Read Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel Online
Authors: Ward Larsen
Moses.
Twenty-six Geitawi Boulevard.
Slaton leaned back and sipped his coffee.
What to do about it?
He felt certain Ben-Meir was on his way to Lebanon. Astrid’s fate also remained heavy in his mind. She’d been a classic recruit—a scorned woman, financially needy, and with access to vital information. All the same, Slaton could never have kept his sanity over the years without clinging to one precept, a very private and firm ethical rule. Noncombatants were never to be targeted. They might be pressured or manipulated, but the killing was reserved for those who had earned it. He now held Ben-Meir in breach of that rule.
He was sure there were others involved, and they remained a threat: not only to him, but to Christine and his son. For the first time, however, Slaton had a vector, so there was no decision to be made. It was time to take the initiative. It was time to become the hunter.
He left the café and threaded south between the bars and brasseries of Schweizer Strasse, ducking his head against a sharp wind that scored through leafless trees. At the Südbahnhof tram stop he dropped the powered-up tablet computer in a deep puddle, cursed for the sake of anyone watching, and moments later sent it into a trash bin wrapped in a discarded newspaper. The capabilities of electronic surveillance were advancing every day, and he had no wish to be tracked again.
The question of where to go next was straightforward. He did not possess, and had no hope of obtaining, a Lebanese entry visa. He did, however, have the acquaintance of a most unprincipled Nicosian fisherman.
Jammer Davis arrived at Portland International Airport that same afternoon. He rented a car at the first counter he came to, Avis, which was probably the most expensive. Sorensen had promised to cover it, and time
was
of the essence.
Two hours later he was outside Bend, Oregon, winding through the forests of pine and fir that were endemic to the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, in an indirect way, it was those forests that brought him here. Because winter was at its peak, there were no trucks hauling loads of timber, yet the telltale signs of Oregon’s biggest industry were everywhere. Roadside diners with expansive dirt parking lots, tall garages to shelter heavy equipment, mills sided by wood-pulp mountains that were covered in snow. This was logging country.
Davis found his destination using the car’s GPS device, although it was hardly necessary. Bend Municipal Airport was very well marked. He could not have arrived by commercial air, the field having no passenger terminal, no parking lot, and not a single scheduled flight. Bend Municipal’s focus was support aviation, and like everything else here it centered on the timber industry.
Davis found a perimeter road—virtually all airports had them—and within five minutes he saw the building he wanted. Outside were five helicopters tied down for the season, distinctive skeletal frames that were among the most powerful vertical-lift aircraft on earth. They were used for two very distinct missions. The first involved hauling logs out of deep forest, places where roads and trucks were impractical. It was the second mission, however, that brought Davis here, in particular to a company called Pendleton Aviation.
He parked in front of the largest hangar on the airfield, and as he got out of his car Davis studied the place. The hangar door was cracked open and he saw an aircraft inside, something big and fixed-wing, with propellers and a red number 21 painted on the side. The runway was caked in snow and looked like it hadn’t been plowed all winter. Davis guessed it would stay that way until spring. There was no one in sight, but he did see a light burning in an office attached to the hangar.
He pushed open the door to find an empty reception desk, then heard a voice from a room behind. He kneed past a small swinging gate, and at the first doorway he saw a man with a phone shouldered to his ear. His heels were crossed on a cabinet, and he was gesticulating toward the rear wall. The desk behind him was piled high with paper and knickknacks, and there was a brass nameplate front and center: R
AYMOND
S
TEVENSON
, P
RESIDENT
.
“Excuse me,” Davis said.
The man turned around and held up a finger to suggest that Davis should wait. He did, very politely, and in the two minutes it took for the phone to find its cradle he studied the office. Nothing surprised him. There were photographs of aircraft, plastic models of aircraft, and three bookcases full of technical manuals on aircraft.
“Hi, I’m Ray Stevenson,” the man finally said.
“Jammer Davis.”
Davis shook hands with a midsized man, fiftyish, with open-air features and collar-length brown hair that had found its first gray highlights. He watched Stevenson pause to consider the name Jammer—everybody did—before asking, “What can I do for you?”
It was the obvious first question, and Davis had been contemplating his response since leaving Brazil. He could have told a version of the truth—that he was an accident investigator looking into the crash of an MD-10, an aircraft that had recently been modified in the hangar fifty feet away. But that would put the man on the defensive, and Davis didn’t have time for that.
“I’m here on behalf of an Australian concern. We’re studying the feasibility of modifying a large aircraft.”
“What kind of mod?”
Davis told him.
Stevenson beamed. “Absolutely. What kind of airframe are we talking about?”
“An MD-10,” Davis said. “I understand you’ve done one before.”
“Four years ago.”
Stevenson reached behind his desk for a scale model of an MD-10 painted with Pendleton Aviation’s logo. He handed it over, and Davis held it over his head like a kid with a new toy. He looked near the tail and saw the aircraft registration number hand-painted with pride—CB68H. He studied the underside and saw a modification along the belly where a pair of large doors had been mounted along the longitudinal axis. “Pretty impressive. I’ll bet it does the job.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”
Stevenson dug into his file cabinet and pulled out a sheet listing the technical specifications of the modified heavy jet. Davis gave it a cursory look, but he knew he had to get more before heading back to D.C.—he’d already booked a red-eye flight for tonight.
“It might be helpful to talk to the current owner. Can you tell me who operates her now?”
Stevenson hesitated, which told Davis he’d heard about the crash. When he did answer, it came in carefully measured words. “We did the modification for DGR Aviation—at the time they had a contract with the U.S. Department of the Interior. But things didn’t work out. After a couple of slow seasons, the jet was put in storage. Maybe a year later it was bought by a leasing company. I’m not sure what came of her after that.”
Davis doubted this last point, but he said nothing.
“Let me show you the video,” Stevenson offered.
Davis watched a two-minute marketing clip on Stevenson’s desktop computer. It
was
impressive. After that he spent twenty minutes asking logical questions, covering things like reliability and performance. Then he made his last request.
“This all sounds good. I think my principals might be interested. Do you by any chance have an extra copy of the technical manuals—in particular the modification specs? Our engineering staff would need to look those over.”
Davis felt like a modern-day Medusa as the man looking at him turned to stone. “What company did you say you were with?” Stevenson asked.
“I didn’t say.”
The mood in the room descended. Stevenson stood, which was a protest of sorts, but the effect probably wasn’t what he was after. Davis towered over most men, and in this particular case his physique, suited perfectly for rugby, only accentuated the disparity.
Stevenson said, “I don’t know who you are, maybe a lawyer or an insurance goon, but I think you should leave right now.”
“I’ll say it again,” Davis replied, as if not hearing Stevenson, “I’d
really
like to see the tech manuals for your modified MD-10.”
“Go to hell!”
Davis backed away one step, but he didn’t turn toward the door. During the two minutes Stevenson had been yakking on the phone, he’d spotted what he was after. Second bookcase on the right, third shelf:
MD-10 VLAT Aircraft Reference Manual, MD-10 VLAT Maintenance Procedures Manual.
Davis pulled them from the shelf, two manuals, each fully four inches thick.
Ray Stevenson, incandescent with rage, responded by opening a drawer on his desk. Davis knew what would be inside. It was Stevenson’s last mistake of the day.
Ten minutes later Davis was steering his Avis rental past the timber-railed airfield entrance, back to the main road with its opposing walls of hardwood forest. The shoulders were curbed with mountains of plowed snow, and as he backtracked his way to Portland International, Davis drove cautiously. The two thick manuals on the passenger seat would make for heavy reading later, particularly given the all-night nature of his flight. But Davis had what he’d come for.
By the time he got to D.C., eight hours from now, he would know exactly what they were up against.
* * *
Jack Kelly found Sorensen in the employee cafeteria.
“We’ve found another one,” he said.
She didn’t have to ask—he was referring to their Group of Seven. “Is this one alive, at least?” She’d meant it as a joke, but a solemn look came over Kelly’s face. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“Wangen, Switzerland, another gunfight. There was a second casualty as well, a woman who’s been identified as the executive assistant to the banker who was killed two days ago in Zurich—the Swiss police had been looking for her.”
Sorensen leaned back and put a hand to her forehead, the way people did when they needed an aspirin.
“The Swiss are all over this,” said Kelly. “The woman was killed by a sniper after getting out of a car. The driver got away by running down the shooter with the car and then executing him at close range.”
“And this driver?” she asked tentatively.
Kelly nodded. “A witness saw him ditching the car, and her description matched perfectly. It’s our man from Malta.”
She blew out a long breath. “That’s three down. But at least he can’t take credit for the death of the two pilots in Brazil.”
Kelly gave her a plaintive look.
She said what he was thinking. “Yeah, I know. The good news is … there’s only two more names left on the list.”
The quickest route from Frankfurt to Cyprus involved British Airways. Unfortunately for Slaton, the Sunday afternoon schedule forced him to first travel westbound to be subjected, for twelve hours, to the debatable charms of London’s Heathrow Airport before making his connecting flight. He arrived at Larnaca International Airport at three minutes before noon on Monday.
Slaton was dressed like the other tourists escaping an unusually harsh European winter—khaki slacks, loose cotton shirt, wraparound sunglasses—and he breezed through immigration before navigating the steel-and-glass arches of the new Larnaca terminal. He hired a cab into town, and the driver had little to say to yet another boorish visitor from the West who would gawk out the window and tip poorly. This was the standing relationship between Cypriots and Europeans, established some eight hundred years earlier when Richard the Lionhearted, cast into a fit of rage when a ship carrying his future bride had not been welcomed ashore, summarily sacked the island. Soon after, and with his point well made, Richard sold the island to the Knights Templar for a token sum of gold Byzantines.
Slaton kept the tradition alive, adding a lamentable tip to his fare when he was dropped along the palm-lined beaches of Foinikoudes. The beach was as ever, a copper-tan playground at the crest of high season, the attendant cafés and hotels riotously busy. Slaton moved cautiously amid the crowds, even though he was increasingly confident the killers of Zurich were no longer tracking him. And if the scope and intent of their operation remained a mystery, he was reasonably sure of one thing—Ben-Meir had gone to Beirut seeking an address in the northern suburbs. Seeking a man named Moses.
He turned toward the city, and two streets removed from the beach he found a secondhand clothing store where he bought what he needed and a canvas bag to carry it in, and took a smile from an old woman behind the cash drawer who didn’t care what he was buying or why he was buying it when a twenty-euro note slid across the counter. From the central district he walked east to the harbor’s main pier where grand yachts, invariably flying the flags of nations with favorable tax laws, lay moored in wait for their well-heeled owners, professional crews polishing rails and sanding teak. A northerly turn at the water’s edge brought a more humble nautical district, row after row of locally owned pleasure boats ready for a day’s sail on the Eastern Mediterranean. He heard halyards tapping masts, and the occasional deep-throated rumble of a diesel springing to life. Beyond these tidy docks, past the protective breakwater, Slaton reached his end.
The quay here was far different. Gone were the thick precast seawalls, replaced by piles of concrete riprap that had been bulldozed to the shoreline. Foot-long steel cleats were absent, as were the broad finger piers planked in pressure-treated timber. In their place were makeshift wooden wharves that might have been assembled by a storm, a collision of wooden pallets and planks and old mooring lines. Some were kept afloat by oil drums, others strapped to derelict boat hulls, all of it joined together with a seeming aversion to right angles.
The vessels berthed here—there had to be fifty—were equally rough-hewn, their decks stained with rust and seabird droppings, and when they rolled on the swells their undersides evidenced a hidden battle beneath, barnacles fighting algae for parasitic dominance. Some of the craft were powered by sail, but most had some manner of diesel propulsion, and the smell of fuel oil hung heavy on the air. The few seamen Slaton saw reflected the fleet, not professionals in their prime suited in crisp white liveries, but leathered old men and young boys whose uniforms were shredded T-shirts and worn sandals, and who moved with a sun-infused languor. It was all just as he remembered.