Assassin

Chapter Four

Venice

FRANCESCA STOOD ALONE, DRINKING CHAMPAGNE AND LOOKING out at the hazy lights along the Grand Canal. A slightly swampy evening breeze off the water carried a fog and blew the blonde curls back from her forehead. She allowed herself a smile, standing there at the railing of the terrace balcony of the suite at the Gritti Palace. The last of the Italian detectives and American diplomatic security agents had all come and gone. Each group had visited the suite at least three times during the week following the bizarre death of the new American ambassador to Italy. They had, they claimed, all they wanted from her. A lie.

She’d allowed herself the smile at this lie because no man on earth had ever had all he wanted from her.

The three Italian detectives had left the hotel, each one clutching her glossy autographed eight by ten. The two handsome American agents from the State Department had, after their third visit, departed the Gritti with only one burning memory: three exquisite inches of pale white thigh and pink garter above the tops of her sheer black stockings visible as she rose from the deep cushioned chair to say good-bye.

One of them, Agent Sandy Davidson, had, she felt, a certain boyish charm.

“Sfumato!” she had exclaimed on his last visit, tears welling in those enormous brown eyes. “Sì! Up in smoke! Poof! That’s what they tell me has happened to him, Sandy! Horrible, no? Ma Donna!”

The American DSS agent in charge thanked the world-famous movie star profusely for her time and apologized for asking so many delicate questions at such a horrendous time. He was sure they would soon catch the terrorist group behind the gruesome murder of Simon Clarkson Stanfield. Any threats? he asked, putting on his raincoat. There had been, she said, certain threats, si, as recently as the preceding week. Her lover had said he was tired of always looking over his shoulder. An American expression, no? What she didn’t tell them, what they certainly had not needed to know, was precisely why her lover had actually been looking over his shoulder that warm summer night one week earlier.

Two minutes after Stanfield had left her alone in the bed that night, Francesca had poured herself a glass of Pol Roger and walked naked out onto the very balcony where she now stood.

Her little silver bird had flown. The red bag hanging from her bare shoulder was much lighter now, without the slender missile. She drew a deep breath and composed herself. A few quiet moments to reflect before she opened the red leather bag again.

Certo, she’d made only one real mistake. She’d stupidly snapped at Luciano out on the dock when he tried to help her with her bag. Surely the target had been watching, seen that behavioral misstep. She couldn’t fly to Venezia; she’d had to take the train because of the contents of the bag. The long ride was tiresome and boring, what with all the begging for autographs. No excuse. She’d lost it down there on the dock, momentarily, and surely the target had seen her step out of character.

She was only lucky he hadn’t asked to see what was in her bag that was so important, no? Stupido! Only the stupid could allow themselves the luxury of luck!

She removed two items from the red leather bag. A Sony Watchman television with a tiny dish antenna affixed. And a very sophisticated satellite telephone to which she had attached a scrambling device of her own design.

First, she switched on the palm-sized television and adjusted the antenna. The image broadcast from the nose-mounted camera of the tiny missile was riveting.

The target was twenty feet ahead, bobbing and weaving and continually looking back over his shoulder. His face, so handsome in repose, was a mask of raw fear. He was just leaving the Alla Napoleonica and entering the central Piazza. Not taking her eyes off the screen she speed-dialed a number on the scrambled satphone. Snay bin Wazir, otherwise known as the Pasha, picked up on the second ring.

“Pasha?”

“My little Rose,” the soft male voice said in classical Arabic, but with a distinct English lilt to it.

“Sì, Pasha.”

The Pasha had long ago decided to call all of the female hashishiyyun in his seraglio of death his ‘petites fleurs de mal’. His little flowers of evil. Each of his small army of seductive assassins was entitled to her own flower name and, since Francesca had some seniority, she’d quickly chosen her favorite, Rose.

The best name was long taken, chosen years ago by one who was the envy of them all, a great beauty descended from one of France’s oldest aristocratic families. She was the very first assassin recruited to do the Pasha’s bidding when his movements were restricted by the Emir. A recluse now, she lived in splendor in a large house on the Ile de la Cité. No one save the Pasha ever saw or spoke to her. She was known only as Aubergine. And called only by her chosen name, Deadly Nightshade.

“Are you watching this, my Pasha?” Francesca asked in English.

“Wallah,” the Pasha said. “Incredible. Dr. Soong’s remarkable silver arrow flies straight and true.”

“Is it not all we hoped for?”

“The Emir is sure to be pleased, little flower. I am certain when he sees this he will—Wait! What is he going to do?”

“Dive into the canal, I would guess? That’s what I would do. Look! He’s—”

“Jara!” Pasha said, “Shit!”

Ever since he’d left England and returned to the high mountains of his native land, the Pasha sprinkled his English with Arabic and his Arabic with English.

“Don’t blink or you’ll miss the good part, Pasha.”

“Astounding! How does it—poise—in mid-air?”

“This is why I am so in love with this new weapon, Pasha. The thrusters, they angle in every direction. Dr. Soong, he explain to me it is like a, what, English Hurrier jet? Yes. Same principle, just smaller.”

“They call it the Harrier, little Rose.”

“Yes, but ‘Hurrier’ it is more funny, no?”

“And, it goes under the water?”

“Of course, Pasha!”

“Yes! Yes! It’s going under the water…it’s…”

The video transmission abruptly ended in a silent blast of static.

“Allah akbar!” the Pasha shouted. “You shall be richly rewarded in the Emir’s Temple of Paradise, little Rose.”

“Allah akbar,” Francesca replied after the Pasha had disconnected the call. The marvelous weapon had worked flawlessly. This Dr. Soong, whom she had met at an arms bazaar in Kurdistan, deserved his reputation as a true genius with weapons. Biological, chemical, or nuclear. He’d first made his name with poison gases, so, although the doctor’s name was I.V. Soong, he was commonly known amongst the cognoscenti as Poison Ivy.

The Venetian moon slipped from behind a cloud and bathed the terrace in pale blue light.

“One down,” Francesca whispered to herself, smiling.

The Pasha, born Snay bin Wazir, fifth son of Machmud, replaced the solid gold receiver and took another bite of his chocolate chip cookie. Famous Amos. The recipe anyway. Couldn’t buy them anymore, so bin Wazir’s pastry chefs made them by the dozens. He hit the intercom button and told the projectionist to take down the screening room lights. To witness the death of the American in real time had been most satisfying. Almost as satisfying as the cookies.

“Roll it again!” the Pasha commanded.

Snay bin Wazir clapped his hands twice. It was a signal to the two concubines beneath his vast embroidered silk robes to return to their ministrations. “Death in Venice!” he’d roar each time the dramatic scene ended, “Run it again!” He’d recorded it for the Emir’s collection of such tapes and made the projectionist play the tape over and over.

Finally, he had his surfeit of the thing. “Out! Out!” the Pasha said, and the two naked courtesans emerged, giggling and tinkling with bangles and rings, running for the exit. Snay bin Wazir clapped four more times, a sign to his four personal bodyguards that he was ready to move.

Although the screening room had plenty of plush velvet seats, over a hundred, the Pasha wasn’t sitting in any of them. He traveled about his palace in an elaborately carved eighteenth century Italian sedan chair. Sad, but true. He had grown to such a magnitude he preferred the chair to his own two feet. As his weight now hovered around four hundred pounds, the palace doctors were concerned about his sixty-year-old heart. He kept telling them this was not a problem.

He had no fucking heart.

His four principal guards appeared, grunted and squatted, each grabbing one of the four posts of the sedan chair and lifting it easily. Lifting the Pasha and his gilded chair was no effort at all, because Snay bin Wazir had chosen as his closest, most personal guards, perhaps the four greatest Japanese sumo wrestlers of the last century.

Ichi, Kato, Toshio, Hiro.

Snay bin Wazir, the notorious sultan of Africa, now known throughout the Emirate as the Pasha, had traveled to Japan to make his selection. He watched and studied the sumo world for months, attending bouts in Tokyo and Honshu, Yokohama and Kyoto, before making his decision. Four men were ultimately kidnapped. Captured, drugged, and smuggled out of Japan aboard the Pasha’s private 747, they were brought up into the high mountains by camel caravan. The sumos had been installed in Snay bin Wazir’s palatial fortress four years earlier. If there was small chance of escape then, there was none at all now.

The furor all this caused in Japan was immense. But no one knew where the rikishi were, and, over time, the country’s economic woes eclipsed the story.

The Pasha clapped once, and the four guards took off at a stately pace, the sedan chair headed down a series of marble halls, the only sounds the music of the crystal jets in the many splashing fountains. From far away floated the notes of a Persian flute and the distant jingle of tambourines. In one of the great arched halls, a number of the Pasha’s concubines were dancing for their own entertainment.

The sumos carried the Pasha past endless doors plated with beaten gold and inset with jeweled hyacinths and chrysolites. Their bare feet padded silently over silken rugs embroidered with silver stars and crescent moons. A tapestry depicted fleets of golden dhows with silvered lateen sails ghosting upon the mirrored Nile. Brilliantly colored songbirds flew freely about in the many vast courts of the Blue Palace, held captive only by the thin-meshed golden nets hanging high above.

Finally, the regal party arrived in the small gardens strictly reserved for the Pasha’s principal wife, Yasmin. The four sumos carefully lowered the sedan chair and, after bowing deeply to the Pasha, retired discreetly to enjoy a few hours of free time in their private suite of rooms.

They were no longer kept chained like disorderly slaves or the political prisoners down in the catacombs. The Pasha had enslaved them by creating a sumo paradise within the walls of the palace: he paid them in gold and diamonds, made them wealthy beyond measure, he had given them their pick of the most beautiful women in the seraglio, put legions of servants at their command.

Still, Snay bin Wazir saw the sumos were not happy. Being a keen observer of human nature, the Pasha quickly surmised the source of their unhappiness. They missed the fame and adulation accorded them in the streets and sumo shrines of their homeland.

So the Pasha had constructed a great hall in the manner of the most magnificent sumo shrines of the Nara Period of the eighth century. It was a soaring affair, with gilded sandalwood beams rising high above the dohyo, the Ring. There were bouts every week, and enthusiastic attendance was mandatory. Everyone from the captain of the imperial house guards to the lowliest minion was obliged to attend, and every seat was always full.

The Pasha took great delight in the emotion on the faces in the crowd. Some were faking, he knew exactly who, and made a mental note, but most were honestly enthralled when each of the wrestlers, with great dignity, performed the opening dohyo-iri ceremony. First, the clapping of hands to attract the attention of the gods. Then the upward turning of the palms to show the absence of weapons. And finally, the climactic act of bringing each foot down with a resounding blow to drive all evil from the dohyo.

In time, the sumos each acquired a devoted following and were treated with great respect and even reverence inside the walls. They had become celebrities within the Pasha’s great mountain sanctuary. That the Pasha allowed any but his own radiance to shine was a source of great puzzlement and gossip in the barracks, where the guards lived, and amongst the women in the seraglio.

Although they would never dare say it, most thought this diverting chapter in the Pasha’s life could only end in tragedy. Lights that burned too brightly within this palace tended to get snuffed out. There was but one sun permitted in this solar system.

In addition to defending the Pasha at the cost of their own lives, if necessary, and bearing him about daily in his chair, the four sumos had been schooling their new master in the fifteen-hundred-year-old sumo arts. Snay bin Wazir, heartless, powerful, and full of guile, was a willing and able student. Kato himself said that bin Wazir had already achieved such a level of proficiency as to make him competitive against the top ranks of rikishi in Japan. He had only to refine his techniques and one day he might rival them in grace and skill and artistry.

Snay had made it plain to the four rikishi that if he were ever able to defeat any one of them, the penalty was instant banishment from the palace. It was a fate only Ichi desired. No amount of wealth or women could salve Ichi’s broken heart. Night and day he longed for Michiko, an angel who’d come to earth to bless him with peace just before his abduction. While his honor forbade deliberate loss in the dohyo, in sumo parlance a feigned Tsuki dashi, it did not, he’d come to feel, forbid the death of a master who held him captive and whom he did not honor.

And so, every morning when the sun rose over the high palace walls, and the thin mountain air was crystalline with light made radiant by the snowy mountain peaks looming above him, Ichi would walk alone in the gardens, consult his heart, and listen carefully to the song of the splashing fountains. He waited for the pure and innocent voice of Michiko. Surely one day the waters might whisper the secret way in which Ichi might escape his prison and find his way back to her heart. And so return to the source of the sun.