Assassin's Game

THIRTY-SEVEN

His eyes opened instantly to a sharp noise.

Slaton immediately tensed, but didn’t move other than to shift his gaze toward the uncorrelated motion, a dark silhouette behind the Rover’s frosted side window. Someone was outside, very close, their hands low and out of sight. That was always the most important thing — the hands. Slaton kept still, and soon the shape sank lower and disappeared. He heard a car door close, a cold engine labor to life.

The car parked in the adjacent spot began to back out.

He rose to an elbow, his breath going to vapor. He was laying in the Rover’s cargo area, wrapped in the heavy sleeping bag and with the rear seats folded down. Slaton had arrived in the waning minutes of Thursday, exiting the A1 at Mont-sur-Rolle, and from there traveled no more than three hundred yards south. He’d parked in a small lot outside the Rolle train station, choosing a tight spot between a panel van and the big Mercedes sedan that had just pulled away. Rolle was centered midpoint along the curved northern shore of Lake Geneva, roughly twenty-five miles from the city of Geneva. Today Slaton would close that gap.

He climbed in front, started the engine and spun the heater knob to full. Rubbing circles in the fogged left and right windows, he surveyed the area around him. He saw an empty parking spot immediately to the right. In the distance, others that had been vacant were now filled by morning commuters. Otherwise, everything looked as it had when he’d arrived six hours ago. The heater blew for five minutes before starting to make a difference. In the backseat he changed clothes, trading the rumpled attire in which he’d slept for the khaki trousers, button-down shirt, and designer tie. He stopped at the train station restroom, and at a washbasin Slaton did his best to revive his coarse appearance. By six-thirty he was waiting on the platform, a ticket in one hand and a newspaper in the other. He stood with ten other commuters who in aggregate could not have matched him more perfectly. A train slid to a stop right on schedule — the Swiss being timekeepers of the world — and the crowd shuffled aboard in an orderly fashion.

Slaton was increasingly alert. His eyes flicked across every person, and in the tight confines of the car he backed against a bulkhead and shifted his stance regularly to alter his vantage point. He was sure he had separated cleanly from Stockholm, and then Zurich. But Geneva was something else. In Geneva he might well be expected.

The run to the city took twenty-seven minutes, the train shouldering to the shore of the serene lake while the massive form of Mont Blanc roused in the distance, its snowcapped peak struck brilliant in the new morning light. No one around him seemed to notice the spectacle. He watched young professionals tap their phones in the name of urgent business affairs, while their older counterparts probed newspaper financials, presumably to calculate how much more or less they were worth on this glorious morning.

Slaton scanned Le Courrier, a French-language local paper. French was one of his better languages, and used widely in Geneva — no surprise as Switzerland’s westernmost city was virtually enveloped by her sister state. On the front page he saw an article regarding a speech in which the Israeli prime minister had strongly urged the United Nations to take a harder line on the “pariah state” of Iran. Slaton saw nothing in Le Courrier about the recent shootings in Stockholm, nor anything about Anton Bloch’s identity, which had certainly been verified by now. That the police were holding this out of the headlines did not surprise Slaton, yet he knew it was a risk for whoever had taken over for poor Inspector Sanderson. He wondered briefly what the little detective was doing right now. Was he still involved in the case on some level? If so, Slaton hoped the ice blue eyes were not boring into Christine, but rather darting over old files and endless camera footage, losing focus as they tried to match unmatchable fingerprints.

Searching for a man who didn’t exist.

Slaton had a fleeting urge to contact Christine. He imagined how it would feel to hear her voice, to know that everything was all right. It was, of course, no more than a teasing thought. He had not briefed her on any method of making contact, and with good reason. Slaton had seen more than one mission blown in the name of comfort. He had seen men tracked down and shot because they’d exposed themselves in order to say good night to their child. He’d seen a wedding party bombed because one guest had allowed sentiment to override reason. Slaton knew exactly what came of such breaches, and he would not allow it. He could only trust that Christine was safe. Trust that he had done enough, and that she was making good decisions. Because right now, his concealment was the best weapon either of them had.

Slaton disembarked at Geneva’s Sécheron Station under a splendid sky, and he dispersed with the other commuters into the heart of the city. Geneva was a place Slaton knew well. He had come here twice before, once as a teenager to attend the nearby Montreux Jazz Festival, and again years later to kill a man. Both aims had been achieved and, for reasons that escaped him, seemed fixed in his mind with equivalent weight. On one shore of Lac Léman he had spread himself on green grass and listened to Ray Charles play his glorious standards, and on the other he had spread himself on a rooftop ventilator to put under his reticle a Yemeni bomb-maker, a proven and indiscriminant killer of women and children. Two fulfillments that could not have been more divergent, yet both set here, on a pristine lake charged by Alpine water, crisp air flowing under a faultless blue sky.

He walked west along Avenue de la Paix, and in a matter of minutes arrived at Geneva’s United Nations Office. The main building, originally built to house the League of Nations, was as grandiose as the ideals it represented, a blunt ivory tower of stone and columns and square edges. All around were offshoot wings fronted by broad lawns and reflecting pools, and on a central pathway the flags of the world were aligned in perfect harmony. It was a splendid and pompous place that Slaton might have ignored but for one reason. This was his starting point.

According to Nurin’s file, Ibrahim Hamedi would present Iran’s case to the world from this stage. At seven in the evening, two days from now, he would stand at a podium in the grand hall and, in all probability, lie about Iran’s program of nuclear weaponization. He would then mingle with the invitees for precisely twenty-three minutes — this also from the file — before being hustled to a side entrance and a waiting motorcade. Three cars, or possibly four, would turn up Avenue de France and make two miles at speed before merging onto Quai du Mont Blanc. There, minutes removed from his diplomatic duty, Iran’s chief nuclear designer would be deposited at Lake Geneva’s northern shore and walk, amid a thick and watchful security contingent, to his next appearance.

And there the kidon would be waiting.