The Assassin (43 page)

When I got back into the house, Winchester was waiting with a towel to dry the dog, who proceeded to shower us both anyway.

“You take real good care of that dog,” I commented.

“She belonged to Owen,” he said.

When he had the dog reasonably dry, he took her upstairs. Grafton was standing in the main living room with Robin watching the Weather Channel. The nor’easter was the storm of the day in America, apparently. Three reporters were on station to bring us the latest and greatest. They posed outside, of course, getting hammered by wind and rain as they gave their breathless reports.

All three talked about snow. When the radar picture came up, we could see it coming our way.

“Six inches by morning in this area,” Grafton murmured. “Power lines are already down in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.”

When the weather gurus went to a commercial, he used the remote to kill the sound of the savage beast. He left the picture on.

The admiral glanced at me and Robin. “Tonight may be the night. If you see, hear or smell anything, anything at all out of the ordinary, call me on the radio. I’ll have it on and the earpiece in my ear.”

“Sweet dreams,” Robin said brightly. She smiled. I decided that there is nothing like the smile of a lady holding a shotgun to jar your preconceptions.

Grafton ascended the stair and we were alone. “So how do you want to do this?” Robin asked. “Why don’t you settle in here behind something solid so no one can drill you through a window, and I’ll circulate? I suggest you also turn off the downstairs lights.” “After a while we trade off.” “Okay.”

She laid her shotgun on the bar and moved a chair behind it, then sat and put the weapon on her lap. The night vision goggles were within reach on the bar. I turned off the lights in the room, then, carrying my own scattergun, wandered back to the kitchen. I hadn’t managed much dinner and decided to inspect the refrigerator, just in case. While I was in there I shoved Winchester’s flashlight into my hip pocket. It threw a lot more light than my little penlight.

Jake Grafton found his wife just finishing her shower. She dressed in a long nightie as he washed his face and brushed his teeth. “No shower?” she said.

“I’m sleeping in my clothes.”

She didn’t have any response to that. He had an M-16 lying on the chair beside the bed. When she was under the covers and he was beside her with a blanket arranged over him, she turned off the light.

“I saw you talking to Isolde,” she said.

After Marisa went upstairs, Grafton had taken the banker to a corner of the living room for a private conversation.

“She thinks Qasim is a monster and Marisa is a victim,” he said.

“So who killed Jean Petrou?”

“I don’t know. Marisa thought he was selling information to Qasim, and he might have been. She followed him and saw them together once. She told Isolde about it. Either of them could have poisoned him. Both had access to Isolde’s prescription digitalis. Isolde says she didn’t and she doesn’t think Marisa did.”

“What do you think?”

“Marisa.”

A long silence followed that remark. Finally Callie said, “Tommy is pretty taken with her.”

“He’s a big boy.”

“Oh, comeon!”

“Listen to me. Marisa called Qasim while she was here, gave him our address in Rosslyn. She told him we were here, and she told him we were going to the political dinner on Thursday.”

“Does Tommy know that?”

“Not that. He knows Marisa may have killed her husband, and he knows she knocked him down when he was set to shoot the fleeing intruders at the Zetsche estate. Heck, she may have poisoned Alexander Surkov—that’s a long shot, but it’s a possibility. Tommy’s been around the mountain a time or two, and he’s trying to figure her out, same as me.”

She thought about that for a moment. “You wanted her to make that call, didn’t you?”

“I was sorta hoping she would.”

“So Qasim intends to assassinate the president?”

“I think he wants Marisa there to see him do it. That’s my best guess. He has been playing us like chessmen, forcing us to do what he wanted. Thursday night. That’s his payoff, I think. Maybe.”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

Grafton lay there in the darkness listening to the rain and wind, trying to relax. After a while his wife went to sleep—he could tell by her breathing.

What if he had figured this all wrong and Marisa was an assassin? She was inside. What if she killed Winchester and Smith tonight? Or opened a door or window for Khadr?

After about half an hour, he got out of bed as quietly as possible, picked up the assault rifle and slipped out of the room. He closed the door behind him and made his way to the end of the hallway, which was lit with small night-lights at ankle height. There was a little straight-back chair there, along with a tiny table containing a dried flower arrangement, so he sat and tilted the chair back slightly against the wall. The rifle he kept on his lap.

From this vantage point he could see all the bedroom doors except Winchester’s, which was on the ground floor. Over his head was a small window. He sat listening to the rain/sleet mix patter against it and the rising sound of the wind. The gusts were worse now as the heart of the storm came down upon them.

I was watching the snow line march toward us on the television when the power went out. The picture dimmed, brightened, then went black. I glanced at the stairs and saw that the glow of the night-lights was gone. It was a few minutes after twelve.

“Uh-oh,” I said to Robin.

I put on my night vision goggles and fired them up. When I looked at Robin, I saw that she already had hers on.

I switched to infrared and went to a window to look out. Between the rain-smeared glass and all the water in the air outside, I couldn’t see much. I tried the ambient light setting and saw even less. Terrific!

I opened the door to the cabana and went out there. The pool was a sheet of black. The howl of the wind was breathtaking here in this unprotected area. Everything was wet; I could feel the water soaking into my shoes. It was miserably cold, too, whipping through my clothes. I didn’t stay out there long. I went back inside and locked the door.

Then I went downstairs and checked all the windows and doors.

The place was gloomy, even with the flashlight. The basement door was locked tight, but… I leaned a rake and shovel against it so they would fall over if the door was opened. Who knows, I might even hear one of them fall. I left the door at the top of the stairs open, on the off chance.

After I checked the main-floor windows, the front door, the main rear entrance and the kitchen door, I strolled around, waiting.

Seems that waiting is the way I spend half my life. One of these days I need to get a real job.

The wind was shaking the main barn doors and blowing through tiny openings here and there. Khadr waited for about thirty minutes after the power failure to give everyone a chance to settle down, then made his way by feel to the ladder and descended to the main floor of the barn.

The horses were restless. He opened their stall doors and let them wander out into the walkway of the barn. They immediately bunched up. The noise he and they made was lost in the storm.

Then he went to the door that led to the area between the barn and the house and unlatched the door. The doors quivered. They would blow open any second.

He walked back behind the horses, trying not to spook them.

Sure enough, within half a minute one of the now unlatched doors blew open and crashed against the barn with a bang. The startled horses whinnied and pranced. Khadr slapped the nearest one on the rump. That was enough to set them off. They charged for the open door and galloped through it.

He followed them to the doorway and molded his body to the wall, his pistol in his hand.

“What was that noise?” A male voice on my headset. “Harry?”

“The barn door blew open and the damn horses are out milling around. Uh-oh, they’re coming around the house toward’you.” “Oh, man, the main gate is open. They’ll go out into the road.” “Let them go, Nick. I’ll check out the barn.”

I heard someone coming down the stairs. Saw him in infrared, carrying a rifle. Grafton!

“Tommy?” he said aloud.

“I’m over here by the cabana door.”

“Robin?”

“Behind the bar.”

“Stay there.”

“Admiral, the best place for you is the basement,” I said. “If it’s Khadr, that’s probably the most likely entrance.”

“Okay,” he said. His penlight flashed on, and he headed for the kitchen and the stairs down.

“Stay where you are,” I told Robin.

“I can’t shoot with these damn goggles on,” she said disgustedly. “I can’t see the sights.”

“Just point the thing and pull the trigger.”

The lenses on Harry Longworth’s goggles were wet, which reduced their effectiveness by a large percentage. He wiped at the water with his fingers, then adjusted the gain and contrast. Standing outside the barn looking through the doorway—one door was open and the other was waving back and forth—he couldn’t see anything. A wet door, wet lens …

“Shit,” he said softly. He took off the goggles and let them dangle on his chest. He pulled his flashlight from his hip pocket and, shielding his body against the door, held the light in his left hand at arm’s length and shined it around the interior. The stall doors were open. He saw nothing.

He pulled the light back and used his left hand to key the mike button on the belt-mounted transceiver. “Hey, upstairs!”

Don’t tell me they slept through that bang when the door blew open!

Caution shrieked at him.

Well, he was going to have to go in there, one way or another.

He threw himself through the door and did a belly flop on the floor, his rifle out in front of him.

Khadr’s first bullet caught him in the neck. Before he could react, he felt rather than saw movement on his right. As he tried to swing his weapon to his right, another bullet hit him, this time ricocheting off his forehead, laying open a two-inch gash clear to the bone and stunning him. The third slug hit him above the ear and penetrated into his brain. He never felt the fourth and fifth bullets, both of which were fired point-blank into his skull.

Khadr took the time to change magazines in his pistol, then ran as fast as he could go toward the dark, silent house.

“Harry, the horses are going out the gate into the road.” I recognized Nick’s voice. He was in front of the house.

Harry didn’t answer, which was ominous.

Squatting, I opened the door to the cabana area and scanned it with the night vision goggles in infrared, then switched to ambient light. The sleet was forming a crust on everything. Even though I was crouched in the door, the wind buffeted me.

Something was happening over at the barn—that much seemed obvious. A distraction? I thought so, so I didn’t move. If Harry and the two guys asleep in the barn couldn’t handle it, one more guy wouldn’t help. My best choice was to stay put.

Yet I couldn’t really see much here in the doorway. I steadied myself with my left hand and moved outside, staying low, alongside the outside bar. From here I could see the pool, the outdoor sauna and toilet building and the hedge that surrounded the whole area. The hedge and trees were waving madly in the wind. I tried to ignore them and searched with the goggles for human movement.

I slipped down to the end of the outdoor bar so I could see around it.

One step, two … and something walloped me in the head and I went out cold.

Khadr didn’t look again at Carmellini, who lay sprawled on his face where he had been shot.

He used his infrared scanner to examine the interior of the house, then moved to the door and looked in.

He saw no one. But he did see the stairs leading up to the bedrooms above. That was where Grafton and Winchester would be.

Pistol in hand, he rose and trotted across the room toward the stairs.

Robin Cloyd poked her head above the bar in time to see the man running for the stairs. In infrared, he was quite plain.

“Tommy?” she asked loudly, above the noise coming though the open door.

The answer was a bullet that slammed into the bar with an audible whack, just inches from her shoulder. She didn’t hesitate. Robin pointed the shotgun and pulled the trigger.

The report was muffled somewhat by her headset and the adrenaline coursing through her, but she didn’t notice. What she did notice was that the muzzle flash had overwhelmed her goggles. Blind, she pumped the slide and fired again toward where she thought the running man might be. Did it again and again, then dropped down and began shoving shells into the bottom of the gun. She paused and keyed her mike, Tommy?

She heard a thumping from the staircase.

With two more shells in the gun, all she had, she flipped the goggles to ambient light and ran to the bottom of the stairwell. She saw something moving at the top of the stairs, so pointed the gun and fired upward.

After she worked the slide she saw no more movement.

I heard Robin’s voice in my ears. That’s when I realized that I had also heard her shotgun hammering.

I tore off the goggles and tried to rise. Later I found out that a bullet had hit the goggles, a bullet that would have killed me if I hadn’t been wearing them. I fell again. Worked at it and got up. I still had the shotgun.

I found the flashlight, fumbled with the switch, got it on and headed back inside, shouting Robin’s name.

I saw her in the light at the bottom of the stairs, saw her shoot once up the stairwell. She lowered the gun and started up, but I grabbed her arm.

“No.” I gave her my shotgun and pulled out the Colt .45.

With the flashlight in my left hand and the pistol in my right, I went up the stairs. Saw the blood all over the carpet. So she got lead into the son of a bitch. Good!

At the top of the stairs, I paused and used the light to scan the hallway, which was to my right. Empty. No, a door was opening. A head came out, looking toward the flashlight. I recognized the face: Jerry Hay Smith.

“Get back in there, you son of a bitch,” I roared.