“What should I do?” Grafton asked softly.
“Have him killed. Send your soldiers after him.”
“He is a religious leader. As far as I know, he hasn’t raised money for terrorism, hasn’t plotted terror strikes, hasn’t enlisted soldiers in the war of terror. I, too, have heard rumors, but they are only that, rumors. All he has done that the British could prove is rant in a mosque.”
“He is inflaming the rabble. Surely you can see that?”
Jake Grafton rubbed the stubble on his chin. It had been a long time since he shaved this morning. “We’ve assassinated five men. All five were actively engaged in terrorism. True, they preached in mosques and argued politics, too, but first and foremost, they were directly responsible for murder of the innocent.”
“You can’t draw that line and defend it,” Tchernychenko roared. “Your Abraham Lincoln noted that there was no difference between the wily agitator who induced a soldier to desert, and the soldier who did indeed desert.”
“No, sir,” Grafton said forcefully. “Lincoln did not say that there was no difference. He asked if he had to leave the hair on the head of the agitator untouched. He did not answer the question, he merely asked it. Now I tell you, if we try to kill everyone who disagrees with us politically or on religious grounds, we are going on a fool’s errand. We’ll be up to our armpits in blood, to no avail.”
“Maybe that is where we should be,” Tchernychenko said heavily. “The time has come when we must take sides and chose a course.”
“We cannot murder everyone who disagrees with us,” Jake Grafton said curtly.
“I wished the Islamic fascists believed that,” Tchernychenko shot back, undaunted. “On the other hand, Putin understands he cannot kill everyone, but he can kill the people who irritate him the most. Corpses make wonderful examples.”
I was sitting in a stuffed chair in the big room across from the main entrance, well back from the light, dozing, when I sensed that someone had entered the room. I tightened my grip on the Springfield as I pried niy eyelids open. It was Jake Grafton. Tchernychenko was behind him.
“Hey, Tommy, time to go.”
I came erect and pocketed the pistol. We collected our driver, said our good-byes and stepped out into the windy night. The temp had dropped some while we were there.
As we rode away in the car with Speedo behind the wheel, driving on the wrong side of the road, Grafton said, “Did you get the bugs in place?”
“Every room in the joint,” I muttered, “including the one you spent the evening in. Best job I’ve done in years.”
“And the retransmitter?”
“Stuck it on the side of the house. Leaned out a second-floor window. No way to hide it, of course.”
Grafton didn’t say anything. Each bug would transmit a tiny signal to the retransmitter, which could boost the signal and broadcast that signal and up to thirty-one others at once, to the satellite. The satellite could send the collected signals to Langley or Fort Meade, whichever seemed to have less work, or both. There the signals would be monitored and recorded for study by computers and humans at a later date.
I sat looking out the window into the black Scottish night. Blacker than the doorway to hell. Blacker than the Devil’s heart. Black and formless. Black, black, black.
CHAPTER TWELVE
After the plane landed at a London airport and the engines were secured, Grafton motioned me to remain in my seat. He went forward, said something to the pilot, then came back and sat down across the aisle from me as Speedo and the crew filed off the plane. The lights and air-conditioning, powered by an auxiliary power unit in the tail of the plane, stayed on.
When we were alone in the airplane, he said, “The key is Marisa Petrou. She knows this bastard better than anyone else alive, and I’ve got a hunch she knows what he’s planning.”
“What is that?” I asked, to prompt him.
“Oh, he wants to kill Winchester and the others, me, you … and the president. He wants to assassinate the president.”
I gaped.
“Qasim wanted to kill him last year in Paris,” Grafton explained, “and I doubt if he’s given up on that dream. Qasim believes that decapitating the head villain, the Devil incarnate to their way of thinking, would shake Western civilization, maybe crack the foundations, as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand did in 1914. Baldly, Qasim wants to trigger a world war. He thinks Islam will rule triumphantly when it’s all over, in a century or two. Death to all the infidels. The victory will be Allah’s.”
His eyes swiveled to me again. “We’re going to kill him first,” he said, not so much to me as to himself. He was taking a vow. Then he repeated it, and I could feel the cold steel in his voice: “We’re going to kill him first.”
The moment passed. Staring off into space, he took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, then looked at me again.
“Tomorrow morning I have a job for you. Then, tomorrow afternoon I want you to go back to France, find Marisa and stick to her like glue.”
This was the second time he had given me this order. Of course, he was the one who told me to get out of Germany. “She won’t like it,” I pointed out.
“Figure something out.”
“Okay,” I said, as if hanging out with unwilling females were one of my many skills.
“This time, if you must shoot someone, bring the women with you.”
“What about that Russian back there?”
“It’s impossible. He refuses to use good sense. He commutes back and forth to London, thinks three or four bodyguards will keep him safe.”
“It would take fifty men to properly guard him.”
“I have precisely two. I have them watching the estate, looking for anyone sneaking in. That’s the best I can do.”
“Who are they?”
“You don’t know them.”
“I know most of the people in the Company’s Europe operations,” I said brightly.
“You don’t know them,” Grafton repeated.
“There’s still a whole hell of a lot I don’t know,” I said reasonably, trying to be a good soldier. Or sailor. That was the only way anyone on this earth was ever going to get anything out of him.
“What else do you want to know?”
“Maybe you ought to tell me if Isolde’s chauffeur was a bad guy or an innocent bystander whom I just happened to murder.”
He smiled a little bit and said softly, “That I don’t know, Tommy. You did the best you could. We’ll all have to live with it that way.”
I felt like a fool and must have reddened. My face seemed hot. “Sorry,” I said.
“Keep swinging at the strikes,” he muttered.
He got out of his seat and led the way up the aisle toward the door.
It was a gray, rainy dawn — the English are good at these and do them often — when I rolled out the next morning. My roommate, the up-and-coming GM junior executive, was still in his room, presumably asleep. I made coffee and stood at my window looking at the world, which from this perspective consisted of four brick buildings identical to the one I was in.
I decided they should find the architect responsible for this masonry crime and cut off parts. Still, the neighborhood was nicer than most of Manhattan, the areas that people live in, and the streets had less garbage piled up. Cities, I decided, were an acquired taste.
