Assassin's Game

FIFTY-FIVE

For the second night in a row Evita Levine rose in the elevator of the Isrotel Tower Hotel in Tel Aviv. Tonight the call from Zacharias had come late, and indeed caught her by surprise.

She had talked in a hushed voice from the kitchen and made the usual arrangements, yet on hanging up Evita thought she sensed something new in his voice. Or perhaps something that wasn’t there. His panting enthusiasm? In any event, she dressed quickly and told her husband, who was nodding off in his decrepit chair behind a television that was running, of all things, an ad for an aerobic exercise video, that her mother was ill and she was going across town to tend to her. Evita had always tried to avoid outright lies, but seeing her liaisons with Zacharias clearly drawing to an end, she tonight allowed herself the expediency of deceit.

The elevator opened, and she walked down the hallway wondering if it was time to break things off. This was a speech Evita had long rehearsed, and one that varied, based on her degree of disgust at the given moment, from a curt letdown to screamed accusations of sexual inadequacy. As she reached the familiar door, however, it all went out of her head. As good as that might feel, there was still reason to be cautious.

He answered her knock immediately, and the first thing she noticed was that he did not have a drink in his hand. The second thing was the way he backed away from her. His usual leer was replaced by a decidedly grim expression that seemed completely out of character. Evita felt the first pang of fear.

“What is it, darling?” She stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. She moved closer and put a soft hand around the nape of his skinny neck. “It’s not your wife, I hope. Has she found out?”

“Evita Levine,” he said, “you are under arrest for treason against the State of Israel.”

She stepped back with wide eyes and a slack jaw. Before she could respond two men appeared from nowhere and pulled her hands roughly behind her back. Evita had no doubt that life as she knew it had just ended, but as was often the case with those in the process of being handcuffed, the question that came to her lips was, “How did you find out?”

Mossad’s director of operations gave her a subdued smile. “Don’t you see, my dear? I’ve known all along.”

Evita stared at him dumbly. She thought of the nights they’d been together, the things she had done. How she had controlled him. She closed her eyes tightly until a vision of Saud came to mind, her forever-young sculptor with his strong hands and liquid gaze. Evita kept her eyes shut as if to hold that picture, and soon cold tears were streaming down her cheeks.

Six minutes later, and one hundred miles north of Tel Aviv, a second group of Mossad agents, these more tactically oriented, burst into a hotel room where the Hezbollah agent known as Rafi was sleeping off a daylong and well documented bender. The man stirred and, it would be later claimed in the after-action report, made a threatening move toward the nightstand drawer. Perhaps because of this, or more likely since the Mossad team was operating on Lebanese soil, no handcuffs were produced.

Forty nine-millimeter rounds later, the bloody body of Rafi looked as though it had been stapled to the splintered headboard.

Christine had spent the evening at Anton Bloch’s bedside in Saint Göran Hospital. She told the police it was because he was an old friend. Bloch, whose rapidly improving condition the doctors found encouraging, knew otherwise.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to turn on the television? There might be something new.”

She shook her head.

He had prevailed an hour earlier, and for ten minutes they witnessed the bloodshed in Geneva. The police gave few details, and the speculation by reporters was rampant, neither of which calmed Christine’s restless imagination. The few facts were damning enough: an attempt had been made on the life of Dr. Ibrahim Hamedi, leaving one assailant and a significant number of bodyguards dead. The scientist was missing. At that point, Christine had turned the television off.

Now she was pacing back and forth at the foot of Bloch’s bed, head low and arms crossed over her chest, and trying her level best to find hope.

“Sit down,” he said. “Can I order you some food?”

“I thought I was here for your sake.”

“I’m worried too, Christine. But I’ve had many nights like this. You simply can’t dwell on the worst-case scenario. Even if they’ve identified the shooter, they won’t release the name any time soon. Tomorrow is probably the earliest we can expect any good news.”

She stopped circling and went to his side. “Good news? From this?”

“It might not have been David,” he said. “Nurin could have sent another kidon to do the job.”

She probed his eyes. “Do you really believe that?”

His pause was too long for a lie. “No. But until we know something more accurate there’s no sense in—”

Assistant Commissioner Sjoberg walked through the doorway. He met Christine with a somber gaze that froze her in place.

“Have you seen what’s happening in Geneva?” Sjoberg asked, not bothering with any preliminaries.

“We saw something on television earlier,” Bloch replied. “A private yacht was attacked, and there was a shootout between an assassin and Hamedi’s security people.”

Sjoberg’s eyes remained fixed, and for a moment Christine thought he was going to chastise her, say something along the lines of, You knew this was going to happen all along, didn’t you? What he said was, “There was a second confrontation soon afterward on a nearby bridge. The Iranian scientist, Hamedi, turned up. He was being held hostage by a second assailant, a man dressed in black. One of my men, Detective Sanderson, shot and killed the suspect. It was your husband, miss.”

Christine’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the side of Bloch’s bed.

“Are you certain?” Bloch asked.

“The body went into the river. Until they’ve recovered it we can’t confirm his death. But as for the identity — yes, I’m sure. Sanderson interviewed Mr. Deadmarsh at length when he was here in Stockholm. He was positive. I can also tell you that Sanderson is an expert marksman. He was very close and wouldn’t have missed.”

The pain was unlike anything Christine had ever experienced. “No!” she whispered hoarsely. “Please, no!” Then, as Bloch put an arm around her, the torment arrived in full.

Oh, David, she thought, I did this to you! Christine doubled over, folded her arms across her stomach, and began to sob uncontrollably.

Dr. Ibrahim Hamedi was quickly identified by the surviving members of his security contingent, which was now under emergency leadership after Farzad Behrouz had been confirmed as a fatality of the attacks, and soon all were being whisked to Geneva International Airport under a heavy police escort. There were tepid protests from quarters of the canton gendarmerie, the detectives there wanting to interview Hamedi as a witness, but a beleaguered Swiss foreign minister intervened, and when Hamedi’s chartered jet departed at half past eleven that evening there were substantial sighs of relief both in the air and on the ground.

The second man recovered from the bridge that night was taken briefly into custody, but soon confirmed to be a detective on the Stockholm police force. His gun was taken into evidence, and Detective Inspector Arne Sanderson, who seemed quite ill, did his best to answer questions from a hospital bed at Universitaires de Genève. He gave a precise, if broken, account of his engagement with the assassin, a story that the local detectives decided fit well with the evidence given by young Kammerer.

Rescue operations on Lake Geneva continued into the early-morning hours, and by sunrise every soul on Entrepreneur’s passenger manifest — crew, guests, and the gendarme detail — had been accounted for. The casualty count reported in the morning papers was nine dead — eight from Hamedi’s security force and the assassin under the Pont du Mont Blanc. Ten passengers and crew members were reported injured, a number that insiders knew was optimistic, and forever left in question, due to the rapid departure of the Iranians. The flotilla of rescue vessels began to dissipate late that morning, and the investigative emphasis shifted to the only remaining loose end — a missing person, the man Officer Kammerer and two civilian witnesses had seen tumble fifteen feet down into the frigid Rhone River.

Under a menacing gray sky, boats with grappling hooks began dragging the tireless Rhone downstream, and pairs of policemen walked both shores, parting stands of tall aquatic weeds and poking in eddies as they searched for the body of an unidentified terrorist who had, by all accounts, taken at least three nine-millimeter rounds from Inspector Sanderson’s SIG Sauer. In the opinion of one interviewed police captain, “a not unfitting end for a man who has terrorized Europe from Stockholm to the shores of Lac Léman.”

In spite of everyone’s best efforts, nothing was found.

After a sleepless night, Raymond Nurin was ruminating in Mossad’s bunker when two very unexpected phone calls came. The first, from the operations center three floors above, sent him running to the elevator. He hit the call button, and when the silver door didn’t open immediately he bolted to the stairs.

One minute later he was listening to a message that had been taken from a satellite download. “This has got to be a hoax!” Nurin insisted. “The Iranians are trying to spoof us, bring us in.”

“No, sir,” the tech replied. “The authentication code is valid. He’s out there.”

“But it’s been — what? Three weeks?”

The man shrugged.

“I want Veron in here.”

“He’s already on the way, sir.”

Nurin went to the large map on the wall and looked at Iran. “Where exactly?” he demanded.

Another technician, this a woman holding a printout of the lat-long coordinate set, plotted things on the map and made an X with a Sharpie. “Right here. Seven kilometers east of Cheshmehshour.”

In what seemed a disturbing new habit, Nurin realized that he had not considered every contingency. He was still staring at the map in the operations room, still reeling, when the second call came.

“Sir! It’s the priority number you flagged!” Nurin tripped over a cable as he dashed to the console and picked up the correct handset.

“Where are you?”

Those three words were the end of his input. He listened for exactly ten and three one hundredths seconds before the line went dead. Nurin put down the handset, and said, “Have the Hawker ready in twenty minutes, fueled for Central Europe. I want a car now — and tell Veron to meet me at the airport!”

As he hurried toward the exit Nurin considered the two calls. They were completely unrelated, but like the good spymaster he was, he immediately began incubating ways to join them in his favor. As Nurin trod down the central hallway, however, his clever schemes went adrift. The map of Iran fixed in his mind, and his calculating nature succumbed to a rare turn of reflection as he wondered, Where do we find such men?