the White House.

If Alexander Surkov sold the identity of the Knights Winchester to al-Qaeda, which then poisoned him, the radioactive trail is a ruse designed to frame people with a known grudge against him. On the other hand, if the Russians really did it, it follows that the Knights have nothing to fear. If that is the case, who murdered Jean Petrou? Was it really an attempt to kill Isolde, Huntington Winchester’s best friend, or did Isolde and/or Marisa decide they had finally had enough of dear old Jean?

Wolfgang Zetsche is at his country home on the Rhine, and Isolde seems to be on her way to join him. Where is Oleg Tchernychenko- I am informed the Swiss banker is in Zurich at his bank. And where are the three Americans? I suggest you get the FBI to keep tabs on them. If al-Qaeda is really after these people, we need to get them to a place where we can guard them, and catch anyone who tries to assassinate them.

Grafton sent the message. Five minutes later he had a reply.

The Knights Winchester? Who thought that up? Tchernychenko is fishing in Scotland, and the three Americans are in the States, although scattered. I asked the FBI to locate them yesterday. If Surkov did indeed sell out the six Knights, he also betrayed your teams. And you. Keep me advised.

It was midnight on a dark, rainy night when I reached Strasbourg and crossed the Rhine into Germany. As I drove up to the border crossing, the gates were wide open and the man under the awning was just waving traffic through.

The Rhine River is the border between France and Germany from Basel, Switzerland, downriver to about Karlsruhe. Wolfgang Zetsche’s castle wasn’t really on the Rhine; it was about two miles up a tributary on the German side of the stream near the town of Rastatt. The hotel the folks in Paris had booked me into was in Rastatt, but I wanted to see the castle. I drove through town and took the river road toward the Rhine, trying to see through the night rain and mist. Visibility was terrible, and if it had been any worse, I would have missed Zetsche’s country retreat. It was a castle, all right, built on a rocky outcrop that forced the small river into a horseshoe bend to get around. From outside the gate, I got the impression of sheer walls of stone, a flat roof, all set amid huge trees behind stone walls that were at least fifteen feet high in the lowest place, higher elsewhere.

I turned around in front of the closed gate and headed back to Ras-tatt. The distance was only about a third of a mile.

Zetsche had obviously done well in the shipping business. Make that very well. So how did he know Isolde and Marisa? Why would they come here, of all places, immediately after the death of the good son?

Rastatt looked centuries old, with three- and four-story medieval buildings along a twisty, narrow street paralleling the river. The lights from the windows and poles reflected off the wet pavement. Not a single pedestrian this time of night. All the good burghers were home in bed.

The hotel wasn’t old—it was a modern brick structure of five or so stories that sat right on the street. An alley led to a parking garage behind it. I parked the Porsche on the second deck, rescued my junk from the trunk, locked up the car and went inside to see if the computer recognized my credit card.

It did. After I had dumped my stuff in my room, I went to find some dinner. Back in my room I had a nice hot shower and scrubbed my teeth. I was exhausted. In less time than it takes to tell, I was in bed with the light off Then my cell phone rang.

“Yeah.”

“Hey, Tommy.” It was Jake Grafton.

“Yes, sir.”

“The police found Henri Stehle this evening. He was floating facedown in the Seine about ten miles downriver from the center of town.”

“So he’s not the guy we talked about.” That would be Abu Qasim, of course, but I wasn’t going to say it over the air.

“Our luck doesn’t run that way. Or mine doesn’t, anyway.”

“Oh, man! She was looking right at him, I thought. You should have seen the look on her face—recognition, horror, loathing, it was all there.”

“She might have been looking at Stehle, who might have reminded her of someone. Or she might have been looking at someone else, one of the waiters, perhaps, or one of the guests.”

“Or the real Henri Stehle wasn’t there.”

“They’re checking on that. In the meantime, Wolfgang Zetsche’s hovel by the river—you know where it is?”

“Drove by a little while ago.”

“Better get over there and spend the night. I want him to be alive in the morning.”

I must have been tired, because the only thing I could think of to say was, “You want me inside or out?”

“Inside, of course. As close to Zetsche as you can get.”

“Of course.”

“Try to keep Marisa alive, too.”

“Maybe you’d better send the Marines.”

“You’re it, Tommy.”

Oh, man! The news just kept getting worser and worser.

” ‘Bye,” he said and hung up.

I turned the light on and rolled out. Back when I was a callow youth, if I had known how miserable the hours would be while working for the CIA, I would have just told that recruiter to send me to prison instead. How does that old song go? “If I’d shot him when I met him, I’d be out of prison now.”

I left my car in the garage and walked to the castle. I was dressed in black trousers, a black pullover shirt, dark sneakers and a black sweater, and carried my gear in a navy blue knapsack slung over one shoulder. My hand-cannon was tucked in the small of my back and my cell phone was in my pocket, set to vibrate if anyone called. That “anyone” would, of course, only be Jake Grafton or a duty officer in London or Paris. Swine that I am, I hadn’t even given my mother this number.

As I saw it, my job was relatively straightforward. The admiral said he wanted Wolfgang Zetsche and Marisa Petrou alive in the morning. I had to get into the house and find those two people, then ensure no one with mayhem on his mind got to them during the hours of the night. On the other hand, if they had already ingested poison, there wasn’t much I could do about it except get them to a hospital quickly after they got sick but before they died. I decided I would worry about poison if and when. It wasn’t dark and stormy, but it was dark and gloomy and dripping that winter’s night. I was the only person on the street, which was probably a good thing—people have a nasty habit of calling the police when they see a man dressed all in black sneaking around outside in the middle of the night. Presumably Johnny Cash didn’t sneak.

My entrance to the castle had to be over the wall that separated the grounds from the road. The river was on the other three sides, and I wasn’t about to swim it.

At fifteen feet tall, it was a heck of a wall, constructed of fieldstone and, fortunately, not smooth. I scanned the trees and top of the wall as I walked along on the other side of the road. I didn’t see any security cameras. Which didn’t mean there weren’t any—only that I didn’t see them. Anyone with a lick of sense who planned to burgle the place would case the joint during the daytime; working for Jake Grafton, I didn’t have that luxury.

Two cars went by. I ducked out of view behind a tree one time, and into the entrance to a stairs that led to a house on a hill the other time. I walked the entire length of the wall, looking it over as carefully as I could.

I stood across the road in the entrance to another set of stairs that led up behind me and listened for traffic and voices. Nothing.

With the knapsack firmly in place on my shoulders, I took a deep breath, trotted across the pavement and free-climbed the wall. I learned this skill in high school when two friends and I took up rock climbing, kept it up through college and still liked to take climbing vacations whenever life allowed.

I crouched on top near a large tree limb that barely cleared the wall. Opened my backpack, got the infrared goggles on and scanned the grounds. Nothing in infrared, so I switched to ambient light. There were two cars parked in front of the place and another in front of a garage beside the house. Lots of large trees, a few shrubs and two flower beds. The windows of the building—from this angle it didn’t look as formidable as I first thought—were blank, with only one light showing in one window on the third floor. There were dormers on what appeared to be the fourth floor. Each corner of the building had a round, silo-like structure festooned with windows; presumably these round rooms were bedrooms. No crenelles or merlons. After I had examined the ground and house as well as I could from this angle, I switched to the trees. Security cameras and motion detectors would probably be mounted high. I didn’t see any.

I slithered down the limb until it reached the trunk of the tree, then dropped about two feet to the ground.

Knelt and looked some more. Listened. I could smell smoke. Someone had a fire going.

A vehicle—it sounded like a car—stopped on the other side of the wall and sat there with its engine running for about a minute, then drove on.

A sprint took me to a bush under one of those round turrets that decorated the corner of the building. I got busy with the goggles on the infrared setting, scanning the grounds, then the house. The nifty thing about the goggles was that they could detect heat sources through windows or normally insulated wooden walls. Unfortunately Herr Zetsche’s country home was constructed of stone, and a lot of it. The heat sources were too well masked for the goggles to find. Couldn’t even find the hot water tank or the fire in the fireplace. I did see a plume of heat emanating from one chimney.

I went around behind the building, trying to stay in the deep shadows under and behind the shrubbery. As I made this trip, rain began to fall. Not a night mist, but rain. The walls above me were wet and getting wetter. I had made it up the rough boundary wall, but free-climbing this cut limestone in the rain was a bit more than I thought I could handle. No sense in finding out how deep a crater I would make in Germany if I fell two or three stories.

The servant’s entrance was down five stairs and had a small projecting roof over it. I went to work with the picks I kept in a small folding wallet on my left hip. The door had two locks. After checking the door for alarms and not finding any, I opened the top lock first, then went to work on the bottom one.

The continuous gentle patter of raindrops on the little roof above my head was broken only by the faint, distant moan of a train whistle. Once, twice, three times it called, then fell silent. I fervently wished I were on it.

The telephone rang in Jake Grafton’s Paris apartment. Not the encrypted portable satellite telephone he carried with him everywhere, but the regular unsecure landline.

“Hello.”

“Admiral Grafton? How are you this evening?”

“I don’t know who you are. In five seconds I’m hanging up.” Grafton began counting silently.

At three, the man said, “Jerry Hay Smith.”

“How’d you get this telephone number, Mr. Smith?”

“If you’d been in the newspaper business as long as I have, Admiral, you’d have some sources, too. I called to find out what you know about Alexander Surkov and polonium 210. Not for publication, of course, but because I think I am entitled to know.”

“Buy a newspaper.”

“Admiral, I have read the wire service reports and everything the newspapers have chosen to publish.” Smith was confident, smooth, a man who just knew that everyone on the planet was dying to talk to him. “I’m also calling about another murder that hasn’t yet made the press here in the States, a Frenchman named Jean Petrou. His mother is a personal friend.”

“This is a ridiculous conversation,” Grafton said, tossing off the words. The thought that Jerry Hay Smith was probably recording said conversation crossed his mind. “Why would you think I know anything that isn’t in the press?”

“Because you’re a CIA officer. And because you are . .. consulting, shall we say, with Mr. Winchester. Who murdered Jean Petrou?”

“You are misinformed, Mr. Smith. I know nothing about your matter.” Grafton put the telephone back onto its cradle.

Apparently Smith was working on his memoirs or his book. Or a column for tomorrow’s paper.