“Everywhere we know this.”
Washington, D.C.
The large man with the maroon tie flagged the taxicab at the corner of
Eighteenth and M Streets, near a bar-and-grill with a neon sign in the window
advertising a carbonated beverage. The cabdriver wore a turban and favored
public radio. His new passenger was a well-dressed man, a little wide around the
waist, thick around the haunches. He could bench-press three hundred pounds, but
he also liked his beer and his beef, and didn’t see why he needed to change his
habits. He was good at what he did, had never had any complaints, and it wasn’t
as if he moonlighted as a catalog model.
“Take me to Cleveland Park,” he said. “Four thirty Macomb Street.”
The Sikh driver repeated the address, jotted it down on his clipboard, and they
set off. The address turned out to be an out-of-business supermarket, boarded up
and bleak.
“Are you sure this is it?” the driver asked.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Actually, would you mind driving into the parking lot and
around the back? I’ve got to pick up something.”
“No problem, sir.” As the cab eased around the low brick-and-glass building, the
passenger’s heart started to beat harder. He had to do this without making a
mess. Anybody could do this. But he was someone who could do it neatly.
“This is great,” he said, and sat forward. In a lightning-fast motion, he
lowered the garrote over the driver’s head and pulled it tight. The Sikh emitted
a faint rasp of escaped breath; his eyes widened, and his tongue lolled out.
Unconsciousness would come quickly, the passenger knew, but he could not stop
there. Another ten seconds of maximum pressure, and the anoxia would result in
permanent respiratory cessation.
Now he returned the wooden-handled garrote to his breast pocket, and dragged the
limp body of the driver out of the car. He popped the trunk, and arranged the
body around the spare tire, the jumper cables, and a surprising number of
blankets. It was important to get the man out of the driver’s seat as quickly as
possible; he had learned this from unpleasant experience. The incontinence that
sometimes followed a sudden death could cause a soiled seat. Not something he
cared to deal with at a time like this.
His RIM BlackBerry communicator purred from deep in his breast pocket. It would
be an update on the location of the subject.
He glanced at his watch. He had little time remaining.
His subject had less.
The voice in his earpiece gave him the precise coordinates of his subject, and
as the passenger-turned-driver maneuvered the taxicab toward Dupont Circle he
was given regular updates as to her movements. Timing was essential if he was to
succeed.
The crowd in front of the department store was sparse; the subject was wearing a
navy peacoat, a gold silk neckerchief knotted loosely around her throat, a
shopping bag with the elegant logo of the upscale store in one hand.
It was the only thing he was conscious of, the figure of the black woman,
growing larger and larger as he gunned the motor of the cab and then, abruptly,
swung the steering wheel far to the right.
As the cab lurched onto the sidewalk, shrieks of disbelief filled the air,
blending into a sound that was almost choral.
A curious intimacy, again, the woman’s startled face coming close and closer to
his, like a lover leaning forward into a kiss. As the front bumper smashed into
her body—he was traveling at close to fifty miles per hour—her upper body
smashed onto the hood of the cab, and only when he braked did her body fly
forward, vaulting through the air and finally landing on the pavement of the
busy intersection, where a Dodge van, despite its squealing brakes, left tire
tracks on her broken body.
The cab was recovered later that day, abandoned in an alley in Southwest
Washington. It was an alley that, in the best of times, was littered with the
brown and green shards of broken beer bottles, the clear curved glass of crack
vials, the translucent plastic of hypodermics. The local youth treated the cab
as just another found object. Before the car was recovered by the authorities,
it had been stripped of its hubcaps, its license plate, and its radio. Only the
body in its trunk was left undisturbed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aside from its location, across the street from the Liberty Foundation
headquarters, there was little that would draw anyone’s eye to the small
canal-bank house, or voorhuis. Inside, Ratko Pavic regarded its furnishings with
a purely utilitarian eye. There was a faint but cloying kitchen odor—pea soup,
was it? It must have been from the night before, but the smell was oddly
permeating. He wrinkled his nose with distaste. Still, nothing more of that sort
would be cooked here. He thought of the two bodies sprawled in the bathtub
upstairs, the blood seeping steadily down the drain. He had no feelings about
what he had done: the elderly couple, engaged to maintain the house while the
owners were in Corfu, were in the way. They were faithful retainers, no doubt,
but they had to be dispatched. And it was for a good cause: seated by the small
square window in a darkened room, Ratko Pavic had an excellent view of the
mansion opposite, and two parabolic microphones conveyed conversations from its
front-facing antechambers with reasonable clarity.
All the same, it had been a tedious morning. Administrators and staff arrived
between eight-thirty and nine-thirty. The scheduled visitors made their
scheduled visits: a senior civil servant from the Netherlands’ Ministry of
Foreign Affairs was followed by the deputy to the Dutch minister of education,
culture, and science. A U.N. high commissioner for refugees was followed by a
senior director of the U.N.’s Division for Sustainable Development, and then by
another exalted bureaucrat, from its Economic Commission for Europe. Others in
Ratko’s team had complementary perimeter views. One of them, Simic, was
stationed on the very roof of the voorhuis, three stories directly overhead.
None had glimpsed any sign of Paul Janson. It was not surprising. A daytime
infiltration made little sense, although the agent was known to do the
unexpected simply because it was unexpected.
It was tedious work that required complete concealment, but it was what suited
him best since he became a marked man. The jagged, glossy cicatrix that ran from
his right eye to his chin—a scar that glowed red when he allowed himself to
become upset—made his visage too memorable for any job that demanded visibility.
He had been marked: that was the thought that filled his mind, even as his
assailant had lashed out at him with a knife meant for scaling fish. More
punishing even than the searing pain from his ripped flesh was the realization
that he would never be able to work undercover in the field any longer. As a
shooter, of course, he was as invisible as his Vaime silenced sniper rifle,
which was ready for deployment at any moment. As the hours passed, he began to
wonder whether that moment would ever come.
To keep himself amused, Ratko regularly zoomed in on the petite receptionist,
watched the redhead’s haunches move as she bent over, and he felt a warmth in
his belly and groin. He had something for her, oh yes he did. He remembered the
Bosnian women with whom he and his fellow soldiers disported a few years
back—remembered faces convulsed with hatred, remembered how similar the
expression was to sexual transport. It required only a little imagination. As he
pounded himself into them, what thrilled him most was the recognition of how
utterly powerless they were. It was an experience unlike any he had ever had
with a woman. It didn’t matter whether his breath was fetid, or if his body
stank, because there was simply nothing they could do. They knew they had to
give it up, to surrender abjectly, or they would be made to watch their parents,
their husbands, their children, shot through the head, before they were
slaughtered themselves.
Fine-tuning his scope, he imagined the redhead roped and pinned to a mattress,
her eyes rolled into her head, her pale softness yielding to the pistoning of
his Serbian flesh.
In the event, Ratko did not need a scope to see the small motorcade of three
black Mercedes-Benzes make its stately way down Stadehouderskade and onto
Leidsestraat, stopping at the Liberty Foundation headquarters. A uniformed
driver of the stretch limo walked around to the rear and held open the door. A
dark-suited man with horn-rimmed glasses and a felt-brimmed hat came out and
stood next to the car for a moment, admiring the majestic stretch of southwest
Prinsengracht. Then the uniformed man—the minister’s personal factotum, it
appeared—pressed the buzzer beside the deeply carved front door. Ten seconds
later, the door was opened.
The uniformed man spoke to the woman at the door. “Madame, the foreign minister