Once a word is out of your mouth, his grandmother used to say, you can’t swallow it again. He’d learned the hard way.
The bellman came downstairs. Slavin set his wineglass aside, and reached for his wallet, but the clerk shook his head. “That will not be necessary, sir. Vensport is taking care of everything.”
“I didn’t know,” Slavin said to cover his mild embarrassment. Tomorrow would not come soon enough.
The clerk handed over the plastic card key. “I hope that you enjoy your brief stay with us, Captain. My name is Mr. Angarita. If there is anything that you need don’t hesitate to call me.”
“Thank you,” Slavin said.
“Our La Terraza restaurant by the pool is first-class. Shall I make reservations for you?”
“I’ll decide later.”
“As you wish, sir.”
When the clerk was gone, Slavin took his champagne back to the wet bar and emptied it into the small sink. He found a bottle of Stolichnaya and a glass, and poured a stiff measure of the Russian vodka. He knocked it back, poured another, and then, jamming the bottle in his coat pocket, headed upstairs while loosening his tie with one hand.
The master bedroom was just as grand as the sitting room, with a huge circular bed facing large floor-to-ceiling sliding-glass doors that opened to the balcony. It was midafternoon and the late-afternoon sun was low behind the hotel, casting a beautiful gold light across the lake. At this point the west shore was fifty kilometers away, lost in the mist, but the view was spectacular. The two-hundred-kilometer-long lake was studded with oil drilling platforms, waste gas burning in long, wind-driven jets of fire from many of them; broad loading platforms where tankers bound for refineries all over the world loaded Venezuelan sweet light crude; and the ships themselves, outbound for the Golfo de Venezuela and the open Caribbean, or inbound under the five-mile General Rafael Urdaneta high bridge at the neck of the lake to take on their cargoes.
“Yob tvoyu mat,” Slavin swore softly. Fuck your mother. He raised a toast. Tania had computed that he had been at sea for twenty-one and a half of the twenty-four years they’d been married. She never complained, in part because the money was very good. But just lately she’d started to ask him about an early retirement. Not to quit the sea, rather she wanted to travel with him to some of the places he’d told her about, as civilians, as tourists, as lovers.
God help him, he did love it. And maybe he would do what she asked, retire before he turned fifty. But not to give up the sea, just to voyage differently. It was an intriguing thought.
He poured another drink and went into the whorehouse of a bathroom, where he found the Jacuzzi controls and started the jets.
Slavin was slightly drunk. Lying in the Jacuzzi, he’d finished the first bottle of vodka, and then, dripping wet, had padded downstairs to fetch a second bottle from the bar. That had been two hours ago, and that bottle was nearly empty. He was finally beginning to relax after the long air trip from Moscow to Paris with Tania, and from there across the Atlantic to Caracas, and finally the short hop up to Maracaibo.
Air travel was fast, relatively safe, and cheap these days, but no aluminum tube with wings, into which a couple hundred passengers were crammed like sardines for endless hours, could ever replace an oceangoing vessel in which a man had more room than even in his apartment ashore.
It was starting to get dark out on the lake. The waste gas flames, combined with the oil derricks and platform lights, and the lights on the ships, made a kaleidoscope of ever-changing colors and patterns that was comforting. Like watching waves coming ashore, or burning logs in a fireplace.
Someone came into the bathroom. Slavin saw the reflection in the window glass and turned.
For a moment he thought it was the idiot clerk again. A man of moderate height, dressed in a dark jacket and open-necked shirt, stood in the doorway, longish blond hair around his ears, with a round face and dark glasses hiding his eyes. The intruder wore latex surgical gloves, and it began to dawn on Slavin that something was very wrong.
“Who are you—?”
The man brought a small-caliber silenced pistol from where he’d concealed it behind his back, raised it, and fired one shot. Something like a hammer struck Slavin in his head, and a billion stars burst inside his brain.
TWO
The assassin, Rupert Graham, stood for a long moment gazing wistfully out the tall windows at the light show on the lake. Soon he would be at sea again, where he belonged. The Apurto Devlán was in the last stages of her loading, ready for sailing in the morning, her crew missing only the captain. So far as he had been able to determine, none of them had ever sailed with Slavin before. The only trouble would come if there was a last-minute replacement who knew the Russian.
But he would deal with that problem if and when it arose.
Graham looked at Captain Slavin’s body. The force of the .22 suppressed long rifle round had been enough to throw the man’s head back against the side of the Jacuzzi, before the body slid underwater. Only the face, its sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, remained above the furiously bubbling surface. An angry red and black hole in the Russian’s forehead, a few centimeters to the right of the nose, had bled very little. And there was no exit wound; the fragmentation round had broken up inside the skull, destroying a massive amount of brain tissue. Death had been nearly instantaneous.
It had been too easy, Graham thought with some regret. He laid his pistol on the toilet seat, removed his rubber gloves, and cocked an ear to listen. The suite was utterly quiet except for the noise of the Jacuzzi’s pumps and the swirling water.
Walking on the balls of his feet, exactly as he’d watched the Russian doing it downstairs in the lobby, Graham approached the Jacuzzi and turned off the jets. He touched two fingers to the side of Slavin’s neck, the water very warm, but, as he expected, there was no pulse. Nonetheless for a man in his profession it paid to be methodical. His life often depended on the care he took with his actions.
He had the entire evening to make his preparations, but he wanted to be finished in time to make a little test of his new persona by ordering room service. Captain Slavin had checked in this early afternoon, interacting with a desk clerk and a bellman, and later this evening he would interact with a room service waiter.
Continuity. A Russian checked in, a Russian ordered dinner, and a Russian checked out. The same Russian.
He took his pistol and gloves back into the bedroom where he stripped off all of his clothing, laying his things on the bed next to the Russian’s leather satchel and garment bag. He was nearly two inches shorter than Slavin, but with the same general build. It had taken him two months to find a ship captain whom he could impersonate. And another two months studying the man’s mannerisms and habits before he was certain he could fool everyone, except someone who’d sailed with the real Slavin before. And finally, the necessary strings had been pulled with GAC to have Slavin assigned to the right ship.
That had been the easy part for bin Laden. GAC, which was responsible for carrying all of Venezuela’s oil around the world, maintained its international headquarters in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and brothers in Dar al Islam did each other favors, no questions asked. It was the symmetry of the thing that Graham most admired.
Back in the bathroom, Graham grabbed hold of the Russian’s elbows and heaved him up over the side and onto the tiled floor like a landed fish. It was difficult because the body was slippery, and out of the water it was more than eighty kilos of deadweight. He rolled the corpse over and dried it with a bath towel, making certain that it was leaking no fluids that could stain the carpeting downstairs in the sitting room.