Assassin's Game

THIRTY

The first attempt on Ibrahim Hamedi’s life had earned him a lone bodyguard, a man who doubled as his driver. After the second attempt he never left home, or the compound in Qom, without a sizable convoy. The composition of his escort varied based on setting. Military vehicles were preferred for desert travel, but today, snaking through the baffling maze that was south Tehran, he made due with three armored limousines. Hamedi was in the lead car, which seemed to him counterintuitive from a security standpoint. But then, he was no expert. With awkwardly reassuring logic, he had long ago relented that Farzad Behrouz would take every possible measure to cover both their asses.

A motorcade of armored Mercedes was not an unusual sight in certain quarters of the city. In the working-class neighborhood of Molavi it stood out like a circus train. People stopped on the sidewalks and stared. Hamedi looked back through bulletproof glass and saw a distantly familiar place. The street was little different from a thousand others in south Tehran. In a long-settled victory of pragmatism over style, endless strings of tan tenements were crammed shoulder to shoulder, their earthen walls seeming to lean on one another like rows of dominos whose fall had been interrupted. He saw wires for electrical and phone service strung overhead like so much spaghetti, and from the main lines illegal shunts snaked brazenly through windows up and down the street. The scents were as ever, the urban tang of people and the stench of refuse, all cut by cinnamon and saffron drifting from kitchen windows.

Hamedi studied each face that passed, looking for any that seemed familiar. Mohammed, his best friend from grade school, or Simin Marzieh, the first girl he had ever kissed. He was sure they were here somewhere — assuming they were still alive. Hamedi had escaped these circumstances, but he was a rare exception. He did not delude himself that it was a matter of having worked harder to get ahead. Hamedi was the one inside the armored Mercedes because he could multiply six-digit numbers in his head at the age of five, and because he had earned his PhD in particle physics at the age of twenty-two. Hamedi had been given a gift from God, and he had not wasted it.

He craned his neck as they turned onto his old street, and soon he saw the building. It was a five-story affair, a weary testament to the color beige baked hard by fifty summers. Then he saw his mother. She was there at the threshold of her first-floor unit, sweeping the front step as he’d seen her do a thousand times. This was her never-ending crusade against the dust and wind, one that she would never win, and probably didn’t care to. “It is the battle that is important,” she would say. Even from a distance, Hamedi thought she looked different from when he’d last seen her, the back more bowed and the hair a lighter gray. The sharp olive eyes, however, he knew would be unchanged.

“Park across the street,” he ordered.

The driver nodded, and a bulky man in the passenger seat murmured something toward his collar. There were six more men in the other cars. The last time Hamedi had come here, a year ago, he’d been alone. That, he knew with certainty, was something that would never happen again.

The cars eased to a stop across the street from his old home. When Hamedi got out, the two men from his car followed and fell in step. “I don’t suppose I could ask you to stay here,” he said.

The guard in front, a heavy slab of a man in an ill-measured suit, said, “I am sorry, Dr. Hamedi, but you know our orders.”

“Very well,” he said. “But give us a little peace.”

As they crossed the street his mother kept sweeping. He was sure she’d seen them — nothing happened anywhere on the block without her knowing about it — and so this was her greeting.

Hamedi stopped at the foot of the steps. “Hello, Mother.”

She looked up at him with the same severe look he’d seen last November. Had it been there ever since? he wondered.

“I suppose you want tea,” she said.

Hamedi looked up and down the block. He saw at least twenty people staring at them, gawking from the street, faces framed in nearby windows. “Yes, that would be nice.”

Without another word, she turned into the house.

The two bodyguards followed them inside, but kept their distance. One took up a position at the front door, and the other at the back. His mother said nothing else until she emerged from the kitchen with the familiar tray: one teapot, two chipped china cups, and a bowl of honey.

“And what blesses me with this appearance? Surely you have important work to do.”

“How have you been?” he asked.

“I am as always — fit and alone.”

“You miss father,” he said.

“It’s been six years. Time has its way. But it is more difficult when one has no other family.”

“You have friends.”

“Oh, yes. And I will have more tomorrow when word gets out that my son, a man of such standing, has been here to visit mercy on his old mother.”

“If you were not always so miserable I would come more often.”

For the first time her eyes engaged him directly. “A letter arrived last week from your mentor in Hamburg.”

“Dr. Bohrlund?”

“Yes. He said the man who took that position you turned down at the university — he has not worked out. They are searching for a replacement, and Bohrlund thinks the post could be yours if—”

“Enough! I will not hear this again!”

“And I will not listen to weak excuses of what you now do!” she said defiantly. “You had such promise, Ibrahim! In Europe you could have taught science and done worthy research. You could have made the world something better. Instead you’ve sold yourself to this madness.”

“I have sold nothing. What I do, I do in the name of peace.” Hamedi looked across the room and saw the shoulder of one of the guards. The man would have no trouble hearing their raised voices. He said in a quieter tone, “You are my mother, but you are not worldly. I don’t expect you to understand my work or what will come from its success. But someday you will accept my decisions.”

After a prolonged silence, she said, “So why have you come here then? To torment me?”

Hamedi eased himself into his father’s familiar old chair. “I am going to Switzerland soon on business. Is there something you would like? That soap I used to bring or some chocolate?”

She snorted. “Don’t bother yourself.”

Hamedi heaved a sigh and surveyed the small room. His boyhood was all around him, and he felt a peculiar discomfort in having brought the guards here — it was as if they were violating the one place in Iran where he had ever felt safe. He said, “There is something else I could do for you. I could…” Hamedi hesitated mightily, “I could get you a better place to live.”

His mother’s eyes narrowed severely. “A better place to live? You mean a place that is away from my friends? Something new and clean, with no marks on the wall or stains on the curtains? One without memories? Or perhaps you only want your old mother in a safer neighborhood, one without so many undesirables.”

“I am not without influence, Mother. I could get you a house with a garden in Hashtgerd. It’s a nice place — many of the high-ranking military officers and Majlis live there.”

She stared at him incredulously. “The Majlis you say?”

Hamedi paused, waiting for her predicted disgust to pass. The big shoulder was still there. “Or … I still have the apartment in Hamburg. Perhaps you could go there, even for a short stay. I could arrange a flight for you to—”

“Enough!” she shouted. “This is where your father died, and this is where I will die, God willing.”

Hamedi was suddenly sorry he had come. He should not have expected different, but it was a pain he had not felt in a year. He rose from his father’s old chair and raised his voice. “Very well! I came to offer my help, but I will take no more of your misery. I’m sorry you consider me such a disappointment, but I will never regret the course I have chosen. Remember that, old woman!”

He strode to the door.

“Ibrahim—” she called.

Hamedi hesitated, almost turned. But then he strode ahead and his two shadows fell in place behind. Seconds later his convoy was under way, churning down the dust-laden street. He supposed her face was there in the window — as always, the cleanest window on Khorrami Street.

Hamedi did not look back.

The matter of entering Switzerland from Germany was something to think through. Slaton knew that with the adoption of the Schengen Area, Switzerland no longer staffed border control points on roads leading into the country. Equally, rail and bus service were not regularly monitored. But this was not an absolute — customs officers had full authority to stop anyone entering the country, and they randomly patrolled trains to ask for identification and search baggage. Carrying no identity papers whatsoever, Slaton was not keen to travel in a vehicle of any sort. On the other hand, he was facing a firm deadline — an appointment to kill a man in four days’ time. The latter forced his hand, and he decided that with the precautions of good tradecraft, it would be best to take the train straight through.

Two and a half hours after leaving Munich, the Intercity Express breached the Swiss border near the town of Bregenz, Austria, and crossed the Rhine to afford a sweeping view of Lake Constance. An announcement was made over the public address system regarding the border crossing, but Slaton saw no customs officers, and neither he nor any of the other passengers bothered to reference the folding cards in the seat pockets that served as official notice, in three languages, of the duties, laws, and responsibilities assumed by those entering Switzerland.

The annuity salesman, still at his opportunistic best, had begun chatting up a thickset man across the aisle. Slaton saw the old peddler pull out his wallet, ostensibly to produce a business card, but also managing to put on display an inset photograph of his lovely wife and two daughters. It occurred to Slaton that he had never in his life kept such a picture in his wallet, even in his recent “domestic period” as Christine called it. Would it ever happen? Would a day come when he could walk through the world without the specter of entangling his wife, and now their child, in his violent past? In the last year he had covered much new ground. He had paid a water bill and opened a credit account, albeit under the alias of Edmund Deadmarsh. For the first time in years he kept a legitimate home address, if one discounted the dusty storage facility in Tel Aviv where a few inherited household items had been moldering for years. Yet now he was slipping back, returning to the abyss.

As the train continued westward, the great slabs that were the Alps dominated the horizon, their crests already aswirl in winter clouds and new snow. Slaton shut his eyes, needing to rest, but also in case any promotion-minded customs officer suddenly appeared in the aisle. Yet if his body was still, his thoughts were less so. He was heading for Geneva and an assassination, searching for a course that would solve all his problems. Yet like any gamble, the coin could equally land against him. If that happened, if he lost control, he might lose Christine forever. At the moment there was only one option — Slaton had to keep moving forward. Keep searching for a way out.

With a change of trains, he could be in Geneva by early afternoon. He would not, however, go that far today. The man he was to kill might soon be in Geneva — but the money was in Zurich.

At 3:15 that same afternoon, as the kidon was spanning Switzerland, Arne Sanderson pulled up to the building labeled Magnussen Air Charters in Oxelösund. He parked his car, and through a drizzle-obscured windshield saw an airplane at the dock with the registration number Rolf had given him: S325P.

A slightly built woman was tending to something in the cockpit. Sanderson got out of his car, shrugged his collar higher, and walked over to announce himself. “Excuse me — may I have a word?”

The woman, who was standing precariously on one of the floats, leaned outside.

“I’m Detective Inspector Sanderson, Stockholm police.” He flashed his old Interpol credentials and she glanced at them.

“It’s about damned time!” she said.

“Sorry?”

“I called the local boys this morning. Told them I’d had some trouble.”

The woman stepped onto the dock and offered a hand. “Janna Magnussen.”

“Yes, good to meet you,” Sanderson replied. “What kind of trouble did you report?”

“A hijacking, of course.”

Sanderson blinked, caught off-guard. “You mean an air hijacking? As in when someone forcibly takes control of your airplane?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe we should start at the beginning.”

Janna Magnussen’s eyes twinkled. “Yes, that might be for the best.” She looked up at the inclement sky, and said, “Why don’t you come inside, Inspector.”