The Mark of the Assassin

  The nurse appeared in the doorway. “The doctor is ready for you, Mrs. Osbourne. This way, please.”

  Elizabeth picked up her briefcase and her raincoat and followed the nurse down a narrow hall.

  Forty minutes later, Elizabeth took the elevator down to the lobby and stepped outside onto a covered sidewalk. She turned up her collar and plunged into the drenching rain. The wind blew her hair across her face and tore at her raincoat. Elizabeth seemed not to notice. She was numb.

  The doctor’s words ran through her head like an irritating melody that she could not drive from her thoughts. You’re incapable of having a baby naturally. . . . There’s a problem with your tubes. . . . In vitro fertilization might help. . . . We’ll never know unless we try. . . . I’m very sorry, Elizabeth. . . .

  A car nearly struck her in the fading light. Elizabeth seemed not to notice as the driver blared his horn and tore off. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to be sick. She thought about making love to Michael. Their marriage had its minor flaws—too much time apart, too many distractions from work—but in bed they were perfect. Their lovemaking was familiar yet exciting. She knew Michael’s body and he knew hers; they knew how to give each other pleasure. Elizabeth had always assumed that when she was ready to have a baby, it would happen as naturally and pleasantly as their lovemaking. She felt betrayed by her body.

  The Mercedes stood alone in the corner of the parking lot. She dug in her pocket for her keys. She pointed the remote at the car and pressed the button. The doors unlocked and the lights came on. She climbed quickly inside, closed the door, and locked it again. She tried to shove the key into the ignition, but her hands were shaking and the keys fell from her grasp to the floor. Reaching down for them, she bumped her head against the dashboard.

  Elizabeth Osbourne believed in composure: in the courtroom, in the office, with Michael. She never let her emotions get the better of her, even when Sam Braxton made one of his wisecracks. But now, sitting alone in her car, her hair plastered to the side of her face, composure deserted her. Her body slowly fell forward until her head rested against the steering wheel. Then the tears came, and she sat in the car and wept.

  4

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Twenty minutes later, a black White House sedan pulled to the curb in the section of the city known as Kalorama. Black staff cars and limousines were not unusual in the neighborhood. Nestled in the wooded hills on the edge of Rock Creek Park just north of Massachusetts Avenue, Kalorama was home to some of the city’s most powerful and influential residents.

  Mitchell Elliott detested eastern cities as a rule—he spent most of his time in Colorado Springs or at his canyonside home in Los Angeles, near the headquarters of Alatron Defense Systems—but his $3 million mansion in Kalorama helped make his frequent trips to Washington bearable. He had considered a large estate in the horse country of Virginia, but commuting into the city along Interstate 66 was a nightmare, and Mitchell Elliott didn’t have time to waste. Kalorama was ten minutes from National Airport and Capitol Hill and five minutes from the White House.

  It was five minutes before seven. Elliott relaxed in the second-floor library overlooking the garden. The wind hurled rain against the glass. It was cold for October, and one of his aides had laid a fire in the large fireplace. Elliott paced slowly, sipping thirty-year-old single-malt Scotch from a cut-glass tumbler. He was a small man, just over five and a half feet tall, who had learned long ago how to carry himself like a big man. He never allowed an opponent to stand over him. When someone entered his office, Elliott always remained seated, legs crossed, hands resting on the arms of his chair, as if the space were too small to contain his frame.

  Elliott was schooled in the art of warfare—and, more important, in the art of deception. He believed in illusion, misdirection. He ran his company like an intelligence agency; it operated on the principle of “need to know.” Information was strictly compartmentalized. The head of one division knew little of what was taking place inside another division, only what the executive needed to know. Elliott rarely conducted meetings with all his senior officers present. He gave them orders face-to-face in private meetings, never in written memoranda. All meetings with Elliott were regarded as strictly confidential; executives were forbidden to discuss them with other executives. Office gossip was a firing offense, and if one of his employees was telling tales out of school, Elliott would soon know about it. Their telephones were tapped, their electronic mail was read, and surveillance cameras and microphones covered every square inch of office space.

  Mitchell Elliott saw nothing wrong with this. He believed God had given him the right—indeed, the responsibility—to take whatever steps were necessary to protect his company and his country. Elliott’s belief in God pervaded everything he did. He believed the United States was God’s chosen land, Americans His chosen people. He believed Christ had told him to study aeronautics and electrical engineering, and it was Christ who told him to join the Air Force and fight the godless Chinese Communists in Korea.

  After the war he settled in Southern California, married Sally, his high school sweetheart, and took a job with McDonnell-Douglas. But Elliott was restless from the beginning. He prayed for guidance from the Almighty. After three years he formed his own company, Alatron Defense Systems. Elliott had no desire to build aircraft. He knew planes would always be vital to the nation’s defense, but he believed God had granted him a glimpse of the future, and the future belonged to the ballistic missile—God’s arrows, as he called them. Elliott did not build the missiles themselves; he developed and manufactured the sophisticated guidance systems that told them where to strike.

  Ten years after forming Alatron, Mitchell Elliott was one of the wealthiest men in America and one of its most influential as well. He had been a confidant of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He had been on a first-name basis with every secretary of defense since Robert Mc-Namara. He could reach half the members of the Senate by telephone in a matter of minutes. Mitchell Elliott was one of the most powerful men in Washington, and yet he operated permanently in its shadows. Few Americans knew what he did or even knew his name.

  Sally had died of breast cancer ten years earlier, and the heady days of big defense spending were long gone. The industry had been devastated, thousands of workers laid off, the entire California economy thrown into turmoil. More important, Elliott believed America was weaker today than she had been in years. The world was a dangerous place. Saddam Hussein had proven that. So had a terrorist armed with a single Stinger missile. Elliott wanted to protect his country. If a terrorist could shoot down a jetliner and kill two hundred and fifty people, why couldn’t a rogue state like North Korea or Libya or Iran kill two million people by firing a nuclear missile against New York or Los Angeles? The civilized world had placed its faith in treaties and ballistic-missile control regimes. Mitchell Elliott reserved faith for the Almighty, and he did not believe in promises written on paper. He believed in machines. He believed the only way to protect the nation from exotic weapons was with more exotic weapons. Tonight, he had to make his case to the President.

  Elliott’s relationship with James Beckwith had been cemented by years of steady financial support and wise counsel. Elliott had never once asked for a favor, even when Beckwith became a powerful force on the Armed Services Committee during his second term in the Senate. That was all about to change.

  One of his aides knocked gently at the door. His phalanx of aides was drawn from the ranks of the Special Forces. Mark Calahan was like all the others. He was six feet in height—tall enough to be imposing but not so tall as to dwarf Elliott—short dark hair, dark eyes, clean-shaven, dark suit and tie. Each carried a .45 automatic at all times. Elliott had made many enemies along with his millions, and he never set foot in public without protection.

  “The car is here, Mr. Elliott.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  The aide nodded and silently withdrew. Elliott drift
ed closer to the fire and finished the last of his whiskey. He didn’t like being sent for. He would leave when he was ready to leave, not when Paul Vandenberg told him. Vandenberg would still be selling life insurance if it weren’t for Elliott. And as for Beckwith, he would have been an unknown San Francisco lawyer, living in Redwood City instead of the White House. They both could wait.

  Elliott walked slowly to the bar and poured another half inch of whiskey into the glass. He went back to the fire and knelt before it, head bowed, eyes closed. He prayed for forgiveness—forgiveness for what he had done and for what he was about to do.

  “We are your chosen people,” he murmured. “I am your instrument. Grant me the strength to do your will, and greatness shall be yours.”

  Susanna Dayton felt like an idiot. Only in movies did reporters sit in parked cars, drinking coffee from a cup, conducting surveillance like some private investigator. When she left the office an hour earlier, she had not told her editor where she was going. It was just a hunch, and it might lead to nothing. The last thing she wanted her colleagues to know was that she was tailing Mitchell Elliott like a B-movie sleuth.

  Rain blurred her view. She flicked a switch on the steering column, and wipers swept away the water. She scrubbed away the moisture on the inside of the windshield with a napkin from the downtown deli where she bought the coffee. The black staff car was still there, engine idling, headlights off. Upstairs, on the second floor of the large house, a single light burned. She sipped the coffee and waited. It was awful, but at least it was hot.

  Susanna Dayton had been White House correspondent for the Washington Post, the pinnacle of power and prestige in the world of American journalism, but Susanna had loathed the job. She hated filing, every day, essentially the same story that two hundred other reporters filed. She hated being herded around like cattle by the White House press staff, shouting questions at President Beckwith from rope lines at staged and choreographed events. Her writing took on an edge. Vandenberg complained regularly to top management at the Post. Finally, her editor offered her a new beat, money and politics. Susanna took it without hesitation.

  The new assignment was her salvation. She was to find out which individuals, organizations, and industries were giving money to which candidates and which parties. Did the contributions have an undue effect on policy or legislation? Were the politicians and the givers playing by the rules? Was the money spent properly? Did anyone break the law? Susanna thrived on the work because she loved making the connections. A Harvard-trained lawyer, she was a thorough and cautious reporter. She applied the rules of evidence to virtually every scrap of information she uncovered. Would it be admissible in a court of law? Is it direct testimony or hearsay? Are there names, dates, and places in the story that can be checked out? Is there corroborating testimony? She preferred documents rather than leaks from anonymous sources, because documents can’t change their story.

  Susanna Dayton had concluded that the nation’s system of financing its politics amounted to organized bribery and shakedowns, sanctioned by the federal government. There was a thin line separating legal activity from illegal activity. She saw it as her task to catch law-breakers and expose them. Her personality suited her perfectly to the work. She hated people who cheated and got away with it. She despised people who cut in line at the supermarket. She went crazy on the freeway when an aggressive driver cut into her lane. She loathed people who took shortcuts at the expense of others. Her job was to make sure they didn’t get away with it.

  Two months earlier, Susanna’s editor had given her a tough assignment: Chronicle the longtime relationship, financial and personal, between President James Beckwith and Mitchell Elliott, the chairman of Alatron Defense Systems. Reporters use a cliché when an individual or a group is elusive and hard to trace: shadowy. If anyone had earned the description of “shadowy,” it was Mitchell Elliott.

  He had given millions of dollars to the Republican Party over the years, and a watchdog group had told her that he had tunneled millions more to the party through questionable or downright illegal means. The main beneficiary of Elliott’s generosity was James Beckwith. Elliott had contributed thousands of dollars to Beckwith’s campaigns and political action committees over the years, and he had served as a close confidential adviser. One of Elliott’s former executives, Paul Vandenberg, was the White House chief of staff. Beckwith regularly stayed at Elliott’s vacation homes in Maui and Vail.

  Susanna had two primary questions: Had Mitchell Elliott made illegal contributions to James Beckwith and the Republican Party over the years? And did he exercise undue influence over the President?

  At this point she had answers to neither question. Her editor wanted to publish the piece two weeks from now in a special section on President Beckwith and his first term. She had a good deal of work to do before it would be ready to go. Even then Susanna knew she could do little more than raise questions about Elliott and his ties to the White House. Mitchell Elliott had covered his tracks well. He was completely inaccessible. The Post photo library had just one ten-year-old picture of him, and Alatron Defense Systems didn’t even have a spokesman. When she requested an interview, the man at the other end of the line chuckled mildly and said, “Mr. Elliott does not make it a habit to talk to reporters.”

  A source at National Airport told her Elliott had come to Washington earlier that day aboard his private jet. Congress had adjourned, and most members had gone home to campaign. The President had cut short a campaign trip to deal with the downing of Flight 002. Susanna wondered what brought Elliott to town now.

  That explained why she was sitting outside his Kalorama mansion in the rain. The front door of the mansion opened and two figures appeared, a tall man holding an umbrella, and a shorter silver-haired man, Mitchell Elliott.

  The taller man helped Elliott into the back of the car, then walked around and climbed in the other side. The headlights came on, illuminating the street. The car pulled swiftly away from the curb, heading toward Massachusetts Avenue.

  Susanna Dayton started the engine of her small Toyota and followed, keeping to a safe distance. The large black car moved quickly eastward on Massachusetts along Embassy Row. At Dupont Circle it melted into traffic in the outer lane and turned south on Connecticut Avenue.

  It was early yet, but Connecticut Avenue was nearly deserted. Susanna noticed that a strange quiet had descended over the city in the forty-eight hours since the jetliner had been shot down. The sidewalks were empty, just a few drunks spilling from a tavern south of the circle and a knot of office workers rushing through the rain into the Farragut North Metro station.

  She followed the car across K Street as Connecticut turned to 17th Street. She crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and swept past the ornate, brightly lit facade of the Old Executive Office Building. Susanna thought she knew where Elliott was dining tonight.

  The car made a series of left turns and two minutes later stopped at the South Gate of the White House grounds. A uniformed Secret Service agent stepped forward, peered into the back of the sedan, and ordered the driver to proceed.

  Susanna Dayton kept driving. She needed a place to wait. Sitting in a parked car for any length of time around the White House was not a good idea these days. The Secret Service had tightened security after a series of attacks on the mansion. She might be approached and questioned. A report might be taken.

  She parked on 17th Street. There was a small café across the street from the Old EOB that stayed open late. She grabbed her bag, bulging with newspapers, magazines, and her laptop, and got out. She hurried across the street through the rain and ducked into the café. The place was empty. She ordered a tuna sandwich and a cup of coffee and made a place for herself at a window table while she waited.

  She pulled the laptop from her bag, adjusted the screen, and turned on the power. Then she inserted a disk into the floppy drive and opened a file. When it came onto the screen, the file appeared as a meaningless series of letters and characters. Sus
anna was cautious by nature—many of her colleagues preferred the word “paranoid”—and she used encryption software to protect all her sensitive files. She typed a seven-letter code name, and the file came to life.

  The sandwich and coffee arrived. She scrolled down through the file: names, dates, places, amounts. Everything she knew about the elusive Mitchell Elliott and his links to President Beckwith. She added the events of this evening to the file.

  Then she shut down the computer and settled in for a long wait.

  5

  LONDON

  The fax arrived in the Times newsroom shortly after midnight. It remained on the machine untouched for nearly twenty minutes, until a young assistant bothered to retrieve it. The assistant read it quickly once and took it to the night editor, Niles Ferguson. A thirty-year veteran, Ferguson had seen many faxes like it before—from the IRA, the PLO, Islamic Jihad, and the crazies who simply claim responsibility anytime someone dies violently. This one didn’t look like the work of a lunatic.

  Ferguson had a special telephone number for situations like these. He punched it and waited. A woman’s voice answered, pleasant, faintly erotic.

  “This is Niles Ferguson, the Times. I just received a rather interesting fax in our newsroom. I’m no expert, but it looks authentic. Perhaps you should have a look.”

  Ferguson made a copy of the fax and kept the original for himself. He personally carried it downstairs to the lobby and waited. Five minutes later the car arrived. A young man with pockmarked skin and a cigarette between his lips came into the lobby and took possession of the fax. Niles Ferguson went back upstairs.