The Mark of the Assassin

“You’re a chickenshit.”

  “It’s called the bureaucratic shuffle. Protecting one’s flank.”

  “Protecting one’s ass.”

  “Same thing. You could learn a thing or two from me. Your ass is usually fully exposed, hanging in the wind.”

  “I’m a field man, Adrian. Field men make lousy desk men. You always said so yourself.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So how come you became such a great desk man?”

  “Because I wanted a life, and I couldn’t have a life if I was running from one shithole to the next, trying to remember what my cover name was that week.”

  “Who’d you give my memo to?”

  “Monica Tyler, of course.”

  “Let me guess—she shit-canned it.”

  “In a New York minute.”

  “I didn’t expect her to do anything else.”

  “So why did you write it?”

  “Because I believe it to be true.”

  “You seriously believe Mitchell Elliott, with the assistance of a secret band of rogue operatives, brought down that airliner so he could build his missile defense system?”

  Michael nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  “That falls into the category of a charge too dangerous to make—not without conclusive proof. Monica recognized that, and so did I. Frankly, what bothers me is why an officer of your experience can’t see it.”

  Elizabeth knocked and entered the room. The senator had convinced her to take the Athena out on the bay with him for a couple of hours. Her face was bright red with the cold. She stood before the fire and warmed her backside against the flames.

  Carter said, “I thought you were supposed to be taking it easy.”

  “Dad did all the sailing,” she said. “I just drank herbal tea and tried to keep from freezing to death.”

  “Everything all right?” Carter asked.

  “Everything’s fine. The babies are perfect.”

  “God, that’s wonderful,” he said, and a large smile broke across his usually placid face.

  “What were you boys talking about?”

  “Shop,” Carter said.

  “Okay, I’m leaving.”

  “Stay,” Michael said.

  “Michael, some of this is—”

  “She can hear it firsthand, or she can hear it later in bed. Take your pick, Adrian.”

  “Stay,” he said. “Besides, it’s nice to have something beautiful to look at. Make yourself useful, Michael, and pour me some more wine. Elizabeth?”

  She shook her head. “I’m off booze and cigarettes for a while.”

  Carter drank some wine and said, “We received a report from the French service two days ago. They believe they’ve discovered the cover identity of October. He was living along the Breton coast under the name Jean-Paul Delaroche. A village called Brélés.”

  “Jesus, we’ve been there, Michael.”

  “He lived quietly in a cottage overlooking the Channel. It seems he was also a talented painter. The French are keeping it quiet, as only the French can do. We have a worldwide alert for him, but so far we’ve had no sightings. We’ve also heard from a number of different sources that he’s actually dead.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “Apparently, whoever hired him to kill you wasn’t pleased that he failed to fulfill the contract.”

  “I hope they tortured him first,” Elizabeth said.

  Michael was looking out the window, toward the dock and the white-capped bay beyond.

  Elizabeth said, “What are you thinking about, Michael?”

  “I’d just like to see a body, that’s all.”

  “We all would,” Carter said. “But these things usually don’t work like that.”

  He finished the wine and held out his glass for more. Elizabeth opened another bottle. The senator came into the room, face red, hair windblown. “I see you’ve raided the cellar,” he said. “Pour me a vast amount, please.”

  Carter said, “I have one other piece of serious business before we get too drunk.”

  “If you must,” Michael said.

  “Monica has agreed to drop all disciplinary proceedings against you. She thinks they’re inappropriate at this point, given what you and Elizabeth have endured.”

  “Oh, isn’t that nice of Monica.”

  “Come on, Michael. She’s serious. She thinks the whole thing got out of hand. She wants to put it behind us and move on.”

  Michael looked at Elizabeth, then back at Carter. “Tell her thanks, but no thanks,” he said.

  “You want the disciplinary proceedings to go forward?”

  “No, I want out,” Michael said. “I’ve decided to leave the Agency.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Dead serious,” Michael said. “Sorry, poor choice of words. Okay, now we can get drunk.”

  Elizabeth crossed the room, leaned down, and kissed Michael’s lips. “Are you sure, Michael? Don’t do it for me.”

  “I’ve never been so sure about anything in my entire life. And I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for us.” Then he touched her stomach. “And for them.”

  She kissed him again and said, “Thank you, Michael. I love you. I hope you know that.”

  “I know,” he said. “God, I know.”

  Carter looked at his watch and said, “Oh, shit!”

  “What?” Michael and Elizabeth said in unison.

  “We missed Beckwith’s address.”

  And they all burst out laughing.

  EPILOGUE

  MYKONOS, GREECE

  It was the villa no one wanted. It clung to a clifftop overlooking the sea, exposed to the eternal wind. Stavros, the real estate agent, had given up on the idea of selling the property. He simply rented it each year to the same clan of young British stockbrokers who pillaged the island each August for three drunken weeks.

  The Frenchman with the injured hand spent just five minutes in the house. He toured the bedrooms and the living room and inspected the views from the stone terrace. He paid particular attention to the kitchen, which made him frown.

  “I know men who can do the work for you, if you wish to undertake renovations,” Stavros said.

  “That won’t be necessary,” the Frenchman said. “I’ll do the work myself.”

  “But your hand,” Stavros said, nodding at the bandage.

  “It’s nothing,” the Frenchman said. “A kitchen accident. It will heal soon.”

  Stavros frowned, as though he found the story unconvincing. “It’s a popular rental,” he continued. “If you wish to leave the island at the high season, I’m certain I can fetch a good price for it, especially if you make repairs.”

  “The villa is no longer for rent.”

  “Very well. When would you like to—”

  “Tomorrow,” the Frenchman said. “Give me an account number, and I’ll have the money wired this afternoon.”

  “But, monsieur, you are not Greek. It’s not so easy for a foreigner to buy property. There are forms to fill out, legal documents. These things take time.”

  “See to it, Mr. Stavros. But I’m moving in here tomorrow morning.”

  He spent the remainder of winter inside. When his hand had healed sufficiently he went to work, mending the villa with the devotion of a monk copying the ancient books. Kristos, the man from the home supplies store, offered to find good men to help with the work, but the Frenchman politely refused. He replaced the kitchen appliances and laid a new ceramic countertop. He repainted the entire interior. He carted away the old furniture—ghastly modern pieces—and filled the rooms with rustic Grecian chairs and tables. In March, when the weather warmed, he turned his attention to the exterior. He patched cracks in the walls and put down a coat of gleaming whitewash. He replaced the broken tiles on the roof and the broken stones on the terrace. By the middle of April, the villa no one wanted was the finest in the village.

  The Italian racing bicycle arrived that same week. Each morning he rode alo
ng the winding coast roads and up and down the steep hills in the center of the island. Gradually, as the days lengthened, he spent more and more time in the village. He dawdled over the olives and rice and lamb in the marketplace. A few afternoons each week he took his lunch in the taverna, always with a book for protection. Sometimes he bought broiled sea bass from the boys on the beach and ate the fish alone in a grotto where gray seals played. He ventured into the wineshop. At first he drank only French and Italian wines, but after a time he developed a taste for inexpensive Greek varieties. When the clerk suggested more costly vintages, the Frenchman would shake his head and hand the bottle back. The renovations, he explained, had put a dent in his finances.

  At first his Greek was limited, a few staccato sentences, a vague untraceable accent. But remarkably, within two months he could conduct his business in passable Greek with the accent of an islander.

  The village women made gentle advances, but he took no lovers. He had only one pair of visitors, a small Englishman with eyes the color of winter seawater and a mulatto goddess who sunbathed nude in the May sunshine. The Briton and the goddess stayed for three days. Each evening they dined on the terrace late into the night.

  In May he began to paint. At first he could hold his brushes for only a few minutes at a time because of the scar tissue in his right hand. Then, slowly, gradually, the scar tissue stretched and gave way, and he was able to work for several hours at a time. For many weeks he painted the scenes around the villa—the seascapes, the clusters of whitewashed cottages, the flowers on the hillsides, the old men taking wine and olives at the taverna. The villa reflected the changing colors of each passing day: a dusty pink at dawn, a filtered raw sienna at dusk that took weeks of patient experimentation to re-create on his palette.

  In August he began painting the woman.

  She was blond, with striking blue eyes and pale luminous skin. According to his cleaning lady, he worked without a model from a handful of crude pencil sketches. “Clearly,” she told the other girls in the village, “the Frenchman is working from memory.”

  It was a large work, about six feet by four feet. The woman wore only a white blouse, unbuttoned to her navel, tinged with the raw sienna of the setting sun. Her long body was draped over a small wooden chair, facing backward. One hand rested beneath her chin; the other held something that looked like a gun, though no one would put a gun in the hand of a woman so beautiful, the maid said. Not even a recluse Frenchman.

  He finished the work in October.

  He placed it in a simple frame and hung it on the wall facing the sea.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The events portrayed in this novel are entirely the product of the author’s imagination, as are the characters that populate it. Still, several men and women similar to the people in this story gave me invaluable assistance, without which this work would not have been possible. The expertise is all theirs; the mistakes, simplifications, and dramatic license are all mine.

  Several current and former members of the American intelligence community allowed me to peek behind the curtain into their world, and I wish to express my gratitude to them, especially the professionals at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in Langley, Virginia, who patiently answered as many of my questions as they could and generously shared a few pieces of their lives along the way.

  So much has been written about working in the White House, but several people from various administrations helped me fill in the blanks with their personal memories. Some of their insight helped shape this work, and some of it was just tucked away, but I am indebted to all of them.

  In my previous life I was privileged to work with Brooks Jackson, who covers the intersection of money and politics for CNN and is one of the finest reporters in Washington. His wisdom was invaluable, though nothing written on the pages of a novel could ever do justice to the spirit and expertise of his work.

  James Hackett and John Pike helped me decipher the Rubik’s Cube of National Ballistic Missile Defense and also argued passionately for and against it. Obviously, I am to blame for the frightening oversimplification of missile defense contained in this book, not them.

  I also wish to express my profound thanks to Dr. Zev Rosenwaks and Wally Padillo of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. Also, to Chris Plante, who helped me better understand Stinger missiles.

  Over the years three dear friends, Tom Kelly, Martha Rogers, and Greg Craig, have given me a window on the world of Washington law, even though they never realized I was gathering material for a book. I thank them for their insight and, more importantly, their friendship.

  As always, Ion Trewin, the managing director of Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London, gave me priceless counsel, as did his assistant, Rachel Leyshon.

  A very special thanks to the team at International Creative Management: Heather Shroeder, Alicia Gordon, Tricia Davey, Jack Horner, Sloane Harris, and, of course, Esther Newberg.

  And finally, to the talented and dedicated staff at Random House: Adam Rothberg, Jake Klisivitch, Sybil Pincus, Leona Nevler, and Linda Grey, and especially my editors, Brian DeFiore and Ann Godoff. There are none better.

  Please read on for an excerpt from

  Daniel Silva’s exciting novel

  THE SECRET SERVANT

  Available from Signet

  AMSTERDAM

  It was Professor Solomon Rosner who sounded the first alarm, though his name would never be linked to the affair except in the secure rooms of a drab office building in downtown Tel Aviv. Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence, would later observe that Rosner was the first asset in the annals of Office history to have proven more useful to them dead than alive. Those who overheard the remark found it uncharacteristically callous but in keeping with the bleak mood that by then had settled over them all.

  The backdrop for Rosner’s demise was not Israel, where violent death occurs all too frequently, but the normally tranquil quarter of Amsterdam known as the Old Side. The date was the first Friday in December, and the weather was more suited to early spring than to the last days of autumn. It was a day to engage in what the Dutch so fondly refer to as gezelligheid, the pursuit of small pleasures: an aimless stroll through the flower stalls of the Bloemenmarkt, a lager or two in a good bar in the Rembrandtplein, or, for those so inclined, a bit of fine cannabis in the brown coffeehouses of the Haarlemmerstraat. Leave the fretting and the fighting to the hated Americans, stately old Amsterdam murmured that golden late-autumn afternoon. Today we give thanks for having been born blameless and Dutch.

  Solomon Rosner did not share the sentiments of his countrymen, but then he seldom did. Though he earned a living as a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, it was Rosner’s Center for European Security Studies that occupied the lion’s share of his time. His legion of detractors saw evidence of deception in the name, for Rosner served not only as the center’s director but was its only scholar in residence. Despite those obvious shortcomings, the center had managed to produce a steady stream of authoritative reports and articles detailing the threat posed to the Netherlands by the rise of militant Islam within its borders. Rosner’s last book, The Islamic Conquest of the West, had argued that Holland was now under a sustained and systematic assault by jihadist Islam. The goal of this assault, he maintained, was to colonize the Netherlands and turn it into a majority Muslim state, where, in the not too distant future, Islamic law, or sharia, would reign supreme. The terrorists and the colonizers were two sides of the same coin, he warned, and unless the government took immediate and drastic action, everything the free-thinking Dutch held dear would soon be swept away.

  The Dutch literary press had been predictably appalled. Hysteria, said one reviewer. Racist claptrap, said another. More than one took pains to note that the views expressed in the book were all the more odious given the fact that Rosner’s grandparents had been rounded up with a hundred thousand other Dutch Jews
and sent off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. All agreed that what the situation required was not hateful rhetoric like Rosner’s but tolerance and dialogue. Rosner stood steadfast in the face of the withering criticism, adopting what one commentator described as the posture of a man with his finger wedged firmly in the dike. Tolerance and dialogue by all means, Rosner responded, but not capitulation. “We Dutch need to put down our Heinekens and hash pipes and wake up,” he snapped during an interview on Dutch television. “Otherwise we’re going to lose our country.”

  The book and surrounding controversy had made Rosner the most vilified and, in some quarters, celebrated man in the country. It had also placed him squarely in the sights of Holland’s homegrown Islamic extremists. Jihadist Web sites, which Rosner monitored more closely than even the Dutch police did, burned with sacred rage over the book, and more than one forecast his imminent execution. An imam in the neighborhood known as the Oud West instructed his flock that “Rosner the Jew must be dealt with harshly” and pleaded for a martyr to step forward and do the job. The feckless Dutch interior minister had responded by proposing that Rosner go into hiding, an idea Rosner vigorously refused. He then supplied the minister with a list of ten radicals he regarded as potential assassins. The minister accepted the list without question, for he knew that Rosner’s sources inside Holland’s extremist fringe were in most cases far better than those of the Dutch security services.

  At noon on that Friday in December, Rosner was hunched over his computer in the second-floor office of his canal house at Groenburgwal 2A. The house, like Rosner himself, was stubby and wide, and it tilted forward at a precarious angle, which some of the neighbors saw as fitting, given the political views of its occupant. Its one serious drawback was location, for it stood not fifty yards from the bell tower of the Zuiderkirk church. The bells tolled mercilessly each day, beginning at the stroke of noon and ending forty-five minutes later. Rosner, sensitive to interruptions and unwanted noise, had been waging a personal jihad against them for years. Classical music, white-noise machines, soundproof headphones—all had proven useless in the face of the onslaught. Sometimes he wondered why the bells were rung at all. The old church had long ago been turned into a government housing office—a fact that Rosner, a man of considerable faith, saw as a fitting symbol of the Dutch morass. Confronted by an enemy of infinite religious zeal, the secular Dutch had turned their churches into bureaus of the welfare state. A church without faithful, thought Rosner, in a city without God.