The Assassin

CHAPTER NINE

I left my car in the garage and walked to the castle. I was dressed in black trousers, a black pullover shirt, dark sneakers and a black sweater, and carried my gear in a navy blue knapsack slung over one shoulder. My hand-cannon was tucked in the small of my back and my cell phone was in my pocket, set to vibrate if anyone called. That “anyone” would, of course, only be Jake Grafton or a duty officer in London or Paris. Swine that I am, I hadn’t even given my mother this number.

As I saw it, my job was relatively straightforward. The admiral said he wanted Wolfgang Zetsche and Marisa Petrou alive in the morning. I had to get into the house and find those two people, then ensure no one with mayhem on his mind got to them during the hours of the night. On the other hand, if they had already ingested poison, there wasn’t much I could do about it except get them to a hospital quickly after they got sick but before they died. I decided I would worry about poison if and when. It wasn’t dark and stormy, but it was dark and gloomy and dripping that winter’s night. I was the only person on the street, which was probably a good thing — people have a nasty habit of calling the police when they see a man dressed all in black sneaking around outside in the middle of the night. Presumably Johnny Cash didn’t sneak.

My entrance to the castle had to be over the wall that separated the grounds from the road. The river was on the other three sides, and I wasn’t about to swim it.

At fifteen feet tall, it was a heck of a wall, constructed of fieldstone and, fortunately, not smooth. I scanned the trees and top of the wall as I walked along on the other side of the road. I didn’t see any security cameras. Which didn’t mean there weren’t any — only that I didn’t see them. Anyone with a lick of sense who planned to burgle the place would case the joint during the daytime; working for Jake Grafton, I didn’t have that luxury.

Two cars went by. I ducked out of view behind a tree one time, and into the entrance to a stairs that led to a house on a hill the other time. I walked the entire length of the wall, looking it over as carefully as I could.

I stood across the road in the entrance to another set of stairs that led up behind me and listened for traffic and voices. Nothing.

With the knapsack firmly in place on my shoulders, I took a deep breath, trotted across the pavement and free-climbed the wall. I learned this skill in high school when two friends and I took up rock climbing, kept it up through college and still liked to take climbing vacations whenever life allowed.

I crouched on top near a large tree limb that barely cleared the wall. Opened my backpack, got the infrared goggles on and scanned the grounds. Nothing in infrared, so I switched to ambient light. There were two cars parked in front of the place and another in front of a garage beside the house. Lots of large trees, a few shrubs and two flower beds. The windows of the building — from this angle it didn’t look as formidable as I first thought — were blank, with only one light showing in one window on the third floor. There were dormers on what appeared to be the fourth floor. Each corner of the building had a round, silo-like structure festooned with windows; presumably these round rooms were bedrooms. No crenelles or merlons. After I had examined the ground and house as well as I could from this angle, I switched to the trees. Security cameras and motion detectors would probably be mounted high. I didn’t see any.

I slithered down the limb until it reached the trunk of the tree, then dropped about two feet to the ground.

Knelt and looked some more. Listened. I could smell smoke. Someone had a fire going.

A vehicle — it sounded like a car — stopped on the other side of the wall and sat there with its engine running for about a minute, then drove on.

A sprint took me to a bush under one of those round turrets that decorated the corner of the building. I got busy with the goggles on the infrared setting, scanning the grounds, then the house. The nifty thing about the goggles was that they could detect heat sources through windows or normally insulated wooden walls. Unfortunately Herr Zetsche’s country home was constructed of stone, and a lot of it. The heat sources were too well masked for the goggles to find. Couldn’t even find the hot water tank or the fire in the fireplace. I did see a plume of heat emanating from one chimney.

I went around behind the building, trying to stay in the deep shadows under and behind the shrubbery. As I made this trip, rain began to fall. Not a night mist, but rain. The walls above me were wet and getting wetter. I had made it up the rough boundary wall, but free-climbing this cut limestone in the rain was a bit more than I thought I could handle. No sense in finding out how deep a crater I would make in Germany if I fell two or three stories.

The servant’s entrance was down five stairs and had a small projecting roof over it. I went to work with the picks I kept in a small folding wallet on my left hip. The door had two locks. After checking the door for alarms and not finding any, I opened the top lock first, then went to work on the bottom one.

The continuous gentle patter of raindrops on the little roof above my head was broken only by the faint, distant moan of a train whistle. Once, twice, three times it called, then fell silent. I fervently wished I were on it.

The telephone rang in Jake Grafton’s Paris apartment. Not the encrypted portable satellite telephone he carried with him everywhere, but the regular unsecure landline.

“Hello.”

“Admiral Grafton? How are you this evening?”

“I don’t know who you are. In five seconds I’m hanging up.” Grafton began counting silently.

At three, the man said, “Jerry Hay Smith.”

“How’d you get this telephone number, Mr. Smith?”

“If you’d been in the newspaper business as long as I have, Admiral, you’d have some sources, too. I called to find out what you know about Alexander Surkov and polonium 210. Not for publication, of course, but because I think I am entitled to know.”

“Buy a newspaper.”

“Admiral, I have read the wire service reports and everything the newspapers have chosen to publish.” Smith was confident, smooth, a man who just knew that everyone on the planet was dying to talk to him. “I’m also calling about another murder that hasn’t yet made the press here in the States, a Frenchman named Jean Petrou. His mother is a personal friend.”

“This is a ridiculous conversation,” Grafton said, tossing off the words. The thought that Jerry Hay Smith was probably recording said conversation crossed his mind. “Why would you think I know anything that isn’t in the press?”

“Because you’re a CIA officer. And because you are.. consulting, shall we say, with Mr. Winchester. Who murdered Jean Petrou?”

“You are misinformed, Mr. Smith. I know nothing about your matter.” Grafton put the telephone back onto its cradle.

Apparently Smith was working on his memoirs or his book. Or a column for tomorrow’s paper.

Grafton made a mental note: Jerry Hay Smith was going to be a problem.

Wolfgang Zetsche was in his late fifties, a brilliant, vigorous athletic man about five and a half feet tall, one with little patience for what he viewed as the lesser lights of the species. He listened to Marisa now with thinly disguised impatience, almost as if he were ready to interrupt to complete her sentences.

The room they were in was huge, a drawing room full of stuffed furniture and exhibits of artifacts and curiosities Zetsche had gathered on his many expeditions to far corners of the globe. He was currently between wives. The future Frau Zetsche number four sat in a chair near Isolde, her eyes fixed on Wolfgang.

Near the group was a television upon which the four of them had been watching the late evening news. Several minutes had been devoted to the murder of Jean Petrou, and several more to recent revelations in the still unsolved murder of Alexander Surkov. Now the audio was muted, although images of talking heads and policemen shimmered across the screen.

“Ha,” Zetsche said when Marisa paused for air, “you think an assassin could reach me here, in my own house?” He strode to a nearby desk and jerked open the right-hand drawer. From it he removed a pistol, a wicked black automatic. He pulled back the slide until he saw brass, then let it go home with a metallic thunk. He held it up where Marisa could clearly see it. “If those Islamic zealots want to come, let them come!”

He jammed the pistol into his pocket, then looked at Isolde, sitting in a nearby chair. “I am sorry for my manner, which is insensitive. I know you have come far in your hour of grief to warn me, but I need no warning. You have met the assistant butler and my personal chauffeur — they are trained bodyguards, expert in armed and unarmed combat. I will speak to them. The four of us are safer in this house with them than we would be alone in a bank vault. Trust me — it is true.”

Marisa glanced at the future frau to see how she was taking all this. Apparently she knew all about her fiance’s involvement in a conspiracy to rid the world of Islamic Nazis. The wonder was that Wolfgang Zetsche hadn’t been interviewed about it for a major newsmagazine.

It took me maybe three minutes to open both of the locks, three minutes listening to the wind in the treetops and water gurgling down an old downspout just a foot away from this entrance.. and glancing around occasionally to ensure I was still alone.

I pulled the door open and had started to step inside when I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. I was wearing the night vision goggles set on ambient light, so I turned my head and looked. The ambient light presentation is green, for technical reasons that are a bit beyond me, so I saw green trees and green rocks amid a green world. Nothing was moving now.

A flip of the switch and the goggles reset themselves to display infrared images. Not a single image of a warm-blooded creature did I see.

Well, something had moved and caught my eye.

Or perhaps it was my imagination, the way I was turning my head. The field of view in the goggles is limited, and usually the clarity of the images is some degree of fuzzy, so sometimes an overactive imagination can lead you to think you see things that aren’t really there.

I stepped through the door and closed it behind me. Turned both bolt handles to ensure it was again locked, then adjusted the goggles on my head and took a look around.

I was in a hallway with stone walls, part of the basement, and a wooden ceiling. I looked up … no people visible. I felt something under my feet — a mat. For wiping shoes. I put it to its designed use.

Moving forward, slowly and silently, I searched the basement. It seemed deserted. Quickly found the hot water tanks — there were three— and the hot water pipes leading away to faucets all over the building.

As soon as I was sure I was alone in the basement and had a general idea of where the doors were, I crept up the stairs. At the top of the stairs I had a good view through the walls, which were apparently made of some kind of thin, painted particleboard. I saw dim, ghostly figures moving some distance away, through several interior walls, it seemed. I also found the fire, which was in a room where there appeared to be four people — three sitting, one standing. Two more people were in what I thought might be the kitchen area — I could see a heat source that might be a coffeepot or teakettle — and one or two people were upstairs; no, make that three.

The nearby hallways being empty, I opened the door as quietly as I could and sneaked through. There were lights in the hallway, dim night-lights mounted halfway up the walls. I raised the goggles to my forehead. The ceiling was at least twelve feet above the floor, and dark chandeliers dangled every few yards.

I opened the door to the room adjacent to the room with the fireplace. As I walked in, the light coming through the doorway revealed a giant bear standing on his hind legs, every tooth bared, about to rip my head off with his paws.

I recoiled, then realized the bear was stuffed. A leopard gathered to leap stood on a table in one corner; deer, elk, caribou and antelope heads shared the walls with shelves full of books. There were four stuffed easy chairs, a bar and a table for playing cards. A gun cabinet filled with hunting rifles and shotguns stood between the two exterior windows.

I pulled the door closed and checked in infrared in all directions to ensure no one was marching for this room. Then I hunkered down beside a bookcase and put a stethoscope microphone against the door that separated the two rooms. Fortunately the four people on the other side of the door were making no move to come this way: With only the one wall and some books between us, I could see their figures fairly well.

The earpiece had about ten feet of cord. I unwound it and slipped the earpiece into my right ear. I heard voices from the next room.

“… the person who betrayed us. Obviously someone did. We must find that someone.” A man’s voice speaking accented English, the lingua franca of our age.

“It might have been Surkov,” a woman said tentatively. That accent sounded French. Was that Marisa?

“If he had been the one,” the man said positively, “they wouldn’t have murdered him. Why kill your source of secret information? Oh, no! I think the traitor is one of us. Or perhaps Grafton.”

Grafton?]ake Grafton? I thought that Grafton betraying the group, or any of them, was about as likely as me winning the Irish Sweepstakes, considering the fact that I had never bought a ticket.

I stood there amid the stuffed beasts in the Dead Zoo frozen into immobility, wondering what in the world these people were going to say next.

“This undertaking was always hazardous.” That was an older woman speaking, a French accent. I thought perhaps Isolde Petrou. “There are occasionally moments in history when a handful of determined people can make a difference. I do not know if this is one of those times, but I feel it is our moral duty to fight this great evil that is attacking the people of the earth. If they win, civilization will collapse and we will enter a new dark age. If we win, the adherents of Islam will eventually learn, as have the believers of all other faiths, how to live in a secular world, at peace with those who believe differently. The politicians wish to bury their heads in the sand, as usual. They will do nothing until the entire house is on fire. Huntington Winchester was absolutely right — it is the moral duty of those with the courage and means to grapple with this great evil.”

“I had thought,” the man said softly, so softly that I had to strain to hear, “that with the death of National Socialism in Germany, fascism was once and for all defeated. It wasn’t. The Islamic strain is even more virulent than the Italian and German varieties. My parents — you knew them, didn’t you, Madame Petrou?”

“I did.”

“They were Nazis in the thirties, rejoiced when Hitler took over, hated the Jews. Oh, yes, they admitted it later, when I was a boy. They were just children in the thirties, innocent, foolish and proud as all children are, but when they saw the devastation of Germany, when they realized that Hitler had murdered millions of people in concentration camps, then.. they lived with the guilt of their earlier approval all their lives. I saw that guilt. It haunted them. This stain was on Germany, on Germans, this foul, evil, bloody stain…”

He paused and, listening but not seeing, I thought maybe he was trying to regain his composure. “We are all committed,” the man said forcefully. “We are all convinced we are doing the right thing. But there is a traitor among us and we must ferret him out.”

“Or her.” That was a female voice I didn’t recognize. Perhaps the future ex — Mrs. Zetsche.

“I am ready for bed.” Marisa.

“Of course,” the man said. “My bodyguards will be in the hallway all night.” So the man was Zetsche. He apparently rang a bell. In less than a minute I heard and saw someone enter the room. “Werner will escort you to your rooms. We will discuss this matter tomorrow at breakfast. Gute Nacht.”

They rose from their chairs in the living room and made their way toward the hallway as I wrapped up my cord and stowed the stethoscope mike.

I was walking around that trophy room in high dudgeon, tired, wishing I could spend twelve hours in bed, silently cussing and revisiting my decision to stay married to the green paycheck, when I got a glimpse through one of the windows of a man walking across the lawn. Just a dark figure, striding purposely.

Now what?

I thought about calling Grafton and giving him a piece of my mind, then decided against it. I checked the pistol in my waistband.

I d feel a lot better about all of this if I got busy and shot somebody.