The Assassin

CHAPTER FIVE

Jake Grafton’s cell phone rang as he walked the two blocks from the Rosslyn subway stop to his condo. He checked the number, then answered it.

“Hello, Robin.”

“Good evening, Admiral.” Robin Cloyd was a data-mining expert who had been working for NSA. She had been temporarily transferred to the CIA and assigned as Jake’s office assistant. One of the many things she did for the admiral was hack her way around the Internet, which was, of course, illegal. Robin worried about that, but she did it anyway because Jake Grafton asked her to.

Robin was a technical genius, a tall, gawky young woman who lived in jeans and sweatshirts because the rooms where she spent her working life were filled with computers and heavily air-conditioned. She also wore glasses, large, thick ones, because she didn’t trust the doctors who did eye surgery. “After all,” she remarked to Jake when she interviewed for the job, “I only have two eyes, and why take a chance?” Why, indeed? Jake hired her on the spot. That was four months ago.

“I’m into three of their computers now,” Robin said, “Winchester, Smith, and Wolfgang Zetsche — so I see all the e-mails they send back and forth to each other. They’re using a fairly sophisticated encryption code, one that—“

“Right.”

“You don’t care about the code.”

“Not really.”

Robi n sighed audibly. Nontechnical people have no appreciation for logical beauty. “Anyway,” she said, “Jerry Hay Smith is the most interesting. He’s writing a book about the conspiracy and incorporating the unencrypted e-mails.”

Grafton snorted in derision. “How much has he written?”

“About forty thousand words.”

“Oh, Lord!”

“It’s interesting reading. I don’t think there’s much truth in it, but it is certainly exciting.”

“Send it along with all the e-mails and your analysis. I need some bedtime reading.”

“Yes, sir.”

When he got home, he found the morning paper on the kitchen counter, where his wife, Callie, had left it. He took it with him to the den and dropped into a chair. The trial of Sheikh Mahmoud al-Taji in London was the lead story on the front page. The British were trying to deport him for giving incendiary sermons in his London mosque about the duty of Muslims everywhere to serve Allah by battling infidels. His defense was that he was not a terrorist but was merely exercising his religious and free-speech rights. He had not, according to the press, actually advocated mayhem or murder. The British government argued that his speech went too far and was the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater. British Muslims were demonstrating outside the courthouse.

A verdict was expected in a few days, and if it went against the sheikh, his lawyer promised an appeal. “The government has the right to prosecute terrorists,” he said, “not legal immigrants commenting on the issues of the day, even if they use a pulpit to state their views.”

Grafton read the entire article, then leafed on through the newspaper.

After my conversation with Grafton, I rode the Washington subway— the Metro — back to my stop on the edge of Metropolis, where I parked my car every morning. I couldn’t stop thinking about Marisa Petrou and her father, Abu Qasim.

When Qasim and the head of the French intelligence agency, Henri Rodet, had plotted to murder the G-8 heads of government at the Palace of Versailles, Marisa Petrou had posed as Rodet’s mistress. She was nominally the daughter of one Georges Lamoureux, a high officer in the French diplomatic service. Grafton thought she was really the daughter of Abu Qasim and had been taken in, or adopted, by Lamoureux, a friend of Rodet’s, when she was ten. We didn’t have any proof of that, naturally, but when Grafton voiced an opinion it was usually a fact. He sometimes got these insights, and — but I digress.

One of our difficulties was that we didn’t know what Qasim really looked like. Sure, I had seen him a couple of times, and so had Grafton, while he was disguised as an old man. I even got a photo that the wizards at the FBI enhanced so we could see what he might look like without the makeup and wig. Wasn’t any help. Oh, we searched, followed every lead, rumor and lukewarm tip we could squeeze out of anyone, as did every other police and intelligence agency in the civilized world, but Qasim had disappeared as completely as if he had dissolved in the human solution.

One of the things Qasim did to hide Rodet’s role in the plot was stage a fake kidnapping and slice up Marisa’s face. I had seen her, unconscious, bleeding and tied to a chair, moments after he finished the job. She was a hell of a mess; it took a plastic surgeon a couple of months to put her back together again as best he could.

I know Grafton is Grafton and I’m just a grunt in the spy wars, but still … a father doing that to his daughter? What kind of animal was Abu Qasim? Or was Grafton wrong? Maybe she wasn’t his daughter but was a female holy warrior determined to get to Paradise on virtue, or fanaticism if virtue didn’t work.

The people on the subway, the pedestrians on the sidewalks — I watched them walk along, looked at their faces, wondering … Oh, we read about twisted, drugged-out freaks in the newspaper every so often, the refuse of humanity, who murder wife and kids for reasons that only the Devil could understand. But slice them up?

Maybe I have a low tolerance, but I can only visit a sewer for a few minutes before I need fresh air.To get some, on the way home I stopped by the lock shop I own with a guy named Willie Varner. Our ten-year-old van was parked out front and the light was on, so I unlocked the door and went in.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Back here.”

I went into the workshop in the rear of our space. Willie was a dapper black man twenty years my senior, slender and trim. What he didn’t know about locks wasn’t worth knowing.

“Wanta see something cool?” he asked as I examined the project he had on the bench. “This little thing will open any card-reader lock I’ve ever played with,” he said with a touch of pride in his voice. “Gonna call it the Varner mechanism and get me a patent.”

He demonstrated his creation on a hotel-room lock he had mounted on a board held by a vise. Normally this lock opened when a properly programmed plastic card was inserted in the reader slot. He inserted a card-sized probe that was wired up to a PalmPilot and stood watching. In about five seconds the green light on the lock came on and there was a click. Willie pulled the probe from the slot and turned the door handle, which opened. It was that easy.

“Whaddaya think of that?”

“I didn’t know you knew anything about computers.”

“Don’t.” He waved the PalmPilot. “I had a local lady geek program this for me.” I see.

“Gonna put her and my name on the patent app. Both of us gonna make some money outta this.”

He opened a small refrigerator that he had plugged in under the bench and pulled out two beers, one of which he passed to me. When he was seated and sipping, I said, “Willie, I wish you’d asked me about that thing before you started working on it. The agency’s got gizmos that do the same thing.”

He stared. “You’re jivin’ me, right?”

“Honest.”

He swore a little. Drank some beer and swore some more. After a while he smacked the workbench with the flat of his hand and said, “I knew it was too good to be true! Invent something, make some money.” Then he glowered at me. Sooner or later he’d decide his misfortune was my fault, and it turned out to be sooner. “You’re like a little black cloud, Carmellini. When the sun starts shinin’, you show up and rain on ever’thin’.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You come around a little more often, we could talk about stuff, partner to partner, but you’re off alla time sneakin’ into this or that, peepin’ through keyholes, spyin’ on folks who don’t want to be spied on. Someday somebody’s gonna stomp your sorry ass.”

On that happy note, I went home. I had ruined a friend’s day, and that was enough. Hi-de-ho.

The next morning at the office I asked for Marisa’s file. It was sorta thick. While I was there I also checked out her husband Jean Petrou’s file, which was not thick.

I took them to the cubbyhole the government euphemistically refers to as my office. With my door locked, I opened Marisa’s classified file and perused it. About half of the contents were newspaper clippings. It had grown some since I saw it last.

According to the file, Marisa was the daughter of Lamoureux and his second wife, a woman named Grisella. She attended private schools until college, dabbled a year or two at the Sorbonne and a couple of Ivy League joints in the States and married the son of a wealthy financier, Jean Petrou. They lived together a year or two, she split, did some more American college, never graduated, had a fling with a French heart surgeon and wound up as the mistress of Henri Rodet, the director of the French intelligence service. That’s where she came into my life.

Grafton insisted then that Marisa was a co-conspirator with Rodet and his buddy Abu Qasim. His assertion that she might be the natural daughter of Qasim, and Rodet had arranged for his good friend Lamoureux to adopt her when she was about ten years of age, was in the file. Our agents had checked the public records in Switzerland and France and had come up dry. Which only proved that if there had ever been adoption papers filed on the child, they weren’t in the records now. The French and Swiss police had also made inquiries, they said, and their negative reports were also in the pile.

Being smarter than the average bug, we wanted to interview the people who knew the truth about Marisa’s parentage, Georges Lamoureux and wife number two, Grisella. Unfortunately they were dead. Grisella succumbed to cancer in a Paris hospital five years ago, and Georges died in a single-car crash in the Swiss Alps a couple of months before the Paris G-8 summit.

I flipped through page after page of this stuff until I came to something interesting. After the flap in Paris, Marisa and Jean Petrou had buried the hatchet, patched up their differences while Marisa convalesced and once again taken up housekeeping as husband and wife. Then, a couple of months ago, Jean accepted a posting in the French diplomatic service. He was currently attached to the French embassy in London, but he also spent a lot of time in Paris at the ministry.

Apparently the French government wasn’t nursing any grudges against Marisa, or her hubby would never have gotten his political post. Of course, French politics being what it is, the French government had never officially admitted that there was ever a plot to assassinate the G-8 leaders, nor that the late Henri Rodet was anything other than a recently deceased civil servant who had done his bit for la belle France. Jean and Marisa were apparently aristocrats in good standing.

I was happy for them.

There was more info in the file, lots of details, addresses and so on. I took some notes.

Finally I closed the file and arranged it squarely on my desk and sat staring at it. I had a ruler in my desk, so I took it out and checked. The file was precisely one and three-eighths inches thick, counting the stiff folder that contained it.

I also measured Jean’s file. It held an inch less paper.

I opened the husband’s folder and began reading. There was a photo in there, a snapshot. No place or date. The guy was of average size and weight and looked smarmy. A fop, I decided.

The info in the file sorta went along with that assessment, making ol’ M. Petrou sound like your average rich young Frenchman. He was the only son of a seriously rich financier, so he had expectations. Private schools in his youth, a few regrettable incidents with young women, an expensive car wreck — a Ferrari, no less — flunked out of one school and was thrown out of another, some dabbling in recreational drugs. What else? Enjoyed pornography and erotic art. Collected some of both. Didn’t drink to excess and wore expensive suits and jewelry. He had worked in various capacities for his father’s banks before he entered the French foreign service, and apparently got a nice allowance, because he lived well above his salary. Had a mistress, whom he saw a lot when he was separated from Marisa. No info about whether he and the mistress still had a thing going since he had reconciled with his wife. His pop had died two years ago, and his mom was running the banks.

That raised my eyebrows. Most European aristocrats of old man Petrou’s generation married cute, curvy, clotheshorses from the right families who looked good at society parties, had their kids by them, then began a long series of dalliances with younger and younger mistresses. Maybe old Petrou had done that, but his wife, Isolde, was still a natural force. Someone had clipped an article about her and stuck it in the file: The banks were more profitable last year under Isolde’s stewardship than they were under her late husband’s. He’d be whirling in his grave if he knew.

All this dross was background, of course, to help intelligence evaluators weigh the worth of any tidbit an agent might glean from young M. Petrou at a cocktail party or other venue. He was not a regular intelligence source. Still, an agent had noted a comment of his about French foreign policy in Iraq made during a business luncheon in Paris six months ago. That tidbit was also in the file. It looked like a blog comment to me, but what do I know?

That was the crop. Ho hum. I took the files back to the library and headed for the Starbucks on the ground floor to get a cup of coffee. Ah, the fast, hot life of an international spy.

Of course, Marisa was in my future. I wondered if she had really taken up poisoning people, an ancient and dishonorable trade. Even if she hadn’t, she wasn’t ordinary, not by any stretch of the imagination. Amazingly, I was actually looking forward to seeing her again.

I took my cup of cappuccino into the cafeteria, where there were tables, and was sitting there musing about poison when Robin Cloyd, Grafton’s new assistant, came striding over and dropped into the chair across from me. She had coffee in her hand and a little cup of yogurt.

“Good morning, Tommy,” she said brightly. She had long hair that she wore frizzy, which hid most of her face. What you saw was the mountain of hair above the sweatshirt — today she was advertising New York University — and, peeking out of the hair, the big glasses, which magnified her green eyes. The glasses dwarfed her nose, which was working overtime holding those things up.

“That your breakfast?” I asked, glancing at the yogurt.

She flourished a plastic spoon. “Oh, yes. I’m so healthy that sometimes I can’t stand myself.”

“A common affliction among certain classes,” I replied politely. I slurped at my coffee, which was still warm.

“We haven’t really had a chance to get to know each other,” Robin said as she tore off the foil from her yogurt.

“Hmm.”

“Mr. Grafton said you’re single.”

“He did-“

“And unattached.”

I made a mental note to remind the admiral that loose lips sink ships.

“So am I,” she said brightly.

I said something polite and hit the road. Didn’t really want any more coffee, after all.

“Do you have any grandkids?” Sal Molina asked Jake Grafton. They were in the basement of Molina’s Bethesda home. Molina was sitting on the floor putting a tricycle together. Parts were strewn around, and he had the directions within easy reach. Grafton found a clean spot on the sofa and sat down.

“Not yet,” Grafton said. “Amy is still looking for Mr. Right.”

“That damn guy is hard to find,” Sal admitted. With his glasses in place, he glanced at the directions, then selected a washer and cotter pin from a small pile and began installing a rear wheel. “Talk to me,” he said. “Alexander Surkov.”

“Surkov was Oleg Tchernychenko’s chief lieutenant, and presumably Tchernychenko told him about the data-mining op we put in Tchernychenko’s company. Tchernychenko trusted him, and we needed a bag man, a man to carry money, around Europe and the Middle East to our soldiers. So through Tchernychenko, we used Surkov. I thought he would be better than an American at delivering the money.”

“But you didn’t trust him?”

“He was in a position to betray my people.”

“What do you think? Did he sell us out?”

Grafton took his time with that question. “Surkov was living very well in the U.K., even for an expatriate with serious connections, making serious money. It’s possible he was selling information to anyone with cash to buy.”

“To al-Qaeda? Abu Qasim?”

“Perhaps. Or he may have sold information about Tchernychenko’s business to one of his boss’ competitors. Or to the Russian government. In any event, he deposited a hundred and fifty thousand pounds in his London bank three weeks ago, a check drawn on the account of a shell corporation based in the Seychelles. The check was good.”

“How likely is it that the Russians poisoned him?”

“The two men who ate dinner with him are the most probable villains, but one wonders if the orders really came from Moscow.” Grafton told Molina about his meeting with Janos Ilin as Sal finished with one of the tricycle’s rear wheels and began on the second one.

“The amazing thing,” Grafton concluded, “is that I had a man watching Surkov when he was poisoned. That is, assuming the British police’s theory that he was poisoned at the restaurant holds up.”

“You had a tail on Surkov?”

“We couldn’t watch him around the clock — we don’t have the resources — so we were doing the best we could with what we had. We monitored his landline and cell phone. Tommy Carmellini bugged his apartment and his car. Tommy was also keeping a discreet eye on who he met.”

“Why?”

“We lost two men last month. One of them and his girlfriend were tortured, then murdered. They took down Abdul-Zahra Mohammed, who had been running a money-laundering operation through a Russian company Tchernychenko has a finger in. The al-Qaeda guys aren’t stupid. Sooner or later they are going to investigate that connection, and Surkov, the greedy hustler, would be a logical place to start.”

Sal Molina shook his head and tossed the pliers into the toolbox. “Jake, this takes the cake. If Ilin learns that one of your men saw Surkov eat it, he’s going to smell a dead rat and get curious.”

Grafton was undaunted. “Oh, I suspect he already knows.”

“Did he mention it?”

“Oh, no. Yet look at it — Surkov is murdered in London and isn’t even in the ground before we have a senior Russian intelligence officer looking up a senior American intelligence officer to pass on a back-channel message. ‘We didn’t do it,’ they say.” Grafton threw up a hand. “There are U.S. ambassadors all over the globe, the Russians could have made a beeline for the State Department, the Kremlin could have called our president on the hotline. Why me?”

“I’m with you,” Molina muttered.

“Ilin must know that a man who normally works for Jake Grafton was present when Surkov went down. He then assumed that the CIA is or was interested in Surkov. So I took Tommy Carmellini, the op who was watching Surkov the night he was poisoned, to meet Ilin, who looked him over and told him he had heard his name. That convinced me I was right. Guys that senior normally ignore the grunts.”

“If the Russians didn’t kill him, who did?”

“That’s the problem — it could have been anyone. One of his dinner companions, someone in the kitchen or serving, Marisa Petrou — who may be Qasim’s daughter and was right there eating dinner — or anyone else in the restaurant. Carmellini was there observing, but he didn’t make a note every time someone passed that table. For heaven’s sake, they sat there on and off for almost three hours.”

Sal Molina finished the tricycle and levered himself off the floor. He sat down in a chair facing Grafton.

“Do I understand this correctly? You think it’s possible that Surkov sold out the Winchester group for money and someone killed him?”

“Yes.”

“One of the group, or the person he sold them to?”

Grafton shrugged.

“Proof?”

“I’m not in the proof business,” Grafton said testily.

“What does Winchester say about all this?”

“I’ll find out tomorrow. I’m seeing him then.”

“He may be having some serious second thoughts,” Sal Molina mused.

“Too late for that,” Grafton snapped. “I tried to tell him, and you, that once he was in, he was in until the crack of doom. As they say in Vegas, he and his friends are all in, with everything piled in the middle of the table.”

Molina rubbed his forehead. “Everything else going okay?”

“Jerry Hay Smith, the Mouth That Roared, is writing a book about the conspiracy.”

Molina closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he eyed Grafton. “Is it any good?”

“Fair. Not much dialogue and it’s short on action, but it has its moments.”

“Is the president in it?”

“Only by inference. Winchester has kept his mouth shut, which is a minor miracle.”

“I’m not going to ask how you got hold of it.”

“That’s good. You should take care of your blood pressure.”

“You in it?”

“Yep. I can’t decide if he thinks I’m the hero or the villain. Could go either way, I suppose.”

“He know you’re CIA?”

“Yes. I had to tell them.”

“Terrific.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Sheikh Mahmoud al-Taji, the London cleric — what do you know about him?”

“He’s a terrorist,” Jake Grafton said curtly.

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as you can be about these things. We have two informants in the mosque, and they tell us al-Taji is not only preaching, he is recruiting terrorists, using donations to help fund weapons acquisition and training, and meeting with various like-minded souls to discuss possible terror targets in Britain. Our spies don’t know what targets they’ve picked or how close they are to doing something. They’re not yet in the inner circle.”

“The British know this?”

“We’ve shared everything with them. The crown is prosecuting him because he’s a public nuisance and questions were asked in Parliament, but MI-5 isn’t sharing intelligence with the prosecutors. They couldn’t use any of it at his trial, of course, without betraying our people inside the mosque. They’d be dead within an hour.”

“Why not pull these people out first, then put the sheikh away in a drafty old English prison?”

“I’ve talked to the head of clandestine ops about that, and he’s talked to Bill Wilkins. Ethnic Middle Easterners who speak the language, have the guts and smarts to go undercover and are loyal Americans to the core are hard to find. We hoped these guys would help us catch bigger fish. If we pull them out and then help convict the sheikh, they’re finished as undercover men. Even worse, it will be literally impossible to ever get another man into a London mosque.”

“Okay. What does your friend in London say about the Brits’ dilemma?”

“He says the government doesn’t want any more London subway attacks or anything along those lines. They want the sheikh out of the country or silenced.”

“Silenced how?”

“Not murdered. That would inflame British Muslims. My British friend is sort of hoping, off the record, of course, that the sheikh will have a fatal accident or die a natural-death.”

“A natural death would be best,” Sal Molina said, nodding.

Jake Grafton shrugged.

“Can we help with that?”

“Perhaps.”

Hunt Winchester and Simon Cairnes had lunch with Jake Grafton in the dining room of Winchester’s yacht club in Newport in front of a big picture window. Through the window the diners could see the bay and whitecaps marching in rows under puffy clouds. On the dock below the window, flags snapped in a nice chill breeze. The bay was empty of boats.

When Grafton suggested that they meet in a place where no one knew Winchester, the industrialist made a rude noise. “The yacht club, he said. “I’ll get us a private room. And Simon wants to talk to you. The room contained twenty tables, but Grafton, Winchester and Cairnes were the only diners today.

“I feel like a fool sneaking around some dump bar or coffee shop, hoping no one will recognize me,” Winchester told Jake now after he took an experimental sip of white wine. “As if I were a criminal.” After a moment’s thought he added, quite unnecessarily, “I don’t like that feeling.”

Simon Cairnes shook the admiral’s hand, then seated himself.

Grafton also sipped wine. It was dry and cold. He glanced at the label on the bottle. French wine, of course. He carefully placed the glass on the table and watched the shadow and weak sunlight play upon the waters of the bay. In the yacht basin below the clubhouse — an old mansion with creaky wooden floors — the piers were empty. Off to the left, boats hauled out for the winter sat on blocks.

“There won’t be any other customers,” Winchester told them. “I reserved the whole restaurant.”

“Umm,” Jake Grafton said.

“So tell us, are you getting any useful information from our records?”

“Some,” Grafton said, nodding. “All we get are leads, which must be investigated. Right now we have about seventy-five people devoted to that effort. Our allies also have significant resources checking out the leads we have passed them. Every now and then we learn something we didn’t know.”

“That’s the way life is,” Cairnes muttered.

Winchester wanted more. “Have you or have you not found any of those bastards?”

“We have.”

Hunt Winchester smiled wanly and settled back in his chair. He removed an envelope from the inside pocket of his sports coat and placed it in front of the admiral. “There’s a hundred thousand in there. For services rendered to date. I know you work for the government and don’t want money, but we want you to have it.”

Grafton picked up the envelope, took the cash out and divided it into two stacks. He put a stack in each of his side pockets. He found a pen in a shirt pocket and wrote on the envelope, Received $100,000 for consulting services. He signed it and put the date under his name, then passed it across to Winchester.

“A signed receipt?”

“You can tear it up if you wish.”

Winchester folded, then pocketed the envelope.

A waiter brought menus. The admiral didn’t pick his up. He sipped wine, idly watched Winchester and Cairnes examine the menu and looked out the window.

When Winchester lowered the menu, he said, “I assume you want to talk about Surkov.”

Grafton nodded.

“I’ve been watching the news,” Winchester continued. “Hell of a note! Tchernychenko knew the guy, trusted him.” Winchester shook his head. “And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why anyone would use a radioactive isotope to murder someone.”

“A bullet would have been just as fatal,” Grafton mused. “Arsenic just as deadly. They chose polonium to send a message, Mr. Winchester.”

“To whom?”

“To you, of course. To you and Tchernychenko and Mr. Cairnes and your other friends.”

Winchester’s eyes widened. He searched Grafton’s face. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Last month two of our men were killed. I told you about them. Ricky Stroud was killed shortly after assassinating Abdul-Zahra Mohammed in North Africa. Nate Allen was tortured and murdered in Rome, shortly after he returned from North Africa. His girlfriend was also tortured and murdered.”

Winchester nodded. Cairnes didn’t turn a hair. He was watching Grafton with narrowed eyes.

“Nate may have talked.” Grafton took a deep breath. “Probably did. Probably told them everything he knew so they would stop torturing his girl and end it sooner. If I had been Nate, I would have talked.”

The admiral finished his wine and poured another glass from the bottle. “Al-Qaeda must know those men were working for me. They’ll be looking for a leak. And if they think of Tchernychenko’s company, they’ll come looking there.”

The waiter entered the room and walked over to the table by the window for their order. Winchester picked up the menu again and stared at it. Cairnes ordered by saying, “My usual.”

“A chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast for me,” Jake Grafton said. “Put some mustard on it.”

“Yes, sir.” The clouds were momentarily gone, and outside the sun drenched everything with a cold, clear light, making the colors extraordinarily vivid.

Winchester finally ordered a salad. “And a double bourbon on the rocks.”

When they were again alone, Winchester asked, “Did Surkov betray us:

Grafton told him about the check from the Seychelles corporation.

“You’ve got your fingers in a lot of pies, don’t you?” Simon Cairnes said, eyeing the admiral askance.

“So if Surkov betrayed us to al-Qaeda, why did they kill him?” Winchester asked.

“To send you a message. Have you received it?”

When Winchester didn’t reply, Jake turned his gaze to Simon Cairnes. “How about you, Mr. Cairnes?”

“I got the message from those Islamic Nazis years ago,” Cairnes said, his face coming alive. “They want everyone on earth who doesn’t worship God as they do dead and in hell. They’re perfectly willing to do the killing. When the slaughter is over, they intend to rule the dungheap. Now that’s the message, by God. The question is, When are the damn fools in Washington going to get it?”

“When the American people get it, and not before,” Grafton replied. “That’s the way things work in a democracy.”

“You’re probably right,” Cairnes said softly, “but still…” He paused to gather his thoughts. “When I was a boy, a teenager, I lied my way into the United States Army. Completed training and wound up in a replacement pool in France in January 1945. That spring I was seventeen years of age, just a pimple-faced kid, when I walked into the concentration camp at Dachau. Saw the people starved, saw the ovens, saw the ashes, tried to get food and water down people and had them die in my arms. Our captain had us round up the local German civilians and march them through the camp, made the bastards look.

‘Now the Arabs say the Holocaust didn’t happen. The reason they say that is because they’re fascists, Islamic Nazis, and like the German Nazis, they plan on killing everyone on earth who doesn’t agree with their religious dictates. Do you hear me? They plan on murder on a scale Hitler couldn’t even conceive of.”

“Is that why you agreed to be a member of this group?” Grafton asked as he examined the moisture on the side of his wineglass.

“I’m an old man, Grafton. Lived a long time and seen a lot of things.

There’s not much the government or the courts or anybody else can do to me now that is going to cause me much grief. Lawyers can keep me out of jail — I can hire an army of them. I’ve made a huge shit-pot full of money, more money than I ever dreamed of, because I read the newspapers and talked to people and I could see how the future was going to go. I invested in the trends that I saw. I’ve been terrifically right a lot more times than I’ve been wrong, and I’ve made more money than a hundred men could spend in their lifetimes. For the last ten years I’ve been chairman of a bank — but you know all that.

Now let me predict the future. The civilized world is headed for a major war with fundamental Islam. Our enemies think America and its European allies are weak, ineffectual, no match for committed holy warriors ready to fight God’s battles and die doing it. So they are going to push and murder and chip away at the West until the only thing it can do is fight or die. And it will fight — you and I know that, even if the fundamentalists don’t. We’ll fight and we’ll win, of course, yet a great many people will die. Organized religion as we know it will be one of the casualties, which will be a tragedy. A great many enormous crimes have been committed in the name of God, yet in the main, through the centuries religion has been a civilizing influence, a force for good in countless lives.”

Cairnes tapped his glass on the table. “If we can prevent that war from happening, Mr. Grafton, we can save this world that you and I have lived our lives in. We can save Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam and all the rest. We can save this civilization based on religious principles. That, I think, is a goal worthy of all that we are, all that we have, all that we can do during our lifetimes.”

“And you, Mr. Winchester?” Grafton said. “I know about your son. Is revenge the goad that drives you?”

Winchester looked belligerent. “I want some of it, yes. But I agree with Simon — these bastards have got to be fought, and the longer we wait to fight, the worse it is going to be. Everything we do—“

Cairnes butted right in. “Hunt is a fallen-away Catholic. He doesnt give a damn about religion. They can put all the Bibles and hymnals and theology books in one big pile and burn them for all he cares.”

“You know that isn’t true, Simon,” Winchester protested heatedly. “Just because I don’t go to church anymore doesn’t mean that I am ready to dump on anyone else’s religious beliefs.”

The waiter entered the room with the lunches on a tray. After they all were served and the waiter had left, Cairnes looked at Grafton and rumbled, “Maybe you’d better tell us the real reason that you’re in this.”

“In my spare time I work for the government, as you know. That is a job I also know how to do.”

“Your bosses, they know about us?” Cairnes gestured vaguely at Winchester and himself.

“That’s really none of your business.”

“Maybe you’re with the CIA and maybe you’re not.”

“Think what you like.”

Cairnes stared at him from under shaggy brows. “I think you tell a lot of lies.”

“If I ever tell a lie, Mr. Cairnes, you’ll never catch me at it,” Grafton shot back.

“He came highly recommended,” Winchester said. “That’s good enough for me.”

“I’ll find out,” Cairnes vowed. “Before I’m through I’ll know more about you than your mother did.”

Jake Grafton got busy on his sandwich. When he finished, he told them he needed some money transferred and the names of two more data-miners he wanted them to hire.

That evening, when he got home to his flat in Rosslyn, Jake Grafton gave the cash he had received from Huntington Winchester to his wife. Tomorrow,” he said, “I want you to go to Navy Relief and give them this money as a donation. Every dollar. Get a signed receipt and don’t lose it.”

Callie Grafton looked at the stacks of bills, which were held together with rubber bands. “Selling drugs these days, are you?”

“It’s worse than that,” he said heavily. “This is the worse mess I’ve ever been in.”

“I doubt that.”

Jake Grafton made a noise, then started to say something. He changed his mind, went to the window and looked out. The lights of Washington were beginning to come on. Finally he wandered off toward the den.

“Jack Yocke returned your call,” she said loudly. “He’s in his office this evening.”

Callie began counting the hundred-dollar bills on the kitchen table. She had married her husband after the Vietnam War, when he was a Navy lieutenant flying A-6 Intruders. Since then she had watched him shoulder increasing responsibilities, and she had occasionally been a part of them. She trusted his judgment implicitly, and yet… all this money? What was he into this time? She was curious, but she would never ask. Jake would tell her what he could, when he could. Through the years she had learned to live with that. People come as packages, and she was wise enough to know that in Jake Grafton she had gotten a good, solid man.

In a few minutes her husband was back. She was still counting.

He watched for a moment. “The man who gave me that,” he said, “thinks money makes the world go around.”

“You didn’t have to take it,” she replied without looking up.

“Yes, I did. He did what he thought was right. Sometimes you have to let people do that.”

Ten minutes later Grafton called Jack Yocke, who was a columnist with the Washington Post. Jake had known him for years. At the start of their acquaintance, Yocke thought he was going to get information from Grafton, but finally gave up on that idea. These days the information only went one way — from him to Grafton.

After they had said their hellos, Grafton got around to the reason he called. “What do you know about Jerry Hay Smith?”

“He’s not with the Post.”

“Umm.”

“Won a Pulitzer fifteen years ago.”

“Sixteen,” Grafton said.

“I stand corrected. His column used to be syndicated in eighty-nine newspapers, if my memory serves me correctly. Only fifty-some carry him now.”

“Fifty-two.”

“What don’t you know that you want to know?” Yocke said sharply.

“What do you think of his ethics?”

“Well, he has some, I suppose. A few, anyway, that he keeps in a closet somewhere and dusts off occasionally.”

“Has he ever gotten in trouble over stories?”

“Depends on what you mean by trouble. He tries desperately to get stories that other people don’t have — that’s one way you can get ahead in this business. Incidentally, that’s what I try to do. I don’t read his column on a regular basis, so I don’t know what pies he has his fingers in, but yes, he’s had a reputation for years of crossing the line to get a scoop. A couple of times he’s been accused of playing fast and loose with the truth.”

“He had any big stories lately?”

“Not that I can recall. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. Thanks for your help.”

“By the way, what are you doing for amusement these days?”

“This and that. Why don’t you come over for dinner some evening?”

“Okay.”

“Callie will call you when the schedule fits.”

“I’ll bring a date.”

“Thanks, Jack.”

London was enjoying a wet, cold, miserable winter. The English find this sort of thing invigorating, or pretend to, anyway. I reminded myself that the concept of central heating came late to this little isle.

After a flight across the pond, which took all night and left me bleary-eyed and feeling hungover, I went directly to the CIA’s office in Kensington. There I met the two guys Grafton wanted me to work with, Speedo Harris, an MI-6 op, and Nguyen Diem, an FBI special agent.

Harris was clean-cut, modestly athletic and meticulously groomed. He looked like Central Casting’s version of a metrosexual. “Speedo?” I asked.

“School name, you know. It seems to have stuck. Bathing suit incident, of course.”

“I see. I turned to Diem, who was a darn big Vietnamese, almost y size. Goes to show what a high-protein diet will do. As we shook he said, “The Great Carmellini. I’ve heard about you.”

I found myself liking the guy. “Lots of wonderful things, I’ll bet.”

“Actually, no.”

“You got a cute nickname, too?”

“Per.”

“I would have never guessed.”

“Why’d they send you over here for this?” Diem asked.

“I’m tech support. Bugs and such.”

“The Company doesn’t put tech-support guys on ops.”

“Normally, no, but the boss, Admiral Grafton, knows me. I keep his BlackBerry humming.”

“And his cigarettes lit.”

I could see that Diem and I were going to be best buds. “Just keep your mouth shut and do as you’re told. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you?” I asked Harris. “Ops with the Yanks?”

“Short straw.”

“Did you bring the file on the Petrou family chateau?”

“As you requested,” Harris replied. Grafton told me to start with Marisa, and since Marisa hung out a lot at the chateau — and since I didn’t have any better ideas — I figured that was the place.

One of the places the news of Alexander Surkov’s spectacular murder came ashore was the Petrou chateau outside of Paris. Isolde Petrou read about the latest developments in Le Monde as she ate her breakfast at her desk in her bedroom after working out in her private gymnasium. Breakfast was unsweetened tea, dry wheat toast and yogurt.

When she was dressed and ready for the office, she found her daughter-in-law, Marisa, reading the newspaper at the desk in her bedroom. She had come in, apparently, while Isolde was in the bathroom.

“The police have found radioactivity in various places from Moscow to London,” Isolde Petrou said. “Do you still think the Russians are innocent?”

“There is no such thing as an innocent Russian,” Marisa shot back, “but the Russians didn’t kill Surkov. You know it and I know it.”

Isolde stood before the mirror as she donned her earrings. “He must have known everything — the names of the seven, the amounts we are contributing, the source of our intelligence, who Grafton’s soldiers are__everything. He knew even more than you know.”

Marisa folded the paper and placed it squarely on the desk. She looked at her mother-in-law’s image in the mirror and said, “You are in danger of your life. You all are. If he got to Surkov, he knows, and if he knows, you and your friends are in mortal danger.”

“How did he find out?”

Marisa drew a deep breath. “I will not insult your intelligence. You are in an illegal, criminal conspiracy to make war on al-Qaeda. Your own government would prosecute you if they knew. While the conspiracy may be small, the number of people necessary to carry your war to the enemy grows with every passing day. But I’m telling you nothing new — you know all this.”

Isolde Petrou turned to face her daughter-in-law. “So who betrayed us?”

“We’ll probably never know.”

Isolde seated herself beside Marisa and searched her face. Marisa met her gaze. From this distance she could see the hairline scars under Marisa’s makeup that the plastic surgeon had been unable to eradicate. “Why did you marry Jean?”

Marisa grimaced. “He was the only man who asked.”

“You could have done much better.”

Marisa said nothing to that. After all, Jean was Isolde’s son. He was what he was and words wouldn’t change it. “What should we do?”

“You and the other six? Or you and me?”

“All of us.”

“Kill him before he kills you.” When Isolde left the room, Marisa sat thinking about the dinner at which Surkov was poisoned. It was Jean who suggested they go to dinner that evening at that restaurant in Mayfair. When she saw Surkov, whom she wasn’t supposed to know, she started to walk right by his table. It was Jean who recognized him, who stopped and chatted briefly with the three men as she stood there smiling and nodding, trying to pretend they all were strangers.

What was on that table? She racked her brain, trying to remember, we had stood there looking at the faces and … Had the drinks been served? Certainly there were glasses of water in front of everyone. An appetizer?

Could Jean have dusted polonium on Surkov’s water glass or cocktail?

If he did, why would he do it?

Even as she asked herself the question, she realized that she knew the answer. What if her husband, Jean, not Surkov, betrayed the members of the Winchester conspiracy to Abu Qasim? He knew his mother was involved. Qasim knew about Jean, of course. Perhaps they had a way of contacting each other.

She and Jean both knew Surkov, had met him before on one or two occasions. Was it she or Jean who said, “Oh, there’s Surkov”? Perhaps she had. She tried to remember exactly what was said when they paused at Surkov’s table to chat. Had the two men made eye contact, or did they avoid it?

If Jean did it, where did he get the polonium?

From Abu Qasim, of course!

If he did it, which seemed unlikely. Yet even if he didn’t poison Surkov’s water, why did he suggest that particular restaurant for dinner?

The whole thing had Abu Qasim’s fingerprints all over it.

Very neat, you must admit.

She hadn’t an iota of proof. Yet.

Her husband was in Paris this morning at the ministry, so she went to his bedroom. The maids were finished. She locked the door and began searching.