The Perfect Assassin

Chapter Twelve

Christine guided the small Ford through Dorset countryside as they made their way back to the region where the odyssey had begun, the rural Celtic counties of the southwest coast. They had abandoned the rented Peugeot in Southampton, leaving it a few blocks from The Excelsior in a crowded lot. How David had acquired this car was a mystery to Christine. It seemed mechanically sound, but was frightful to look at. Probably twenty years old, it seemed held together by an amalgam of rust and putty. The back window was plastered over with stickers, supporting the likes of the Green Party and a musical group called Throbbing Gristle. The odometer had simply stopped working at 217,768 and both rear fenders displayed damage from what looked like two separate incidents, although Slaton had assured Christine that all required lights and vital moving parts were functional. She guessed that he’d stolen the car, hoping no one would miss it, or perhaps figuring the owner was likely a budding criminal or an anarchist, the type of person who would avoid any intentional contact with the police.

David was asleep in the passenger seat. Christine had offered to drive, knowing there was no way she’d be able to get any rest. The image of two masked men and the flashes of their weapons kept flooding her thoughts. Once again her protector seemed to be a step ahead of these madmen, but how long could it last? She heard David rustle, as he’d done time and again over the last two hours. He wasn’t sleeping well, but Christine suspected it had nothing to do with what had gone on at The Excelsior. His eyes opened groggily.

“Where are we?” he asked, with a glance at his watch.

“Almost to Dorchester.”

He straightened up and stretched. “You made good time.”

“Feel any better after the rest?”

“Sure.”

Christine thought he still looked tired. In the days she’d been with him he’d never slept more than a few hours at a time. That wasn’t good. She’d worked enough twenty-four hour shifts in her residency to know that recurring lack of sleep could seriously cloud a person’s judgment.

“So where did you find this beauty?” she asked with a glance up at the ripped headliner. “Is it hot?”

He laughed, “You mean stolen? No, I bought her fair and square. Nine hundred pounds sterling.”

“The seller won. Who was he?”

“A young kid. Heroin addict, I think. Wanted to sell the car fast, probably for a quick fix. Once I offered cash, he signed it right over. I made a copy of the papers, then sent off the registration, but I neglected to sign at the bottom. Some clerk will see the mistake in a couple of days and send it back to an address that doesn’t exist. It will all take time, and for a few days we’ll have a beat-up car that’s been legitimately signed over to us.”

“Whose name is it in?”

“Yours.”

“Mine?” she exclaimed.

“Well, Carla Fluck’s.”

Christine smiled, and then from somewhere deep within a laugh emerged, followed by another and another. It was contagious and he succumbed until both were laughing uncontrollably. It felt good, and Christine realized that even through all their troubles, all the death and deception, there could still be laughter. There could still be life.

She sized him up.

“What?” he asked, clearly wondering what was on her mind.

“Oh, I’ve just never seen you laugh like that. I suppose I thought a person like you would always be … serious or something.”

“A person like me?” he said, his voice harsh. “A killer, you mean. That kind of person.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, yes, we’re serious. One has to be when all you do is go around killing people all day. But we do all the rest. We laugh, cry, feel pain, a whole spectrum of emotions.”

Christine fixed her gaze on the road ahead, not sure what to say. The ensuing silence was stifling.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“You don’t have to explain. I know how much pressure I feel like I’ve been under. I never stopped to think that you might—”

“Get ready to turn off!” he interrupted.

“What?” She noticed he was concentrating on the side mirror. Christine looked back and saw a pair of headlights in the distance behind them. A chill spiked down her back and her grip on the wheel tightened.

“Is someone following us?”

“Probably not.” The little Ford went around a curve and the head lights behind disappeared temporarily. “Turn! Turn there!” he said, pointing to a small gravel side road.

Christine braked quickly and swerved onto the road.

“Take it in another fifty feet, up next to those bushes. Kill the lights and put it in park.” Christine did as he instructed. “Make sure your foot’s off the brake pedal or else the brake lights will stay on.”

Christine moved her foot as far away as she could and they both sat in silence. A long ten seconds later the car whipped by behind them, showing no signs of slowing.

“Okay, turn us around and be ready to go.”

Christine extracted the car from the side road, did a three point turn, and backed into their hiding spot. They sat silently for nearly ten minutes, the little Ford’s feeble engine idling.

“All right,” he finally said, “we’re safe. Let’s press on.”

Christine let out a deep breath. “You haven’t told me where we’re going.”

“We’re going to put some distance between ourselves and The Excelsior. We still need to get lost for a day or two, and I think I know just the place.

Prime Minister Jacobs’ morning staff meeting ended at 10:00. He had tried to show interest in the daily crises briefed by his various Cabinet members and their underlings. More Katyusha rockets flinging in from the Lebanese border, a severe influenza outbreak in the primary schools, and the Americans again. This time their Senate had tied up an international aid bill, threatening the start of the new Hadera desalination project. In spite of his efforts, Jacobs’ distraction was evident to all. When the meeting finally dragged to a close, the staffers were asked to leave, while Cabinet Ministers remained. General Gabriel and Ehud Zak looked worried. Sonya Franks and Ariel Steiner eyed one another contemptuously.

Jacobs got things going. “What’s the latest, Anton?”

The creases in Bloch’s brow seemed to have attained a permanent etch. “We found the ELTs. But not Polaris Venture.”

“What does that mean?” Steiner pounced.

“The ELTs were exactly where we expected to find them. Only they weren’t in the wrecked hull of a ship. They were simply lying next to each other on the ocean floor.”

It was a result no one had predicted, and silence prevailed as the group digested the information.

General Gabriel said, “So the ship might have been hijacked, and whoever did it threw these things into the ocean to throw us off?”

“Maybe,” Bloch said. “All we can say for sure is that somebody’s trying to confuse us. The question is, why?”

Jacobs forced hope into his voice, “Polaris Venture is a big ship, Anton. Surely if she’s still sailing around somebody will spot her soon.”

“Yes, I’ve already sent out a message to watch for her. And our satellite people are going to give all the Arab ports a good look over the next few days.”

“A few days might be too late,” Steiner suggested.

Franks said, “I have to agree. Isn’t there something else we can do?”

Jacobs was stung by the rebuke from one of his closest allies. He sensed the political sands shifting.

“There’s more,” Bloch said. “I sent a flash message yesterday, about our London Chief of Station being killed in a gun battle.”

“I know Anton, I saw it. It’s an awful thing. We’ll do what we can to solve that when the time comes, but for now we have to concentrate on Polaris Venture.”

“This is about Polaris Venture. This morning I talked to London. It seems our people got a good look at the assailant.”

“You don’t mean —” General Gabriel started.

“I’m afraid so. It was David Slaton.”

Jacobs felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “God Almighty,” he said.

“What’s going on, Anton?” Zak demanded. “One of your people sabotages our most delicate operation in years, then runs off and starts killing his co-workers?”

Bloch said, “We don’t know that he was responsible for hijacking or sinking Polaris Venture. And we don’t know why he’s been on a tear through England.”

Zak showed a rare glimpse of impatience, “You can’t justify what he’s done now, Anton. This man is a menace.”

Franks said, “I agree. He’s turned against us, for whatever reason. We don’t know what happened to that ship, but we know he was involved somehow. And there seems to be no doubt he’s responsible for decimating our London station.”

The room fell quiet. Political allies exchanged knowing glances, adversaries glared at one another. All waited for Jacobs to speak.

The Prime Minister stared at the table in front of him. Bloch had explained the tragedy in Netanya. Had Slaton gone off the deep end? Jacobs decided it didn’t matter. Not now.

“Anton,” he said, “is there anything you can tell me in Slaton’s defense?”

Bloch’s pause was brief. “No.”

An ocean of grim faces descended on Jacobs.

“Then you know what has to be done.”

“I’ll issue the order,” Bloch said.

By noon, Nathan Chatham’s patience was running thin. He had spent the entire night in his office, and though he’d directed two cots to be set up in a side room, so far his own was unused. The room was abuzz with people scurrying in and out, most of them leaving a paper or two on Chatham’s desk. He quickly scanned each and directed it to one of two places — a growing manila folder on his desk, or the trash can on the floor next to it.

A man who Chatham didn’t even recognize came in carrying a heavy binder, at least 200 pages long. He handed it to the inspector with a kind of ceremonial reverence.

“What the devil is this?” Chatham demanded.

The owlish man peered through round eyeglasses and explained succinctly, “It’s your personal copy of the Commissioner’s new policymanual. It explains everything we all need to know. New information security procedures, parental leave, and a greatly expanded statement on sexual harassment that—”

“Balderdash!” Chatham bellowed. He got up, threw the brick of a manual straight into the trash can, then stomped on it for good measure. The clerk from the upper floor looked stunned.

“Out with you!” Chatham said, his voice booming. “Out!”

The bewildered clerk bid a hasty retreat and shot a look of warning to the next victim, who was now standing in the doorway. Ian Dark held back his snicker until the poor man was out of earshot.

“Sexual harassment indeed,” Chatham fussed. “More worried about being kind and gentle to one another than catching killers. That’s what’s wrong with this place nowadays.”

Dark’s tone was conciliatory, “You might have been a bit hard on him, sir. He’s a new lad on the upper floor.”

Chatham’s terseness eased and he began to fidget, putting his hands in his back pockets. “Yes,” he muttered, “perhaps. Well, we’ll make it right then, won’t we?”

“I’ll go up later and ask for a new manual, maybe have a word with the fellow.”

“Yes,” Chatham fudged, “that’s the ticket. So, what have you found?”

Dark held up a file and a videotape. “First of all, I just got off the phone with ballistics. From what they’ve seen so far, there were at least four shooters — three Israeli security men and the assailant. The Israelis surrendered their weapons for evidence. The attacker dropped one of his weapons on the way out.”

“One of them, you say? Good Lord, how many did he have?”

“The one he dropped was a Mauser, one round fired. Rough tests show it’s probably the one that killed Varkal. The rest of his work was with a 9mm, maybe a Berretta. We’ll have it all worked out soon. Are the Is-raelis cooperating?”

Chatham had spent a good part of his morning at the embassy. “Things are rather chaotic there, as you might expect. The media have made the connection between yesterday’s events and those in Penzance. There’s a phalanx of reporters standing watch outside the embassy. Unfortunately, the woman I eventually spoke with wasn’t giving anything up. In fact, she was downright evasive.”

“I imagine that’s how it will be until Tel Aviv decides otherwise.”

Chatham strolled to a tray of sandwiches that had been put on his desk sometime last night. Blindly grabbing a sample, he took a bite and his mouth puckered. “Ugh! Bloody awful!”

“I’ll send for something fresh.”

Chatham found a carafe of water and reconstituted his fouled palate. “And so,” he said, “the question then becomes, why? Is this fellow a threat to the Israelis? Has he done them harm? Does he know something important, perhaps embarrassing? Find the answer to that, then we’re on the way to his identity, and eventually his location.” Chatham paced the room, wringing his hands behind his back. “What about this American woman? Any sign of her yet?”

“No,” Dark responded, “she hasn’t been seen since he hauled her off two days ago. I shouldn’t give odds on her still being alive. Whoever this fellow is, he manages to leave a steady trail of bodies in his wake.”

“What have you found out about her?”

“Nothing extraordinary. She’s a doctor, well liked. No radical friends or fringe politics. Everything we’ve found points to a nice young woman caught up in bad circumstances. Maybe he took her from the motel as a hostage.”

“Kidnapped her? The same person in the wrong place, again?” Chatham stopped pacing, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his long nose.

“Bad luck, perhaps?” Dark offered weakly.

Chatham shrugged, “We’ll come back to it. What’s that?” he asked, gesturing to the videotape Dark held.

“Ah, a stroke of luck, or at least I thought it was. Remember yesterday, you told me to look into Yosef Meier’s death? Well, I found a jewelry shop about 100 feet away from the accident scene that had a security camera set up. It doesn’t show the actual point of the incident, but it gives a view out the front of the shop, toward the street. You can see the people on the sidewalk clearly. I went over it earlier, covered the ten minutes before and after the event.”

“And?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid.”

“Let’s have a look then.” Chatham eyed the seldom used TV and VCR that sat on a cart in the corner of his office. He dug around on his desk and found a remote control for the TV under some papers in the out box. He managed to turn the device on, but then quickly transformed the picture into a mesmerizing array of blue and green lines. Realizing this wasn’t right, he kept jabbing buttons, next commanding the set to auto-program ninety-nine channels of static.

“It’s the devil’s own work, it is,” Chatham grumbled. He handed the control over to his subordinate. “You wrestle the beastly thing.”

Ian Dark fixed the picture, then ejected a movie that had been left in the tape player. Chatham frowned when he saw it was a Swedish porn film. Someone had been using the equipment while they were out. Dark tucked it discreetly among a stack of Metropolitan Police training videos.

“The accident occurred at quarter past eleven in the morning,” Dark said, “but I’ll cue it to start ten minutes before. I did impound all the tapes for that day. The owner of the store keeps seven days of tapes on file. Apparently in the jewelry business it’s easy to overlook one or two small things that might be missing, something the smart thief knows. This fellow inventories once a week and keeps enough tapes on record to cover it.”

“Hmm, yes,” Chatham mumbled, concentrating on the video.

The image was black and white, but good quality, and the time and date in one corner made it easy to get to the right spot. People on the street were clearly visible, though not for long. Only those few who stopped to gawk in the store’s windows were captured for more than a few seconds. The tape ran to the time of the accident, which Dark noted, then continued. Roughly ninety seconds after the accident would have occurred, Chatham waved his hand.

“Stop! There—”

Dark paused the tape. On the screen were an elderly woman with a shopping bag, who held a vague resemblance to the Queen Mum, and a couple of teenagers wandering aimlessly.

“Inspector, the lads look harmless, and the little old woman—”

“No, not the people,” Chatham snapped impatiently. He waved his hand in circles. “Go back, back a few seconds.”

Dark obliged, rewinding frame by frame until Chatham stopped him.

“There it is!” Chatham got up and tapped on the glass screen. “This car!”

Dark studied the vehicle. “I can’t see the driver with that camera angle. The top half of the car is cut off. But one thing’s for sure, it’s a BMW. Do you think it could be the same one we found in Penzance? There’s a lot of those running around London, you know.”

“Not like this one,” Chatham said. “Look at the license plate.”

Dark squinted, “I can’t read the numbers, the angle is impossible. But it looks vaguely familiar. There’s something different in the border.”

“It’s a diplomatic plate,” Chatham said with certainty, “and I’d wager that if it’s not the same car, it’s at least drawn from the same motor pool.”

Dark strained to make sense of it, “You think the Israelis killed this Meier chap? Maybe the car was from another embassy. The Syrians, or someone like that.”

“Hmm,” Chatham murmured, lost in a multitude of his own thoughts. “What we have to do is send this down to our technical people. Perhaps they can make something out of that license plate. In any event, I’m more inclined to believe that Yosef Meier’s death was nothing near an accident.”

“I suspect you’re right,” Dark agreed. “There’s a lot of killing going on here, and possibly more to come. It’s frustrating that the Israelis must know something about it, but aren’t letting on.”

“Something?” He crossed to the window and stood with his hands on his hips. “They know all of it!” he growled. Chatham strode to the door and yanked his coat off the rack. “I’m going to have a word with Shearer.”

They arrived in the late afternoon. As a seasonal matter, the beach access road had been blocked off. Slaton got out and dragged a wooden barricade far enough aside for Christine to maneuver their ragged little car through the gap, then shoved it back into place. He didn’t bother to smooth over the tire ruts in the muddy gravel — there were already others, so they were clearly not the first to circumvent the barrier. But on this day, with a chilly breeze and low, heavy clouds that seemed to promise rain, they would likely be alone. A small car park just inside the entrance lay vacant, and likely had been for days. Even during peak season, the beaches along this stretch of the Devon coast were not among the most popular. They were remote, rocky, and the water was nearly a mile from parking at its closest point.

They drove slowly on a road that seemed to have no end, meandering deeper and deeper into a maze of sandy hills that were covered with outcroppings of coarse, tough vegetation. After ten minutes, Slaton announced his intention to find a place to park that would conceal the small car. There were plenty of hiding spots. Unfortunately, the same loose sand that created a warren of twenty-foot dunes also served to make the valleys impassable to lightweight, two-wheel-drive sedans.

It took twenty more minutes of weaving before Slaton found a spot he deemed useful. A turnabout was situated between two dunes, and farther back a thick, straw-like stand of grass gave some firmness to the ground. Slaton got out and studied the area. Content, he guided Christine to pull the Ford back behind a large hill and into a stretch of brambles. This time Slaton yanked off a few long strands of grass and used them to sweep clear the car’s tracks. He went back to the main road and stood with his arms crossed, evaluating how well they were concealed.

“That should work,” he decided. “We’ll sleep in the car tonight. By morning, I’ll have the next steps worked out.”

Christine looked at the surrounding dunes. They seemed desolate and barren, yet comforting. No people or cars to watch and worry about. Only sand, thicket, wind, and wide-open space. It was the safest she’d felt for a long time.

“Have you been here before?” she asked.

“Once or twice. During the summer it’s busy. But this time of year it might be a week before anyone wanders by.”

A gust of wind swept in and Christine felt a chill. She reached into the car, fished out a cable-knit sweater and put it on. Slaton began rummaging through two bags of provisions Christine had purchased earlier at a small village grocery.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“I suppose. How far away is the ocean?”

Slaton’s head was still buried in the back of the car. “Oh, maybe a mile.”

“Why don’t we take our dinner there. A walk would feel good after sitting for so long.”

Slaton lifted his head out of the car and looked at her, then shifted his gaze up to the solid gray sky that hovered threateningly overhead. He shrugged. “Okay. If you want.” He took a bag of groceries, then went to the driver’s seat and grabbed his jacket and the Beretta.

Christine tensed at the sight of the weapon. She watched as he started to wrap his jacket around the gun, no doubt to keep out any rain or sand. She remembered the first time she’d seen it — pointed at her in a Penzance hotel room, by a man who was now dead.

Though David didn’t seem to be watching her, he suddenly stopped what he was doing. He studied the gun obviously for a moment, then said, “Ach, no need to lug this thing along.” He put it back under the driver’s seat and locked the door, then opened the trunk and pulled out a stack of three heavy blankets, requisitioned from Humphrey Hall. “But we might need these.” Slaton closed the trunk and set off for the shoreline at a casual pace. When she didn’t fall in right behind, he turned.

She stood staring at him, an inescapably warm smile on her face.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, the smile still etched in place.

They followed a winding path between the dunes. The soft sand made progress slow, but neither was in a hurry.

“So what are your plans after you finish your residency?”

The question caught her by surprise. It was the kind of thing she used to give a lot of thought to. “I’d like to be a family practitioner, probably in a small town. A lot of my classmates are set on specializing — surgery, radiology, anesthesiology. They’ll say the pay is better or the hours more reasonable. When they finish school they’ll go to work in some big hospital, an assembly-line operation where they never even get to know their patients. That’s not being a doctor. Not in my book. And not in Upper’s.”

“Who?”

Christine laughed, “Dr. Upton N. Downey, my resident adviser and hero. He’s a Texas Type A. Constant slow motion. He’ll lope through the halls in his Tony Lama snakeskins and drawl non-stop to a half dozen fledgling residents. Winks at the kids, winks at the nurses, never misses a thought. Upper is a really smart man who’s proved to me that good medicine is part science, part art. The science for a good FP is knowing a little about all the specialties. And the art is in getting to know your patients and their families, getting them to trust you.”

“You’d be good at that. The trusting part.”

Christine smiled.

“So what was your favorite rotation? Isn’t that what they call them?”

“Yes. OB-GYN. I delivered a baby a few months ago. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever done. Have you ever seen a child born?”

He hesitated on the question, one that should have required no thought. “Once,” he said.

For the thousandth time Christine wondered what was going on in his head. They shuffled ahead silently and she hoped he would explain, that he’d lift the veil for once and show a part of himself. When nothing came, she decided not to push.

“This reminds me of a beach back home,” she said. “I used to go there when I was a girl. The dunes seem endless. Then, just when you think you’ll never reach the water, it appears out of nowhere.”

“Was this in Florida?”

“Yeah. Where I grew up.”

He nodded, “It’s good to have a place you can call home. Someday you’ll probably be taking your daughter to that same beach.”

She laughed, “I never thought about it, but I suppose you’re right. As long as someone doesn’t stack it with condominiums first.”

They crested a rise and suddenly the Atlantic was before them. The waters were dark, almost black in color, punctuated by white streaks of foam. Waves broke up and down the beach, producing a never-ending series of hollow thuds, weary travelers slamming down to announce their arrival, then churning and clawing the last few feet up to shore. They stood in silence, mesmerized by nature’s perpetual show.

“Every beach sounds a little different,” Christine said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Lots of variables. Sandbars, the steepness of the upslope just offshore. Then the bottom might be any combination of sand, rock, coral, or loose pebbles.”

“Now that’s one thing I’ve never tried to deduce scientifically.”

“But you are a scientist, Dr. Palmer.”

“Maybe, but some things are better left a mystery.”

He dropped their belongings to the sand and set out toward the waterline. Christine followed suit.

“It was part of some training I took many years ago, waterborne as-sault. The water might be an ocean, a lake, a swamp, or a ditch full of sewage. Whatever it was, you had to know the line where water met earth like the back of your hand. A moonless night or zero visibility in the water was no excuse. Use the compass and watch, feel your way if necessary.” His voice grew detached as he went on, “The water was your way in, your way to get close, the sanctuary you owned. But sooner or later the time would come to get out. And you’d better be in the right place. Not too far from your partner or too close to the guard shack where …” his voice trailed off. “Sorry, here you are trying to show some heartfelt appreciation of nature, and I give you a short course on covert amphibious assault techniques. You’re right. Some things are better left a mystery.”

She gave no reply.

“I guess I’ve learned a lot of peculiar things over the years.”

Christine remembered, “When I found you in the ocean there were shoe laces tied around the bottom of your pants legs. Was that one?”

“Yeah. It’s a cold-water survival trick, on the same concept as a wet suit. If you can’t keep cold water out, at least contain a narrow warm layer next to your skin. It buys a little time. I don’t remember where I picked that one up. Probably on a beach at three in the morning with some big guy behind me screaming it would save my life someday.” He stopped and shifted his gaze to sea. “Maybe it did.”

“Then I’m glad you learned it.” Christine watched for a reaction, but like always, there was none. He simply stood staring at the frigid ocean.

They sat down together facing the water. Neither spoke as the bitterly cold ocean rose and fell to meet the shore. An occasional cry from a seagull punctuated the surf’s rhythmic chaos. Evening was fast approaching and the overcast skies accelerated the loss of light. Christine looked to their right up the coastline. It was straight and featureless as far as she could see. In the other direction the beach made a gradual curve out to sea, then turned back in, disappearing from view four or five miles away. There, at the point, she could barely discern a pair of faint, yellow lights. The only other sign of civilization was an old fishing dory overturned on the beach behind them. It was parked above the high water line, probably for the season. The isolation seemed almost complete.

“It feels good to be out here, away from everything,” she said. “It’s as though I’m back on Windsom.”

“But you’re not alone here.”

“I don’t need to be alone to feel relaxed,” she paused and then added, “do you?” Christine suddenly realized the question might seem barbed. “I’m sorry,” she fumbled, “I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

He looked at her squarely, his eyes holding more feeling than she ever thought he might possess. But Christine couldn’t tell what that feeling was. His reply caught her completely offguard.

“I saw a child born once. My daughter. I was there in the delivery room, and you’re absolutely right — there were doctors, nurses, lots of blood. But all I can remember is the moment my tiny daughter came into the world. It has to be the most magnificent, awe-inspiring event on earth.”

Christine was stunned. She had weighed this complex man in so many ways, from so many angles, yet it had never crossed her mind that he might have a family.

“You have a daughter!” she exclaimed. “That’s wonderful!”

He turned back to the ocean and shook his head. “She’s dead.”

The weight of the earth came crashing down. Christine felt helpless as she grasped for something to say, something beyond the standard, pointless, “I’m so sorry.” Nothing came to mind.

He pulled out his wallet, delicately removed a photograph and handed it to her. The picture was of a small girl, probably two years old. She was laughing as a woman pushed her on a swing. The young woman had beautiful, dark features, and a vivacious sparkle in her eyes, a characteristic unmistakably reiterated in the little girl.

“She’s beautiful,” Christine said, trying to recover. “This is her mother?”

“My wife. She’s dead as well.”

“My God! What happened?”

“Katya, my wife, and little Elise were riding a bus home from the library and …” he struggled to find words and Christine noticed his hand digging into the beach, a fistful of sand squeezed remorselessly.

“Was there an accident?”

“No. It was no accident. It was three men with AK-47s and grenades. They got on the bus and wiped out twenty-two people, three of them children.” His hand kept clenching, faster and harder. His voice rose, “My daughter survived for a few hours. But I couldn’t get there in time to be with her. Do you know what a fragmentation grenade does to a two-year-old body, doctor? Do you?”

Slaton closed his eyes and Christine put her hand over his. She held it until the grasping stopped, then kept holding. Neither said a word.

Gradually, the light faded, and an occasional drop of rain gave promise of more to come. Neither seemed to care as they sat watching the open sea, both mesmerized by their own private thoughts.

It was Slaton who finally broke the silence. “You know, I thought about becoming a doctor myself. A long time ago, back when I was at university. There must be a tremendous sense of satisfaction, working to save lives.”

“You make it sound like we’re all saints. I know a lot of people who went to medical school just because they wanted to make good money, or satisfy their egos.”

“Maybe. But even those types can justify what they do. It’s a noble calling.”

Christine handed back the photograph and he slid it carefully into his wallet. She shivered as a gust of wind swept by.

“It’s getting cold.” he said.

“A little.”

“Let’s get a fire started, then we can eat.”

They both went foraging at the high tide line and easily scavenged enough driftwood and dry grass for a small fire. Slaton set up camp next to the old wooden dory, using it as a windbreak. The boat, about fifteen feet in length, had probably not been used since the summer. Only a few flakes of red bottom paint remained on its weather-beaten hull. Behind the boat was a rusty old fifty-five gallon drum. Slaton gave it a kick and the hollow rapport confirmed that it was empty. He started building a fire right next to the boat.

“The weather’s about to take a turn for the worse,” she said, pointing out at the water. The dark clouds that had hung over the sea now seemed to reach down and touch it. A heavy, moisture-laden blanket was enveloping the horizon to the east and north.

“I think you’re right.”

“I’d hate to head back to the car,” Christine lamented. “I like it here. The rest of the world seems so far away.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

A light drizzle started to fall. The fire caught and began to burn steadily, notwithstanding the occasional hiss of a raindrop. Slaton threw on a few more sticks and looked at the boat.

“I’ve got an idea.”

He went to the boat and lifted one side slightly to test its weight.

“What is it?”

He rolled the empty metal drum right up to the boat. “I’ll lift this side up, you roll the drum underneath.”

“All right.”

Slaton put both hands under the gunnel of the dory and heaved up with all his strength, raising it just far enough for Christine to maneuver the drum underneath. With the drum in place, he lowered the side of the boat to rest on it, creating a makeshift lean-to. He gave the arrangement a few shoves to ensure it was solid, then spread out a blanket under their newly formed shelter. Moving the rest of their belongings in, they found enough room to be able to sit up.

The wind calmed as the drizzle thickened to a steady, light rain. The fire was situated just outside their new shelter, its smoke drifting up and away, but the radiant warmth filling their refuge. Dinner was a loaf of French bread, tart cheese, and bottled water. They took the meager meal in silence, both enjoying the simple fare and, accordingly, the simple sound of raindrops tapping the thick wooden hull overhead. Afterwards, they watched as the fire’s flames danced and reflected obscurely off the rusted metal drum.

Christine spoke in a quiet voice, not wanting to interrupt the rain’s soothing echoes. “How long can we stay here, David?”

Their eyes met, and Christine noticed how completely he was looking at her. There was no caution, no glancing over her shoulder. The alertness that had always encompassed him was now completely gone.

“We can stay as long as we like.”

No other words were spoken. On their knees, they faced one another. She leaned forward and kissed him gently. She felt him tremble as she ran her hands up his arms to his shoulders. She slowly unbuttoned the front of his shirt, and with each unclasping he took a breath. When she finally removed his shirt and put her hands on his bare chest, he drew in a short, sharp gasp. It was as though he was being touched for the first time. Christine ran her hands along his naked back, feeling the hardness and the scars. Then she leaned back, unbuttoned her own shirt and pressed her naked chest to his. His hands began to respond, enveloping and stroking. Her own breathing quickened and they laid down.

The kidon’s hands trembled no more as he reveled in a glory he could scarcely remember.