He rolled it over again on its back, and grasping it under the armpits, dragged it out into the bedroom and then down the curving staircase, where he left it across from the dining table.
Slavin’s right eye had rolled up into its socket, only the bloodshot white showing, while his other eye had turned inward, making it appear as if he was staring at the tip of his nose. No one looked dignified in death, at least not the ones Graham had assassinated, and he idly wondered how he would appear to his killer when the time came.
He’d checked into the hotel yesterday afternoon with two ripstop nylon sports bags. Last night he’d smuggled an aluminum footlocker into the hotel and up to his room, making absolutely certain that no one had seen him. He’d brought all three items with him to Slavin’s room, taking the chance that someone might see him, in which case he would have had to kill them. But his luck had held. He’d used a universal key card to open the door, and again luck was with him. The Russian had not latched the security chain, nor had he been right there in the sitting room.
“You will need to depend upon a certain amount of Allah’s good fortune,” Osama bin Laden had told him eleven months ago in Karachi when they’d first hatched the canal mission.
Graham had met with bin Laden and four of the man’s top advisers in the M. A. Jinnah building in the heart of downtown to work out the details. Afterwards, bin Laden had taken him aside for a private talk.
“They don’t understand,” bin Laden said. “Luck has played a very important role in what we’ve accomplished, what we will do together.”
“Luck is what we make of it,” Graham had said. As a submarine commander in the British navy he’d had a career blessed with plenty of luck because he’d been the best. But in his personal life the opposite had been true, right up to the time his wife had died of cancer while he was out on a ninety-day patrol beyond recall.
After that he’d had no use for luck. It was as if he were a cat that had used up eight of its lives, and was recklessly speeding toward its own final destruction. He no longer cared.
“And you’ve done well at it these last two and a half years, but you are not expendable,” bin Laden had replied seriously. “Your life is mine. Do not forget it.”
Graham smiled bitterly. His life was his own. Bin Laden and al-Quaida only provided him the means to hit back at the kinds of bastards who’d allowed Jillian to die alone and in pain.
He brought the aluminum footlocker across to the Russian’s body and opened the combination lock. The lid came up stiffly because of its thick rubber hermetic seals. It wouldn’t do for any odors to be released at the wrong time. Even a corpse-sniffing dog would smell nothing.
Graham hoisted Slavin’s body with great effort and stuffed it facedown inside the footlocker. Only its head and torso fit. Its arms and legs from the knees down stuck out. Jamming a foot against the body’s back, Graham pulled one of the arms backwards until the shoulder joint broke free of its ligaments with an audible pop, and suddenly it was loose and folded neatly inside the trunk over Slavin’s neck. He did the same with the other arm. The Russian’s hip joints were much stronger than his shoulders, and it took every bit of Graham’s strength to dislocate them in such a fashion that they could be folded over the body, and the lid closed and locked.
When he was finished, he dragged the heavy footlocker across the room next to the entry hall table. In the morning he would check the case with the bellman for storage until he was scheduled to return in three weeks. It was his master’s library, which he wouldn’t need on this trip. Reference books, for the most part, all of them dreadfully heavy. He didn’t think anyone would ask where it came from. He was a VIP.
He carefully examined the beige carpeting where he’d laid the body, and the carpeting up the stairs into the bedroom, for any signs of blood or other stains. But there was nothing.
He took the smaller of his two nylon bags into one of the twin bathrooms, where he laid out hair clippers, dark hair dye, soft brown contacts, and a makeup kit with the ingredients to thicken and darken his eyebrows, soften the lines in his face, and tone down his skin color several shades.
First he cut his hair so that it was the same length as the Russian’s, and then worked in the hair dye, making sure that he didn’t miss a spot. Slavin was forty-six, but he had no gray hair. Possibly he dyed it, but whatever the case, it made Graham’s transformation all the easier if he didn’t have to add gray to his coloring job.
The instructions on the hair-coloring kit required a forty-five-minute wait until the dye could be rinsed out and a conditioner applied. He used the time to flush the hair clippings down the toilet and make sure that the bathroom was devoid of any trace of what he’d done so far. Then he padded on bare feet downstairs where he turned on some music, poured a glass of Dom Pérignon — which was quite good, he thought — and went back upstairs where he stared out the windows at the lake until it was time.
When his hair was finished, he worked on his eyebrows and skin tone, put the contacts in his eyes, and got dressed in Slavin’s clothes. He’d brought lift shoes with him, which he slipped into, giving him an extra two inches to match the Russian’s height.
He found Slavin’s passport, which he took into the bathroom where he compared his appearance in the mirror with that of the photo. No customs officer in the world would question his identity.
Finally, he transferred his two nylon bags and their contents into Slavin’s luggage; it was a tight fit, but not impossible.
Downstairs, he poured another glass of champagne and then called room service. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and maybe some blinis and caviar with iced vodka would make a nice start.
“Poshol nakhuy.” He was hungry.
Lake Maracaibo, which stretched nearly two hundred kilometers from the small farming town of San Antonio, Zulia, in the south to the large city of Maracaibo in the north, was studded with hundreds of oil derricks and loading platforms that stretched in many places across the entire one-hundred-kilometer width. Sixty percent of Venezuela’s oil and natural gas was pumped from beneath the lake. Ships ranging in size from small crude carriers to the 275-meter Panamax tankers that were the largest ships able to transit the Panama Canal, and even some Very Large Crude Carriers capable of loading four times as much oil, arrived and departed the loading platforms and docks 24/7.
Rupert Graham, dressed in khaki trousers, a yellow Izod polo shirt, and a dark blue windbreaker with MASTER, APURTO DEVLÁN sewn over the left breast, followed a young bellman across the roof to the helipad where a Bell 230, its rotors slowly turning, was waiting to take him out to his ship. The morning was crisp and sunny, with a light breeze out of the east keeping the heavy gas and oil stench offshore.
Last night and this morning had gone smoothly, though the room service waiter had shot him an odd look when he’d given the man a generous cash tip. But he’d not been questioned about his heavy aluminum footlocker by the bellman, who’d come to collect it for storage earlier, or that large tip.
The real test, of course, would come once he stepped aboard the Apurto Devlán and began to interact with the crew.
The young, handsome bellman stuffed the two bags into the chopper’s storage compartment aft of the open cabin door. Graham handed him a twenty-dollar bill and climbed into the helicopter.