The Assassin Read online

  “Marisa may be aces with the French government, but her reputation in intelligence circles is not the best. I asked the Brits if they could send someone over to surveil with you. I promised that you wouldn’t cause any trouble or get in their way.”

  “Have I ever?”

  “Of course not.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jake Grafton’s cell phone rang as he walked the two blocks from the Rosslyn subway stop to his condo. He checked the number, then answered it.

  “Hello, Robin.”

  “Good evening, Admiral.” Robin Cloyd was a data-mining expert who had been working for NSA. She had been temporarily transferred to the CIA and assigned as Jake’s office assistant. One of the many things she did for the admiral was hack her way around the Internet, which was, of course, illegal. Robin worried about that, but she did it anyway because Jake Grafton asked her to.

  Robin was a technical genius, a tall, gawky young woman who lived in jeans and sweatshirts because the rooms where she spent her working life were filled with computers and heavily air-conditioned. She also wore glasses, large, thick ones, because she didn’t trust the doctors who did eye surgery. “After all,” she remarked to Jake when she interviewed for the job, “I only have two eyes, and why take a chance?” Why, indeed? Jake hired her on the spot. That was four months ago.

  “I’m into three of their computers now,” Robin said, “Winchester, Smith, and Wolfgang Zetsche—so I see all the e-mails they send back and forth to each other. They’re using a fairly sophisticated encryption code, one that—”

  “Right.”

  “You don’t care about the code.”

  “Not really.”

  Robin sighed audibly. Nontechnical people have no appreciation for logical beauty. “Anyway,” she said, “Jerry Hay Smith is the most interesting. He’s writing a book about the conspiracy and incorporating the unencrypted e-mails.”

  Grafton snorted in derision. “How much has he written?”

  “About forty thousand words.”

  “Oh, Lord!”

  “It’s interesting reading. I don’t think there’s much truth in it, but it is certainly exciting.”

  “Send it along with all the e-mails and your analysis. I need some bedtime reading.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When he got home, he found the morning paper on the kitchen counter, where his wife, Callie, had left it. He took it with him to the den and dropped into a chair. The trial of Sheikh Mahmoud al-Taji in London was the lead story on the front page. The British were trying to deport him for giving incendiary sermons in his London mosque about the duty of Muslims everywhere to serve Allah by battling infidels. His defense was that he was not a terrorist but was merely exercising his religious and free-speech rights. He had not, according to the press, actually advocated mayhem or murder. The British government argued that his speech went too far and was the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater. British Muslims were demonstrating outside the courthouse.

  A verdict was expected in a few days, and if it went against the sheikh, his lawyer promised an appeal. “The government has the right to prosecute terrorists,” he said, “not legal immigrants commenting on the issues of the day, even if they use a pulpit to state their views.”

  Grafton read the entire article, then leafed on through the newspaper.

  After my conversation with Grafton, I rode the Washington subway—the Metro—back to my stop on the edge of Metropolis, where I parked my car every morning. I couldn’t stop thinking about Marisa Petrou and her father, Abu Qasim.

  When Qasim and the head of the French intelligence agency, Henri Rodet, had plotted to murder the G-8 heads of government at the Palace of Versailles, Marisa Petrou had posed as Rodet’s mistress. She was nominally the daughter of one Georges Lamoureux, a high officer in the French diplomatic service. Grafton thought she was really the daughter of Abu Qasim and had been taken in, or adopted, by Lamoureux, a friend of Rodet’s, when she was ten. We didn’t have any proof of that, naturally, but when Grafton voiced an opinion it was usually a fact. He sometimes got these insights, and—but I digress.

  One of our difficulties was that we didn’t know what Qasim really looked like. Sure, I had seen him a couple of times, and so had Grafton, while he was disguised as an old man. I even got a photo that the wizards at the FBI enhanced so we could see what he might look like without the makeup and wig. Wasn’t any help. Oh, we searched, followed every lead, rumor and lukewarm tip we could squeeze out of anyone, as did every other police and intelligence agency in the civilized world, but Qasim had disappeared as completely as if he had dissolved in the human solution.

  One of the things Qasim did to hide Rodet’s role in the plot was stage a fake kidnapping and slice up Marisa’s face. I had seen her, unconscious, bleeding and tied to a chair, moments after he finished the job. She was a hell of a mess; it took a plastic surgeon a couple of months to put her back together again as best he could.

  I know Grafton is Grafton and I’m just a grunt in the spy wars, but still . . . a father doing that to his daughter? What kind of animal was Abu Qasim? Or was Grafton wrong? Maybe she wasn’t his daughter but was a female holy warrior determined to get to Paradise on virtue, or fanaticism if virtue didn’t work.

  The people on the subway, the pedestrians on the sidewalks—I watched them walk along, looked at their faces, wondering . . . Oh, we read about twisted, drugged-out freaks in the newspaper every so often, the refuse of humanity, who murder wife and kids for reasons that only the Devil could understand. But slice them up?

  Maybe I have a low tolerance, but I can only visit a sewer for a few minutes before I need fresh air. To get some, on the way home I stopped by the lock shop I own with a guy named Willie Varner. Our ten-year-old van was parked out front and the light was on, so I unlocked the door and went in.

  “Hey, it’s me.”

  “Back here.”

  I went into the workshop in the rear of our space. Willie was a dapper black man twenty years my senior, slender and trim. What he didn’t know about locks wasn’t worth knowing.

  “Wanta see something cool?” he asked as I examined the project he had on the bench. “This little thing will open any card-reader lock I’ve ever played with,” he said with a touch of pride in his voice. “Gonna call it the Varner mechanism and get me a patent.”

  He demonstrated his creation on a hotel-room lock he had mounted on a board held by a vise. Normally this lock opened when a properly programmed plastic card was inserted in the reader slot. He inserted a card-sized probe that was wired up to a PalmPilot and stood watching. In about five seconds the green light on the lock came on and there was a click. Willie pulled the probe from the slot and turned the door handle, which opened. It was that easy.

  “Whaddaya think of that?”

  “I didn’t know you knew anything about computers.”

  “Don’t.” He waved the PalmPilot. “I had a local lady geek program this for me.”

  “I see.”

  “Gonna put her and my name on the patent app. Both of us gonna make some money outta this.”

  He opened a small refrigerator that he had plugged in under the bench and pulled out two beers, one of which he passed to me. When he was seated and sipping, I said, “Willie, I wish you’d asked me about that thing before you started working on it. The agency’s got gizmos that do the same thing.”

  He stared. “You’re jivin’ me, right?”

  “Honest.”

  He swore a little. Drank some beer and swore some more. After a while he smacked the workbench with the flat of his hand and said, “I knew it was too good to be true! Invent something, make some money.” Then he glowered at me. Sooner or later he’d decide his misfortune was my fault, and it turned out to be sooner. “You’re like a little black cloud, Carmellini. When the sun starts shinin’, you show up and rain on ever’thin’.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You come around a little more often, we co
uld talk about stuff, partner to partner, but you’re off alla time sneakin’ into this or that, peepin’ through keyholes, spyin’ on folks who don’t want to be spied on. Someday somebody’s gonna stomp your sorry ass.”

  On that happy note, I went home. I had ruined a friend’s day, and that was enough. Hi-de-ho.

  The next morning at the office I asked for Marisa’s file. It was sorta thick. While I was there I also checked out her husband Jean Petrou’s file, which was not thick.

  I took them to the cubbyhole the government euphemistically refers to as my office. With my door locked, I opened Marisa’s classified file and perused it. About half of the contents were newspaper clippings. It had grown some since I saw it last.

  According to the file, Marisa was the daughter of Lamoureux and his second wife, a woman named Grisella. She attended private schools until college, dabbled a year or two at the Sorbonne and a couple of Ivy League joints in the States and married the son of a wealthy financier, Jean Petrou. They lived together a year or two, she split, did some more American college, never graduated, had a fling with a French heart surgeon and wound up as the mistress of Henri Rodet, the director of the French intelligence service. That’s where she came into my life.

  Grafton insisted then that Marisa was a co-conspirator with Rodet and his buddy Abu Qasim. His assertion that she might be the natural daughter of Qasim, and Rodet had arranged for his good friend Lamoureux to adopt her when she was about ten years of age, was in the file. Our agents had checked the public records in Switzerland and France and had come up dry. Which only proved that if there had ever been adoption papers filed on the child, they weren’t in the records now. The French and Swiss police had also made inquiries, they said, and their negative reports were also in the pile.

  Being smarter than the average bug, we wanted to interview the people who knew the truth about Marisa’s parentage, Georges Lamoureux and wife number two, Grisella. Unfortunately they were dead. Grisella succumbed to cancer in a Paris hospital five years ago, and Georges died in a single-car crash in the Swiss Alps a couple of months before the Paris G-8 summit.

  I flipped through page after page of this stuff until I came to something interesting. After the flap in Paris, Marisa and Jean Petrou had buried the hatchet, patched up their differences while Marisa convalesced and once again taken up housekeeping as husband and wife. Then, a couple of months ago, Jean accepted a posting in the French diplomatic service. He was currently attached to the French embassy in London, but he also spent a lot of time in Paris at the ministry.

  Apparently the French government wasn’t nursing any grudges against Marisa, or her hubby would never have gotten his political post. Of course, French politics being what it is, the French government had never officially admitted that there was ever a plot to assassinate the G-8 leaders, nor that the late Henri Rodet was anything other than a recently deceased civil servant who had done his bit for la belle France. Jean and Marisa were apparently aristocrats in good standing.

  I was happy for them.

  There was more info in the file, lots of details, addresses and so on. I took some notes.

  Finally I closed the file and arranged it squarely on my desk and sat staring at it. I had a ruler in my desk, so I took it out and checked. The file was precisely one and three-eighths inches thick, counting the stiff folder that contained it.

  I also measured Jean’s file. It held an inch less paper.

  I opened the husband’s folder and began reading. There was a photo in there, a snapshot. No place or date. The guy was of average size and weight and looked smarmy. A fop, I decided.

  The info in the file sorta went along with that assessment, making ol’ M. Petrou sound like your average rich young Frenchman. He was the only son of a seriously rich financier, so he had expectations. Private schools in his youth, a few regrettable incidents with young women, an expensive car wreck—a Ferrari, no less—flunked out of one school and was thrown out of another, some dabbling in recreational drugs. What else? Enjoyed pornography and erotic art. Collected some of both. Didn’t drink to excess and wore expensive suits and jewelry. He had worked in various capacities for his father’s banks before he entered the French foreign service, and apparently got a nice allowance, because he lived well above his salary. Had a mistress, whom he saw a lot when he was separated from Marisa. No info about whether he and the mistress still had a thing going since he had reconciled with his wife. His pop had died two years ago, and his mom was running the banks.

  That raised my eyebrows. Most European aristocrats of old man Petrou’s generation married cute, curvy, clotheshorses from the right families who looked good at society parties, had their kids by them, then began a long series of dalliances with younger and younger mistresses. Maybe old Petrou had done that, but his wife, Isolde, was still a natural force. Someone had clipped an article about her and stuck it in the file: The banks were more profitable last year under Isolde’s stew-ardship than they were under her late husband’s. He’d be whirling in his grave if he knew.

  All this dross was background, of course, to help intelligence evaluators weigh the worth of any tidbit an agent might glean from young M. Petrou at a cocktail party or other venue. He was not a regular intelligence source. Still, an agent had noted a comment of his about French foreign policy in Iraq made during a business luncheon in Paris six months ago. That tidbit was also in the file. It looked like a blog comment to me, but what do I know?

  That was the crop. Ho hum. I took the files back to the library and headed for the Starbucks on the ground floor to get a cup of coffee. Ah, the fast, hot life of an international spy.

  Of course, Marisa was in my future. I wondered if she had really taken up poisoning people, an ancient and dishonorable trade. Even if she hadn’t, she wasn’t ordinary, not by any stretch of the imagination. Amazingly, I was actually looking forward to seeing her again.

  I took my cup of cappuccino into the cafeteria, where there were tables, and was sitting there musing about poison when Robin Cloyd, Grafton’s new assistant, came striding over and dropped into the chair across from me. She had coffee in her hand and a little cup of yogurt.

  “Good morning, Tommy,” she said brightly. She had long hair that she wore frizzy, which hid most of her face. What you saw was the mountain of hair above the sweatshirt—today she was advertising New York University—and, peeking out of the hair, the big glasses, which magnified her green eyes. The glasses dwarfed her nose, which was working overtime holding those things up.

  “That your breakfast?” I asked, glancing at the yogurt.

  She flourished a plastic spoon. “Oh, yes. I’m so healthy that sometimes I can’t stand myself.”

  “A common affliction among certain classes,” I replied politely. I slurped at my coffee, which was still warm.

  “We haven’t really had a chance to get to know each other,” Robin said as she tore off the foil from her yogurt.

  “Hmm.”

  “Mr. Grafton said you’re single.”

  “He did?”

  “And unattached.”

  I made a mental note to remind the admiral that loose lips sink ships.

  “So am I,” she said brightly.

  I said something polite and hit the road. Didn’t really want any more coffee, after all.

  “Do you have any grandkids?” Sal Molina asked Jake Grafton. They were in the basement of Molina’s Bethesda home. Molina was sitting on the floor putting a tricycle together. Parts were strewn around, and he had the directions within easy reach. Grafton found a clean spot on the sofa and sat down.

  “Not yet,” Grafton said. “Amy is still looking for Mr. Right.”

  “That damn guy is hard to find,” Sal admitted. With his glasses in place, he glanced at the directions, then selected a washer and cotter pin from a small pile and began installing a rear wheel. “Talk to me,” he said. “Alexander Surkov.”

  “Surkov was Oleg Tchernychenko’s chief lieutenant, and presumably
Tchernychenko told him about the data-mining op we put in Tchernychenko’s company. Tchernychenko trusted him, and we needed a bag man, a man to carry money, around Europe and the Middle East to our soldiers. So through Tchernychenko, we used Surkov. I thought he would be better than an American at delivering the money.”

  “But you didn’t trust him?”

  “He was in a position to betray my people.”

  “What do you think? Did he sell us out?”

  Grafton took his time with that question. “Surkov was living very well in the U.K., even for an expatriate with serious connections, making serious money. It’s possible he was selling information to anyone with cash to buy.”

  “To al-Qaeda? Abu Qasim?”

  “Perhaps. Or he may have sold information about Tchernychenko’s business to one of his boss’ competitors. Or to the Russian government. In any event, he deposited a hundred and fifty thousand pounds in his London bank three weeks ago, a check drawn on the account of a shell corporation based in the Seychelles. The check was good.”

  “How likely is it that the Russians poisoned him?”

  “The two men who ate dinner with him are the most probable villains, but one wonders if the orders really came from Moscow.” Grafton told Molina about his meeting with Janos Ilin as Sal finished with one of the tricycle’s rear wheels and began on the second one.

  “The amazing thing,” Grafton concluded, “is that I had a man watching Surkov when he was poisoned. That is, assuming the British police’s theory that he was poisoned at the restaurant holds up.”

  “You had a tail on Surkov?”

  “We couldn’t watch him around the clock—we don’t have the resources—so we were doing the best we could with what we had. We monitored his landline and cell phone. Tommy Carmellini bugged his apartment and his car. Tommy was also keeping a discreet eye on who he met.”

  “Why?”

  “We lost two men last month. One of them and his girlfriend were tortured, then murdered. They took down Abdul-Zahra Mohammed, who had been running a money-laundering operation through a Russian company Tchernychenko has a finger in. The al-Qaeda guys aren’t stupid. Sooner or later they are going to investigate that connection, and Surkov, the greedy hustler, would be a logical place to start.”