Assassin's Game

SEVENTEEN

Christine Palmer was, at that moment, waist deep in the very cold Baltic Sea.

The sailboat she’d appropriated, a vessel that normally drew five feet of water to the base of the keel, was heeling markedly in three briny feet on a rising low tide. Standing on the rocky bottom of a nameless bay, Christine had a paintbrush in hand and was mopping a wide blue line around the waist of the boat using bottom paint she’d found in a storage bin. The heavy stripe was the final touch. She had already removed a set of faded red sail covers and made slight alterations to the boat’s registration number. Taken together, the changes gave a markedly different appearance from the craft she’d spirited away from a private dock outside Stockholm. That was the word she’d settled on: spirited. Far preferable to stolen, pilfered, or the overrationalized borrowed.

With one last stroke, she reached the stern of the boat and backed away to appraise her work. The detailing was awful, edges smeared and uneven, and a dozen drip marks ran down to the waterline. It hardly mattered. She was following David’s instructions to the letter. Do what you can to make it look different. Think large scale, so that no one looking from a mile away will recognize it. Christine dropped the brush into the paint bucket and used her wrist to wipe a strand of hair from her face. She regarded the stern, where she’d worked for thirty minutes with a barnacle scraper to take off the old name, a Swedish word that meant nothing to her. After scratching right down to bare fiberglass, she had christened the boat with its new name, struck in bold blue lettering: Bricklayer.

Noticing an uneven C, Christine reached out to perform a touchup. At that moment, three feet underwater, the rock she was standing on wobbled. She nearly tumbled into the sea, but caught herself at the expense of a wayward paintbrush. When she regained her balance Christine was staring at a fresh streak of blue that snaked nearly to the waterline. Between the block letters K and L was what looked like a drunken S.

Brickslayer.

At that moment, Dr. Christine Palmer was struck by the absurdity of her situation. This was what her life had come to — standing in the Baltic Sea to paint a new name on the boat she’d stolen so it wouldn’t be recognized by Israeli spies.

“What the hell am I doing?”

She smacked the transom with the wet brush, paint splattering across the deck like the droppings of some massive blue bird. She climbed up the boarding steps, and dropped the bucket and brush as cool air bit into her exposed legs and hips — she had stripped down to her panties to go into the sea, the only option for a sailor with one set of dry clothes. Mercifully, the owner kept a tall stack of towels on board.

Christine went below. There was no shower on the boat, so she soaked a hand towel with warm water from the sink and dragged it over the lower half of her body to cut the saltwater. It felt warm and wonderful. Using a fresh towel to dry, she dressed before turning to the table where a nautical chart was rolled open, anchored on opposing corners by two empty coffee mugs. The boat was fitted with receptacles for an electronic navigation suite, but the owner had clearly removed the system for the season — only the most hardened sailors bothered to cruise Scandinavia in the winter. The chart bore a single heavy line that was drawn from the center of Stockholm to her present position. Magnetic bearing, 111 degrees. Distance, 29 miles. The numbers had not worked out perfectly — as usual, variables had come into play, the most significant being the anchorage she’d settled on which was nearly a mile from the precise distance and bearing. David would also have to work out the beginning reference point of her last known position — the Strandvägen. And of course, all this assumed that he’d gotten to Sweden and found her message to begin with. From there it was simple. Find a way to reach her in the middle of nowhere.

What could go wrong?

Christine went above and stood on deck. A chilly breeze swept across the cockpit of the little boat, a basic and reliable Pearson 26. She scanned the horizon as she’d been doing all morning, but saw nothing new. Indeed she saw not a single man-made thing. Her last encounter with civilization had been yesterday morning, the seaside village of Runmarö eight miles north. There she had spent every penny in her pocket, mostly on food, and sent one message to her work email account. Then she had sailed here, to the back side of a remote island, and dropped anchor. With her part of the bargain done, there was nothing to do but wait. This was where David’s plan ended, a windswept natural harbor at the end of the earth, winter bearing down like a frigid anvil.

She looked ashore, to the tiny island called Bulleron. It was no different from a thousand others in the Stockholm Archipelago, barren rock outcroppings, a few hardy trees and shrubs clinging for life. It looked a jagged and inhospitable place. The other three cardinal points of the compass were equally discouraging — open water, a few remote islands floating in the marine haze. That was all Christine saw. No boats, no barges, no ferries.

And no David.

“I’d like you to draw a clock showing the time as nine twenty-one,” Dr. Samuels said.

“Digital or analog?” Sanderson asked.

The doctor stared at him with the solemnness of an undertaker.

Sanderson weighed asking if he wanted a.m. or p.m., but decided there was no point in antagonizing the man. Samuels was a nuisance, but in the end only a man doing his job. They’d been at it for the better part of an hour. What is the date? Can you tell me the year? Where are we? Ridiculous hoops, but hoops he had to jump through all the same. It hadn’t helped that when he’d been asked to count backward by sevens, starting with one hundred, Sanderson had stumbled at seventy-nine. But then, he wasn’t taking any of it very seriously. To make his misery complete, he’d woken with another headache. He’d be damned if he was going to mention that to the doctor.

Sanderson drew a clock with Mickey Mouse hands and handed it over.

Dr. Samuels frowned. He was a tall man, balding and with a beard that looked positively Freudian. It seemed as if every shrink Sanderson had ever known tried for the same look, a manifestation of transference or repression or some damned thing that made them all, in his view, no better than the poor sods they were passing judgment on.

“How old was your mother when she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s?”

“I can’t remember.”

The doctor looked at him uncertainly.

“Sixty, maybe sixty-one.”

A sigh. “Do you have any trouble balancing your checkbook?”

“Yes, but only because I need a raise.”

“Please, Inspector. We’re nearly done. I’m going to give you three words. Please say them back to me in reverse order. Cashier, lumber, gable.”

“Pignon, bois, caissier.”

The doctor stared at him blankly.

“Gable, lumber, cashier — in French, because you didn’t specify a language. Doctor, perhaps we could continue these parlor games later over a pint, but I really should be going. The streets are not as safe as they ought to be lately, and my oath obliges me to do something about it, notwithstanding the off-chance that there may be beta-amyloid proteins clogging my brain.”

“All right,” Samuels said. “I think I have enough to work with. But I will insist on an MRI.”

Sanderson nearly protested, but decided it would do no good. He heaved a sigh and said, “Let’s get on with it then.”