Assassin's Game Read online

  Christine whipped around and slammed straight into a waiter, his tray clattering to the ground in an explosion of food and china and cutlery. If the men on the street had lost track of her in the confusion of the firefight, that advantage was gone. Sure enough, she spotted the heavy man who’d been standing by the car. He was running across the street and pointing a finger at her.

  She shoved past a frantic chef into the hallway. Then, just as Bloch had said, she saw the door at the end. Christine picked up speed and burst through without slowing. She pitched into an alley and immediately tripped over a box of kitchen garbage, sprawling to the ground and taking a mouthful of asphalt. But when she looked up it was right in front of her—a blue car. She scrambled to her feet and reached it in seconds. The door was unlocked and she clambered in. Amazingly, the key was still in her fist, clutched like a token of salvation. Christine shoved it in the ignition.

  The key didn’t fit.

  FOUR

  Christine slammed the key with the palm of her hand. It sank awkwardly and jammed in the lock.

  “God, no! No, no, no!”

  She looked over her shoulder. No one yet. Christine kept trying, but the key wouldn’t turn. Frantically, she checked the gearshift. Already in park. Her foot was on the brake. What else? The steering lock. So many damned safety mechanisms. She twisted the wheel and turned the key simultaneously. Still jammed.

  A clatter from behind.

  She turned and saw the big man, his eyes sweeping the alley, gun drawn. She slid down in the seat, and that was when she recognized the problem—the emblem on the steering wheel. Ford. Christine smacked the seat, remembering what Bloch had said. In the alley, turn left. She had fallen, looked up, and seen a blue car. But she’d gone the wrong way. Peering between the headrests, she saw the man walking guardedly in the other direction. Eyes moving, gun level. A hundred feet beyond was a second blue car, a Saab whose key was wedged in the ignition in front of her. Christine reached up and tried to pull the key, but it was hopelessly stuck. There was no time to deal with it. The man would soon reverse and come her way, or possibly his partner would take this side of the alley. She had to move.

  Christine slid to the passenger side of the Ford, which was better shielded from where the man stood. She checked again and saw her pursuer at the far end of the alley peering into the Saab. In front of her, the side street was only twenty feet away. It seemed like a mile, but if she could turn that corner without being seen, she’d be in the clear.

  She pulled the door handle like it was made of glass. The mechanism gave, barely audible, and she eased the door open. Crawling out, she stayed low, leaving the door ajar as a visual screen. She was two steps from the corner when she heard a shout.

  “Stop!”

  * * *

  Christine sprinted toward the waterfront, dodging bicycles and skirting bystanders who were gawking at the wrecked café behind her. The café where Anton Bloch was lying in a pool of blood. She looked back and saw the big man giving chase, negotiating cars as he crossed the street. One nearly hit him, horn blaring, and Dr. Christine Palmer, avowed healer, wished it had done so. She was moving fast now, not the sloppy gait of a frightened woman, but the driving stride of the hurdler she’d been in high school. Even so, the man was gaining. She didn’t see his partner, the driver. Had Bloch shot him? Christine decided it made no difference. One man with a gun was enough.

  Her feet pounded the path along the water’s edge. On her left was a busy street, the far side lined with hotels and shops. On her right was the harbor, tour boats tied along a short pier, a passenger ferry unloading. Her lungs were heaving. Christine was in good shape—she jogged fifteen miles a week. But running for your life was different.

  She heard the alternating wail of a siren in the distance. The police had to be speeding toward the café—but that was the one direction she couldn’t go. Nearing a congested crosswalk, Christine spun to avoid a collision with a woman on a bicycle. She’d just gotten back in stride when she saw something that brought her skidding to a stop. A hundred feet ahead—a car with its hood raised. A silver Audi. The second Mossad man was leaning into the engine compartment, but he was looking directly at her.

  For the first time Christine felt a moment of panic. These were professionals like David. The car was perfectly positioned, and since it was illegally parked on the shoulder, the driver had raised the hood to feign a mechanical issue. It would work for a minute, maybe two, and that was all they needed. Probably right out of the Mossad field agent handbook. The big man was fifty feet away, skirting the street. He’d slowed to a quick walk and was panting with the grace of a bull.

  Her head kept wheeling, left and right. No way out. They had the angles covered perfectly. All too late, Christine realized her mistake—by going to the waterfront she had boxed herself in, made their geometric problem that much easier. She could scream, call for help, but the police were busy elsewhere—shots fired, bodies in the street. And anyway, these two Mossad operatives would handle a hysterical woman as smoothly as they’d positioned their car on the curb with a raised hood.

  They closed in, but didn’t show their weapons. There was no need. The three of them knew, and that was all that mattered. Christine turned toward the harbor. The water looked cold and uninviting. Then, amid the street noise and bustle of the city, she distinguished a singular sound. A low rumble. She looked down the short pier where tour boats were moored and saw a different kind of boat pushing clear of the dock. Thirty feet long, it was blunt and businesslike, perhaps a harbor master’s utility vessel. The deck was crowded with cables and winches and fifty-five-gallon drums. She saw a crewman on deck stowing a line. There had to be another in the wheelhouse. Black smoke coughed from the stern.

  Christine broke into a sprint. She hit the wooden dock in stride and watched the boat accelerate, a cloud of diesel exhaust billowing in its wake. The deckhand disappeared into the cabin. Christine was twenty feet from the end of the dock. She kept running and didn’t look back—she knew the men were coming. The aft gunnel of the harbor boat was five feet from the dock and moving away. The engines rumbled higher as the skipper added power. Eight feet now? Ten? What did it matter?

  At full sprint, Christine focused completely on two things: the last plank on the dock, and the thick, greasy rail of the boat. She never hesitated, hitting the last board like a long jumper taking flight. She soared over the void with arms outstretched and slammed into the side of the boat. On impact she bounced away, and Christine clawed out for a handhold. Her right hand found something and she clamped down for all she was worth, fingers and nails biting into a coarse mesh. She was hanging over the side, hips and legs dragging through the icy harbor, upper body wrapped to the steel hull. Her hand began to slip, and she groped with the other until she felt a second handful of thick hemp. A docking line. Christine reasserted her grip, then pulled and kicked and twisted until she got a leg up. Finally, she pulled herself up over the rail and collapsed to a wet steel deck.

  Her ribs stung with pain. Doubled over, she stumbled amidships along the port side. There was no sign of the crew. The boat kept gaining speed, muscling through the water and building a stiff breeze over the deck. Christine collapsed, her back against the wheelhouse, and tried to catch her breath. Only then did she venture a look back. The two men were on the dock, talking and gesturing. One pulled out a phone. She closed her eyes and pushed back against the cabin, drawing her knees into her aching chest. Christine reached into her back pocket and pulled out her phone. It was soaking wet and the screen was cracked.

  “No!”

  Ignoring what Bloch had told her, she turned it on. Nothing happened—the shattered screen didn’t even flicker.

  Her spirits crumbled. “Oh, David,” she murmured breathlessly. “Now what do I do?”

  The two men on the pier were still watching, but getting smaller as the boat pulled away. Looking ahead, over the bowsprit of the boat and across the waterway, Christine saw a maze of city s
treets and seawalls. Beyond that, in the distance, the urban canals gave way to a more natural flow. Evergreen islands and winding channels. And just like that, the answer came.

  Exactly as David had said it would.

  FIVE

  Nineteen hours later, a Scandinavian Airlines A-340 touched down smoothly at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, the last act of a four-thousand-mile journey. The big jet taxied in, took its place at the terminal, and three hundred and twelve passengers began the customary odyssey, steering through jet bridges, corridors, and crowd-control stanchions toward the human repository marked ARRIVALS.

  Among them, fixed in the middle of the pack, was a tall and slightly disheveled man. He was tan and fit, but clearly fatigued. Wearing an untucked polo shirt and wrinkled cotton slacks, he had the look of a man returning from a well-spent vacation. His tousled, sun-bleached hair merged into the unshaven roughage of a few days’ beard. His casual shoes were untied, thin laces dragging across the polished stone floor. Everything in between these ends corresponded, weary and beaten, all easily attributable to a nine-hour red-eye flight. At a glance, he was a nondescript traveler among a sea of the same. Yet were anyone to look more closely—and no one did—certain marks might have distinguished him from the crowd. He moved quietly, with no wasted motion. He carried a bag in one hand, his left, yet there was no hint of awkwardness or imbalance. His stride was easy and controlled, even precise, and he neatly avoided contact with those around him, never bumping shoulders or locking glances. Most telling of all, his eyes were discreetly active.

  The queue came to a stop at the roadblock that was immigration, and David Slaton stood patiently behind fifty other souls in the NON-EU line. For the second time since landing he checked his phone. There was still nothing from Christine. He called up the message he’d received yesterday and stared at it: Help! Only one word, yet that very simplicity made it ring even louder. Since then, she had not answer his calls, nor had she sent any texts or emails. For what seemed the hundredth time, Slaton tried to imagine what had happened. Any number of dire scenarios came to mind, but they all distilled to one source—his former life with Mossad had come back with a vengeance.

  This was the day he’d hoped would never come. The contingency he had wanted to prepare for and Christine had wanted to deny. As he’d been doing all the way across an ocean, Slaton tried to shape his response. He was a product of training and methods that strove for predictability, because the predictable could be controlled. Yet for the first time ever, his attempts at thoughtful design seemed to drift. Unmoored by last words and gestures, things left unsaid. He had seen others wrestle such complications. A spotter on his sniper team with a sick child. A surveillance partner going through an ugly divorce. Personal issues always got in the way—that was a determination Slaton had long ago made. This time, however, it was different. This time it was happening to him.

  To have gotten this far was simple enough—it had been the only course. Get to Stockholm as quickly as possible. But now what? Unlike the old days, he could expect no help. Funding, intelligence briefings, embassy staff, diplomatic immunity. Those were the things Slaton had once taken for granted. The things that someone in an office, deep in Mossad’s engine room, had always made happen. Now, whatever he and Christine were facing, they were facing it alone.

  The line inched forward, branching into five smaller lines. As Slaton approached the podium he studied the immigration officer. She was middle-aged, attractive in a peroxide-over-tortoiseshell-glasses kind of way. There was no wedding ring on the well-manicured second finger of her left hand. Her uniform was crisp and neat, her physique trim. Perhaps a runner. He saw a faint tan line around her eyes, as if she’d recently spent time outside wearing sunglasses. If he were to venture a guess, a 10K race over the weekend. It struck Slaton then how long it had been since he’d appraised a person in such a way.

  He moved to the podium.

  “Passport,” she said, her words clipped and precise.

  He handed over the document and she swiped it into her machine. Her eyes lingered on a display that would be full of information on an American named Edmund Deadmarsh. Full legal name, place of birth, age, vital statistics. Might there also be a flag? Slaton wondered. To this point, he’d had no reception. No police, no Ministry of Justice, no Swedish Security Service. The longer it stayed that way, he decided, the better.

  She asked, “How long will you be staying, sir?”

  “Only a few days.”

  She handed his passport back and smiled, this time holding his gaze a bit longer than necessary. “Enjoy your stay in Sweden, Mr. Deadmarsh.”

  And that was the moment it struck Slaton.

  Yesterday he had gotten a desperate message from his wife, and in the intervening hours he had vacillated. Sensed tremors of conflict, even indecision. Yet right then, standing at an immigration counter, everything crystallized. There was now but one objective in his life—to find Christine and take her to safety. And if that required a complete reversion to what he had once been?

  So be it.

  The transition came with alarming ease. David Slaton had no interest in a casual flirtation with a nice-looking woman. Edmund Deadmarsh, on the other hand, seen at that moment as a rumpled but rather attractive traveler, could have only one response. He gave the woman his most engaging smile.

  “Thank you. I’m sure I will.”

  And with that, the kidon turned toward the exit and disappeared.

  * * *

  Slaton slipped into a taxi five minutes later.

  “Strand Hotel, please.”

  “Strand Hotel,” the driver repeated.

  The cabbie was a burly sort, a man in need of both a smile and a sharper razor. He made a stab at conversation in troubled English, the usual weather observations and have-you-been-here-before banter. By his accent, Slaton pegged him as Eastern European, Bulgarian perhaps. Slaton was minimally receptive, and the chatter soon ended.

  For most, a backseat ride in a cab is an idle affair. For an assassin it is something else. Of primary importance is position. Slaton sat where he could see the driver’s hands, wanting to know if they were on the wheel or elsewhere. The rearview mirror held greater nuance—he had to be able to see the driver’s eyes when it suited him, but fall out of the reciprocal view with a shift of his shoulders. He checked his line of sight to each sideview mirror, not to watch the following traffic—a discreet turn of the head was always better—but rather to monitor the blind spots along either rear quarter-panel, particularly when stopped. The cab’s physical security measures were standard issue. The doors were not the type to lock automatically—some did—and Slaton noted the positions of the mechanical latches. All the windows were presently raised, except for the driver’s. The man apparently did his best work with an elbow hanging over the rail. There was a Plexiglas bulkhead between the front and back seats with an opening too small for a man to pass through. Yet it did allow access. A strong arm. A hand to the wheel. That was all the control Slaton could assume in an emergency. On most days, details that amounted to nothing. But one day details that might matter very much.

  The ride took thirty minutes, and approaching downtown Slaton began to study his surroundings. How long since he’d been to Stockholm? Eight years? Ten? Things would have changed. Things like how you bought a bus ticket and which local football clubs were playing well. He supposed surveillance cameras were everywhere now, watching businesses and municipal parking lots and traffic corridors. His Swedish would hold up, he was sure of that, but for the moment it was of little use. Edmund Deadmarsh, a man who lugged stone blocks across well-manicured Virginia lawns, ought not be fluent in six languages.

  The cab turned onto a busy thoroughfare. Slaton soon saw the harbor, and with another turn he spotted his objective in the distance. It stood wide and tall, like a granite throne at the water’s edge—the Strand Hotel. He settled back and sequenced his thoughts. Christine was here, somewhere, yet he had no more than a startin
g point. It struck him that he didn’t even know her room number. Again Slaton admonished himself. For a year he had relaxed, allowed his skills to tarnish. He had practiced recycling instead of marksmanship. Planned grocery lists instead of countersurveillance. Now Christine was suffering, and it was a direct result of his half-measures. A direct result of his carelessness.

  He would not be careless again.

  * * *

  Slaton was dropped at the hotel awning at 1:14 in the afternoon. He settled with the driver, then gave the bellman his bag and a ten-dollar bill, saying he’d be back shortly. The size of the gratuity was well considered. Enough to be remembered when he claimed his bag in an hour or two. Not enough to be remembered tomorrow.

  Slaton turned sharply away from the entrance and started up the street. He was already quite sure he was not being followed. In truth, he wished it were the case, because any tail would likely be a lead to Christine. He walked straight to Berzelii Park, at the head of the waterway, and turned right. He navigated a misaligned web of streets, making two brief stops, and paused to marvel at the nouveau architecture of the Royal Dramatic Theater. Changing course, he weaved westward until he came to the Kungsträdgården, and there he passed a statue of Charles XIII, the much maligned king of the early nineteenth century, before meandering the park’s well-manicured gardens with an approving eye. With one more left turn, at the Strömbron bridge, Slaton picked up his pace. He ended back at the Strand Hotel at 1:41, twenty-seven minutes after he’d started.

  Slaton considered the time well spent. He had located two separate curbs where cabs congregated, their drivers leaning on fenders and drawing down cigarettes. He’d purchased an unrestricted day pass for both the water taxi and subway, and was aware of seven access points for trolley and bus service. At a nearby parking garage he’d noted a valet stand where the keys to no fewer than fifty late-model vehicles resided on a pegboard. Irregular flows of traffic—points of congestion and one-way streets—were fixed in his mind, as were the two security guards with Steyr TMP machine pistols stationed obviously outside a bank on Stallgatan. Slaton knew that a mobile police station had been situated near the Kungsträdgården, and was staffed by two officers, both carrying SIG Sauer semiautomatics and spare magazines, who could reach the hotel in no less than four minutes on a dead run. He also knew that the hotel had one service entrance, six fire escapes, and an entire north-facing wing with unbarred windows at street level.