The Mark of the Assassin

  The program shifted focus to the rest of the day’s news. Vandenberg rose and fixed himself a vodka and tonic, which he drank while he tidied his desk and locked away his important files.

  At seven-ten his secretary poked her head through the door.

  “Good night, Mr. Vandenberg.”

  “Good night, Margaret.”

  “You have a call, sir. A Detective Steve Richardson from D.C. Metro Police.”

  “He say what it was regarding?”

  “No, sir. Shall I ask?”

  “No, go home, Margaret. I’ll take care of it.”

  Vandenberg turned down the volume on the television sets, punched the blinking light on his multiline telephone, and picked up the receiver.

  “This is Paul Vandenberg,” he said briskly, intentionally adding a note of authority to his voice.

  “Good evening, Mr. Vandenberg. I apologize for bothering you so late, but this will just take a moment or two.”

  “Can I ask what this is regarding?”

  “The death of a Washington Post reporter named Susanna Dayton. Were you aware she had been murdered, Mr. Vandenberg?”

  “Of course. In fact, I spoke to her the night of her death.”

  “Well, that’s why I’m calling. You see—”

  “You checked her phone records and discovered that I was one of the last people to whom she spoke, and now you’d like to know exactly what we talked about.”

  “I heard you were a smart man, Mr. Vandenberg.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “Actually, I’m right across the street in Lafayette Park.”

  “Good. Why don’t we talk face-to-face?”

  “I know what you look like. Seen you on television over the years.”

  “I suppose television is good for something.”

  Five minutes later, Vandenberg was walking through the Northwest Gate of the White House, crossing the pedestrian mall that used to be Pennsylvania Avenue. His car waited on Executive Drive, inside the grounds. Night had come, and with it a cold drizzle. Vandenberg stalked across Lafayette Park in a brisk parade-ground march, collar up against the cold, arms swinging at his side. Two homeless men approached and asked for money. Vandenberg stormed past, never acknowledging their presence. Detective Richardson rose from his seat on a bench and walked toward him, hand out.

  “She called me for comment on a story she was working on,” Vandenberg said, immediately taking the initiative. “It was a complex investigative piece of some sort, and I referred her to the White House press office.”

  “Do you remember anything about the details of the story?”

  So there was no tape recording, Vandenberg thought.

  “Not really. It was some story about the President’s fund-raising activities. It didn’t strike me as terribly serious, and frankly, on a Sunday night, I didn’t feel much like dealing with it. So I passed her down the line.”

  “Did you call the press secretary to notify him about the call?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “May I ask why not?”

  “Because I didn’t believe it was necessary.”

  “Do you know a man named Mitchell Elliott?”

  “Of course,” Vandenberg said. “I worked for Alatron Defense Systems before I entered politics, and Mitchell Elliott is one of the President’s closest political supporters. We see a good deal of each other, and we talk regularly.”

  “Did you know Susanna Dayton telephoned Mitchell Elliott that night as well? In fact, it was just a few moments before she spoke to you.”

  “Yes, I know she telephoned Mitchell Elliott.”

  “May I ask how you know that?”

  “Because Mitchell Elliott and I spoke afterward.”

  “Do you remember what you discussed?”

  “Not really. It was a very brief conversation. We discussed the allegations contained in Ms. Dayton’s article, and we both dismissed them as baseless nonsense that did not deserve a comment.”

  “You spoke to Elliott but not the White House press secretary?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Richardson closed his notebook to signal the interview had concluded.

  Vandenberg said, “Do you have any idea who murdered the woman?”

  Richardson shook his head. “Right now, we’re treating it as a robbery that went wrong. I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Vandenberg, but we had to check it out. I hope you understand.”

  “Of course, Detective.”

  Richardson handed him his card.

  “If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to call.”

  “I don’t enjoy getting calls from the Washington police at my White House office, Mitchell.”

  The two men walked side by side in their usual meeting place, Hains Point along the Washington Channel. Mark Calahan strolled a few paces behind, looking for signs of surveillance.

  “The Washington police don’t make me terribly nervous, Paul,” Elliott said calmly. “I think the last time they arrested someone for murder was 1950.”

  “Just tell me one thing, Mitchell. Tell me you had absolutely nothing to do with that woman’s death.”

  They stopped walking. Mitchell Elliott turned to face Vandenberg but said nothing.

  Vandenberg said, “Put your hand on an imaginary Bible, Mitchell, and swear to that God of yours that Calahan or one of your other thugs didn’t kill Susanna Dayton.”

  “You know I can’t do that, Paul,” Elliott said calmly.

  “You bastard,” Vandenberg whispered. “What the fuck happened?”

  “We put her under watch—complete physical and audio coverage,” Elliott said. “We went into her residence to do a little housekeeping, and she surprised us.”

  “She surprised you! Jesus Christ, Mitchell! Do you know what you’re saying?”

  “I know exactly what I’m saying. One of my men has committed an unfortunate murder. The White House chief of staff is now an accessory to murder after the fact.”

  “You sonofabitch! How dare you bring this upon the President!”

  “Keep your voice down, Paul. You never know who’s listening. And I haven’t brought anything upon this president, because there is no way we’ll ever be connected to the murder of Susanna Dayton. If you keep your wits about you, and refrain from doing anything stupid, nothing is going to happen.”

  Vandenberg glared at Calahan, who stared directly back at him, unblinking. He turned and started walking. A gentle rain drifted over the river.

  “I have one other question, Mitchell.”

  “You want to know who really shot down that jetliner.”

  Vandenberg looked at Mitchell in silence.

  “Just deliver your lines and hit your toe marks, Paul. Don’t ask too many questions.”

  “Now, Mitchell! Tell me, now!”

  Elliott turned to Calahan and said, “Mark, Mr. Vandenberg isn’t feeling terribly well at the moment. See him safely back to his car. Good night, Paul. We’ll talk soon.”

  Vandenberg’s chauffeured car left Hains Point and followed the parkway around the Tidal Basin. The Jefferson Memorial glowed softly across the water, blurred by rain. The car turned onto Independence Avenue, swept past the towering Washington Monument, and turned onto the Potomac Parkway. Vandenberg glanced up at the Lincoln Memorial.

  He thought, My God, what have I done?

  He needed a drink. He had never needed a drink before in his life, but God he needed one now. He closed his eyes. His right hand trembled, so he covered it with his left and stared out at the river flowing beneath the bridge.

  26

  LONDON

  The next morning, Michael rose before dawn and dressed quietly in the appalling bedroom of the safe flat. The place was quiet except for the grumble of morning traffic near Paddington Station and the prattle of Wheaton’s minders in the next room. He drank vile instant coffee from a chipped mug but ignored a plate of stale croissants. Michael was usually calm before a mee
ting, but now he was nervous and edgy, the way he had felt when he was a new recruit, sent into the field for the first time after his training course at the Farm. He rarely smoked before noon, but he was already working on his second cigarette. He had slept little, tossing in the sagging single bed, troubled by his fight with Elizabeth. Theirs had been a calm marriage for the most part, free from the constant fighting and tension that afflicted so many Agency marriages. Small arguments unsettled them both deeply; a battle like last night’s, with threats of revenge, was unheard of.

  He put on a bulletproof vest over his thin turtleneck and pulled on a gray woolen crewneck sweater. He picked up the telephone and dialed the number of the Fifth Avenue apartment one last time. It was still busy. He replaced the receiver in the cradle and went out. Wheaton was waiting downstairs at curbside in the back of an anonymous Agency sedan. They drove to Charing Cross Station, Wheaton droning on about the rules of engagement for the meeting with the intensity of one who had spent a career strapped securely to a desk.

  “If it’s not Awad, under no circumstances are you to make the meeting,” Wheaton said. “Just wait until the boat reaches Calais, and we’ll pull you out.”

  “I’m not dropping behind enemy territory,” Michael said. “If Awad doesn’t show, I’ll just take the next ferry back to Britain.”

  “Stay on your toes,” Wheaton said, ignoring Michael’s remark. “The last thing we need is for you to walk up to some Sword of Gaza true believer with a wooden key around his neck.”

  Members of the Sword of Gaza—and many other Islamic terrorists—usually wore a wooden key beneath their clothing during suicide missions because they believed their actions would be rewarded with martyrdom and a place in heaven.

  Wheaton said, “Carter doesn’t want you going in there naked.”

  He popped open an attaché case and removed a Browning high-powered automatic pistol with a fifteen-shot magazine, the Agency’s standard-issue handgun.

  Michael said, “What am I supposed to do with this?” Like most case officers he could count on one hand the times he had carried a weapon in the line of duty. A case officer could rarely shoot himself out of trouble. Drawing a gun in self-defense was the ultimate sign of failure. It meant that either the officer had been betrayed somewhere along the line or he had been plain sloppy.

  “We’re not sending you onto that ferry so you can be assassinated or taken hostage,” Wheaton said. “If it looks like you’re walking into a trap, fight back. You’ll be on your own out there.”

  Michael snapped the magazine into the butt and pulled the slider, chambering the first round. He set the safety and slipped the gun into the waistband of his trousers beneath the sweater.

  Wheaton dropped Michael at the station. Michael purchased a first-class ticket for Dover and a stack of morning newspapers, then found the platform. He boarded the train with five minutes to spare and picked his way down the crowded corridor. He found a seat in a compartment with two businessmen who were already hammering away on laptop computers. As the train pulled out of the station a woman entered the compartment. She had long dark hair, dark eyes, and pale skin. Michael thought she looked vaguely like Sarah.

  For nearly an hour the train clattered through London’s southeastern suburbs, then entered the rolling farmland of Kent. In the buffet Michael purchased coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich. He returned to his compartment and sat down. The businessmen were in shirtsleeves and braces, peering at an earnings report as though it were a sacred scroll. The woman said nothing the entire journey. She smoked one cigarette after the next, until the compartment felt like a gas chamber. Her attractive brown eyes flickered over the gray-green countryside of Kent; her long hand lay suggestively over a thigh hidden by thick headmistress stockings.

  The train arrived at Dover. Michael stepped from the compartment. The girl collected a leather shoulder bag and followed. She was tall, as tall as Sarah, but possessing none of Sarah’s grace and feline physical agility. She wore a black thigh-length leather coat and black combat-style boots that clattered as she walked.

  Michael hurried from the platform to the ferry terminal. He purchased a ticket and boarded the vessel, a 425-foot multipurpose ferry capable of carrying 1,300 passengers and 280 cars. He entered the passenger seating area on the main deck and sat down next to a window on the port side of the boat. He looked across and saw Graham Seymour sitting in the center of the room, dressed in blue jeans and a gray Venice Beach sweatshirt, carrying a guitar case. Michael quickly looked away. The girl from the train entered, sat down directly behind Michael, and immediately started smoking.

  Michael read his newspapers as the ferry set sail. Dover vanished behind a curtain of rain. Every few minutes Michael glanced at the port side rail, for it was there, midship, that Awad was to appear. Once he went to the snack counter, which allowed him to scan the faces of everyone seated in the passenger lounge. He purchased murky tea in a flimsy paper cup and carried it back to his seat. He recognized no one but Graham and the girl from the train, who was engrossed in a Paris fashion magazine.

  A half hour passed. The rain stopped, but now, well into the Channel, the wind increased, and white-capped rollers raced toward the broad prow of the ferry. The girl rose, purchased coffee from the bar, then sat next to Michael. She lit another cigarette and sipped coffee in silence for a moment.

  “There he is, next to the rail, in the gray raincoat,” she said, a hint of Beirut in her English. “Approach him slowly. Please refer to him only as Ibrahim. And don’t try playing the hero again, Mr. Osbourne. I’m well armed, and Ibrahim has ten pounds of Semtex strapped to his body.”

  Michael found the face vaguely familiar, like a boyhood friend who materializes in middle age, fat and balding. He had seen the face many times before but never close and certainly never in person. He had seen the hazy right profile snapped by the shooters of MI5 during one of Awad’s visits to London. The fuzzy full face captured by the French service during a stopover in Marseilles. The old Israeli mug shot of the young Awad: stone thrower, expert maker of Molotov cocktails, child warrior of the Intifada who nearly beat to death a settler from Brooklyn with a chunk of his beloved Hebron. The Israeli photo was of limited value, for the Shin Bet had got to him first and left him nearly unrecognizable with bruises and swelling.

  For a long moment Michael and his quarry stood side by side at the rail, each fixed on his own private spot of the swirling Channel waters, like quarreling lovers with nothing left to say. Michael turned and looked at Awad once more. Please refer to him only as Ibrahim. For an instant he wondered if the man truly was Muhammad Awad. Wheaton’s tedious admonitions echoed through Michael’s head like boarding announcements at an airport.

  To Michael, the man standing next to him looked like Awad’s older, more prosperous brother. He was dressed for business in a costly gray overcoat and tasteful double-breasted suit visible beneath. The features had been altered by plastic surgery. The effect was to erase his Arabness and create something of uncertain national origin—a Spaniard, an Italian, a Frenchman, or perhaps a Greek. The prominent Palestinian nose was gone, replaced by the narrow straight nose of a northern Italian aristocrat. The cheekbones had been sharpened, the brow softened, the chin squared, the deer brown eyes washed pale green by contact lenses. The back teeth had been pulled to give him the feline cheeks of a supermodel.

  Muhammad Awad’s life read like a pamphlet of radical Palestinian revolutionary literature. Michael knew it well, for he had compiled Awad’s biography and résumé for the Center with help from the Mossad, the Shin Bet, MI6, and half the security services in Europe. His grandfather had been driven from his olive and orange groves outside Jerusalem in 1948 and cast into exile in Jordan. He died the following year of a broken heart, according to the Awad legend, the keys to his home in Israel still in his pocket. Another branch of the Awad clan had been massacred at Deir Yassin. In 1967 the family was driven out again, this time to refugee camps in Lebanon. Awad’s father n
ever worked, just sat in the camp and told stories of how it had been for him as a boy, tending the olives and the oranges with his own father. Paradise lost. In the 1980s, young Muhammad Awad was indoctrinated in the radical Islam of south Lebanon and Beirut. He joined Hezbollah. He joined Hamas. He trained in Iran and Syria—small arms, infiltration tactics, counterintelligence, bomb making. When Arafat shook Rabin’s hand at the White House, Awad was outraged. When Arafat’s security forces came after Hamas, at Israel’s behest, Awad swore revenge. Together with fifty of the best Hamas guerrillas, he formed the Sword of Gaza, the most deadly Palestinian terror group since Black September.

  Wind gusted over the deck. Awad put a hand inside his coat. Michael flinched but resisted reaching for the Browning. “Easy, Mr. Osbourne,” Awad said. “I just had the urge to smoke. Besides, if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.”

  The English was perfect, light accent indistinguishable to an untrained ear. The cigarettes he produced from the breast pocket of his coat were unfiltered Dunhills. “I know you smoke Marlboro Lights, but perhaps these will do, yes? Your wife smokes Benson and Hedges, doesn’t she? Her name is Elizabeth Cannon-Osbourne, and she practices law for one of those large firms in Washington. You live on N Street in Georgetown. You see, Mr. Osbourne, we have our own intelligence and security service. And we get a good deal of help from our friends in Damascus and Tehran, of course.”

  Michael accepted one of the Dunhills and turned into the wind to light it. When Awad raised his hand to light his own cigarette, Michael could see the bomb trigger in the palm of his right hand.

  “You’ve proved your point, Ibrahim,” Michael said.

  “I realize it was a tedious demonstration, but I did it only to impress upon you that I mean you and your family no harm. You are not my enemy, and I have neither the time nor the resources to engage you.”

  “So why the Semtex strapped to your waist?”