She went to the safe in her closet, removing her passport, a satellite phone, and $5,000 in cash. Then she went down to the laundry room — where she was sure there would be no electronic listening devices — and called Crosswhite on the non-CIA-issue satellite phone.
He answered almost immediately. “Okay. How much do they know?”
“Only that you’ve gone off the reservation,” she answered. “Fields was just here. I have intel that I can’t share over the phone.”
“Then we’d better meet again soon. The clock is running.”
Mariana told him where to meet her in Mexico.
“Are you sure about that?” he asked. “There’s no turning back if we take that road.”
She drew a breath, asking herself if she was sure. “Yes. If what I think is happening is happening, it might be the only road open to us.”
“Okay then. I’ll meet you there in twenty-four hours. In the meantime, you watch your butt. Hear me?”
“I’ll be off the grid within the hour.” She switched off the phone and ran back upstairs to her apartment.
29
The ATRU assassin was a former member of German Army Special Forces, Kommando Spezialkräfte. His name was Jarvis Adler. He was thirty-two, blond and blue-eyed, handsome when you caught him from the right angle. A speed freak and sometime rapist in his spare time, he’d been hired recently as an operator for the CIA out of Bad Tölz. He had no idea why he had been contracted to kill Sabastian Blickensderfer, but he was happy to take the job, glad for the work, and keen to collect fifty thousand dollars — which amounted to only about forty-four thousand euros, but he wasn’t complaining. He’d been out of work for almost a year now, fired from his job with a security firm for failing his third random drug test in a row.
“Random,” he muttered in disgust, sitting in his car beneath the streetlamp he’d disabled the day before, across the snowy street from Blickensderfer’s home. The electronic dossier he had received on the Swiss banker was the most thorough he’d ever read. Whoever had collated the information had even gone so far as to include the brand of toothpaste that Blickensderfer used.
This attention to detail assured Jarvis that the CIA was quite serious about wanting the banker dead, which in turn gave him to understand that he’d better not botch the operation. It was no secret the CIA had undergone a complete overhaul during the last year, making the agency a great deal more like the World War II — era OSS (Office of Strategic Services) than the floundering CIA of the early twenty-first century, and every counterintelligence agency, from the Russian SVR to the Brazilian SNI, was nervous about it.
The CIA’s new director was a man named Pope, who had flown C-130s for Air America during the final year of the Vietnam War, and the word on Pope was that you did not want to end up on his bad side. Unexpected people (two of them women so far) were beginning to turn up dead in unexpected places at unexpected times: people no one wanted to talk about; people with questionable business dealings in the Middle East; wealthy people who were considered untouchable.
People like Sabastian Blickensderfer.
And whoever was ordering the hits wasn’t remotely concerned about them looking like accidents. One CEO from a Paris firm had been found dead in a Yemeni parking garage with his head slammed in his car door an estimated twenty-six times. His Arab bodyguards claimed to have been given the day off.
The White House refused to comment on the alleged assassinations, but what could anyone really say? For one thing, there was no proof at all of CIA involvement. For another, the United States had been attacked with two nuclear bombs just eighteen months earlier; bombs that had been manufactured in the old Soviet Union and eventually sold to Chechen terrorists by God knew who. No one liked to say so out loud, of course, but who could have blamed the US if it had retaliated directly against Russia for managing its nuclear arsenal so poorly? Most Europeans were secretly grateful that the crazy Americans had chosen to exercise what was widely regarded as an Olympian display of self-restraint — especially when one considered their wide-reaching response to 9/11.
Mysterious killings in the news were far easier to abide than the US launching another full-scale military invasion in their backyard or provoking Russia into a second arms race. Even the Chinese were satisfied to keep quiet on the issue — smiling to themselves as they obligingly bought up more and more of America’s growing debt.
Jarvis had fought terrorists as a German soldier, but he cared little for flags or politics. What he cared about was using his considerable skills to make a living. He was even willing to work for the Islamists if they paid him, though he was pretty sure they were fighting on the losing side.
A light came on in Blickensderfer’s house up on the second floor, and Jarvis glanced at his watch to check the hour. Just like the dossier said, Blickensderfer had set his alarm for 04:15.
Before getting out of the car, Jarvis did not check his pistol like they did in the movies. He knew that the suppressed Glock 30 was ready to fire a subsonic .45 caliber round resting in the chamber. He walked casually through the snow toward Blickensderfer’s home on the corner and trudged up the steps. Having memorized the security code from the dossier, he punched in the eight digits, and the lock clicked open.
As he stole into the house and closed the door, Jarvis wondered with admiration how the CIA came by that kind of information. He had intentionally waited for Blickensderfer to wake up before going inside. The idea of killing a man in his sleep looked good on paper, but it could be difficult moving stealthily through a strange house in the dark, and there was no way to be sure if the target was really asleep.
This way there would be no doubt as to whether or not Blickensderfer was awake. The target would be more alert, yes, but there was less uncertainty overall. There would also be light to see by and maybe a little bit of background noise to cover Jarvis’s movement through the house.
He moved up the stairs toward the sound of an electric razor, pausing at the landing to listen. When he was sure that Blickensderfer was in the bathroom and not using the noise of the razor as a decoy, he stepped into the master bedroom and crossed to the master bath, aiming the pistol at a naked Sabastian Blickensderfer, who stared back at him from the sink with his blue eyes wide in terror, the razor buzzing in his hand.
“Das ist nicht persönlich,” Jarvis told him. This is not personal. He squeezed the trigger.
In that same instant, the frontal lobe of Jarvis’s brain exploded, a .45 caliber slug blasting through it from right to left, causing his own shot to miss Blickensderfer’s head by a foot and shatter the glass shower stall.
“Mein Gott!” Blickensderfer blurted in horror, dropping the razor to the tile floor and taking a step back. The razor broke apart but continued to buzz.
Jarvis’s body lay on the bedroom carpet with what was left of his frontal lobe oozing onto the white shag.
Blickensderfer stood with pebbles of shattered glass beneath his feet, too petrified to move, as a man he had never seen before stepped into the bathroom doorway and crouched to pick up Jarvis’s pistol.
The man wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a Carhartt jacket. He stood up and tucked the second pistol into the small of his back, keeping his own .45 gripped in his right hand. “Know who I am?” he asked quietly.