The Watchers Read online

  Indeed, it was a pivotal moment for the warden, and he would not fail. He would uphold both the honor of the United Nations and the memory of those victims this man was accused of—and most assuredly guilty of—having murdered.

  But the warden was a professional. No matter how strongly he shuddered in the mere presence of this creature, he inwardly vowed to maintain his high principles.

  “Mr. Mladov,” he replied, “we at the United Nations pride ourselves on treating our inmates as persons. As a result, you have heard correctly—we do provide certain humane amenities to those we house. They are intended to foster an atmosphere of respect and concern for basic human rights.”

  The six-foot-four general now smirked at the handcuffs still binding his wrists, and over at the nearly adolescent guard four yards away in the corner. He glanced up and down at the boy’s blue UN uniform. He took note of the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun held tightly in soft, unblemished hands.

  Three seconds with that gun and I could be out of here, the general told himself. I’d wager the boy doesn’t even know how to flip off the safety.

  Then he began to shake his head almost mournfully as though he could not believe the nonsense he was hearing.

  “And yes,” the warden continued, “under certain circumstances, that includes medical massages for inmates who suffer from the tensions and ills of incarceration. Therefore, I will grant your request, but just this once. Are we clear on the matter?”

  Mladov smiled coldly at the rising undercurrent of indignation in the bureaucrat’s voice. He nodded just barely enough for the man to notice, but no more.

  “Fine,” the warden said. He turned to the hallway behind him and frowned at a man standing in a flawless pinstriped suit. “As soon as the inmate is processed into his cell, grant him a medical massage. Rudi is out sick, so you’ll have to call in the reserve man. Sixty minutes, and not a second more.”

  Without meeting Mladov’s eyes another time, the warden turned on his heels and strode away.

  Less than one hour later, Radovan Mladov was not sitting sullenly on a prison bench, as thousands of Croats and Muslims back in Yugoslavia had wistfully imagined. He was stomach down on a padded massage table deep within the Scheveningen prison complex, bare to the waist with his eyes closed in bliss.

  An impassive and impressively fit man in white clothes had awaited his entrance, standing against the wall with his arms crossed behind his back. The armed guard had retreated, locked the door, and taken up station behind a large, thickly glassed window. Then the man had finally moved. He stepped forward and began the session as emotionlessly as a robot programmed for the task.

  Within a few minutes the general had turned his face toward the therapist. Ignoring the young man’s unusually thick shoulders and narrow build, he forced one eye to take in the masseur’s young, inscrutable face. “So, do I get a cigarette after this?” he asked.

  The man had not even rolled his eyes at the comment. Without looking up from his vigorous kneading of the prisoner’s back, he merely said, “You may smoke anytime you like, Herr General.”

  Mladov furrowed his eyebrows at those last two words, not caring for the parting use of German and its obvious implication. The man had even pronounced General with a hard g, just like the Nazi lackeys in those old war movies. Despite his having no German accent whatsoever.

  The Serb decided to overlook the comment and preserve the mood. He moaned softly and soaked in both the bliss of the procedure and the absurdity of this moment. Who would have believed prison life could be so coddled. . . ?

  Then he felt pain spread like a puddle of fire across his back.

  “Hey!” he said sharply, rising to face the man. “You trying to hurt me? What is happening here?”

  The stranger lowered himself, faced him squarely in the eye, and shook his head without a change in expression. Mladov noted that the man’s eyes radiated a glacial calm. A poise he glimpsed in few men. Back in Zagreb and under different circumstances he might have recruited such a man for one of his shock troops. He now looked like a man who could mow down an entire family without flinching. Sadly, he’d often told himself, soldiers like that had grown scarce in this world of weak wills and soft allegiances.

  The man’s voice spoke close in his ear—very close. And now there was expression, a smile in the words.

  “Mladov, by the time I finish this sentence you will be incapable of crying out for help, or for that matter, of any speech at all. You are experiencing the onset of total paralysis from a lethal dose of parathion I’ve just rubbed into your back. You will be immobilized for approximately a half hour, during which you will endure the most intense pain the human nervous system can inflict. Doctors could stop the poison with a high dose of atropine or even soothe your pain with a nerve block. But they will think you are merely suffering a stroke, and will not suspect the truth because you will be unable to tell them. Before the hour is up you will choke to death on your own bile—fully conscious. Then I pray there truly is a hell, for you will certainly go there.”

  Even as he spoke, the man continued to knead the general’s now twitching back as though nothing had happened. The guard behind the window had not moved; he could not hear but only see what took place in the chamber.

  “I am not accustomed to telling my packages what is happening to them,” the man continued, “but in your case I saw footage of what you did to those civilians back in Mitrovica. And they knew what was going to happen. Even the children. Now you know too. I wish I could make your death more painful, but that is not neurologically possible. Rest in hell, Herr General.”

  This time he not only used the hard g but rolled the r’s in Herr.

  It was the last bit of speech Mladov’s brain would clearly process.

  At once, just as the general’s eyes rolled back in their sockets and a tremor began to seize his arms and hands, the massage operator whirled back toward the mirror and shouted with the appropriate level of alarm in his voice and face.

  “Alert! Alert! This man is suffering some kind of seizure!”

  Doors flew open and the guard rushed in with a handheld radio at his mouth while muttering furiously in Flemish. Twenty seconds later, three more men ran in, clad in white just like the massage therapist.

  The assassin had flattened himself against the wall, watching closely but letting the emergency team do their work. He waited until the ambulance gurney arrived and met the inmate’s pleading eyes as he was carted away.

  Yet by the time the prison warden arrived to debrief the staff, he had vanished.

  CHAPTER

  _ 8

  Five minutes later, Dylan Hatfield, originally of Billings, Montana—a.k.a. Jonathan Peruggia, Marcus Bryce, and Joseph Stevens of various North American passports and mailing addresses—was clad in street clothes and walking amiably down a tree-shaded sidewalk of Scheveningen, a pleasant suburb barely two miles from The Hague.

  Hatfield hummed “La Marseillaise” under his breath and smiled at his feet with the blurry grin of a departing lover. He had reason to be pleased. The uniform was discarded in a hospital dumpster. The job was over—executed flawlessly, as near as he could tell. A fatal stroke would emerge as official cause of death. Who could deny that entering prison was a stressful event?

  A gust of October wind blew into him, misty with suspended rain and the threat of winter. The cold wetness across his face and hair made him briefly picture himself as a fleeting, shadowy angel of death—an inexorable dispenser of righteous vengeance. He smiled even wider at the thought. With beasts like Mladov roaming the earth, he didn’t mind the analogy one bit.

  He was particularly pleased with himself over the poison he had employed. Acquiring the right concentration of parathion, the world’s most lethal and agonizing neurotoxin, had required a trip to Caracas, to South America’s vilest back-alley Mercado de veneno or poison market. The blackest heart of one of those third-world bazaars that most tourists require a laminated street map t
o find their way out of.

  On its outer peripheries lay a labyrinth where every sort of exotic or conventional animal could be purchased in any state of life or death. The kind of rancid slum uninitiated Westerners would only breach with surgical masks pulled tightly over their mouths, or a ready barf bag swiped from the flight over. And then, only with a trusted guide.

  But farther within, there lay a hardened sector the tourists would never approach. A criminal sector which attracted a steady stream of the world’s slimiest and most cruel assassins.

  It had taken nearly five thousand dollars in bribes, two tense body searches, and a nauseating blindfolded journey through several dozen hard spins and jogs along dirt paths. It all culminated with a brutal blow—from the stock end of an AK–47, he would later learn—on the back of his head, which knocked him to the ground. He had expected it. Although with his old Delta Force training he could have killed them all in seconds, he also conceded that abuse was part of the bargain. A ritual greeting, an initiation of sorts.

  He had regained his senses in a pool of shadow, lying on the hard floor of a small, dimly lit hut. He jerked upright and froze at the sight of an old Indian man aiming an antique Colt pistol at his gut with a gnarled right hand.

  “Veneno?” came the feathery old voice.

  Actually, Dylan had come in search of a curare derivative he had heard about years before in Israel. Although the Caracas mercado had evolved into a source of every poison known to man, it had first gained notoriety as the world’s definitive source for the Amazon’s most lethal and exotic compounds. And curare, favorite of Indian arrow tips, was definitely a product of the Amazon.

  But the old man was fresh out, a young female translator said from a corner. Worse yet, it was the rainy season, she explained as he interpreted with a dismissive wave of the old man’s hand. Travel up the Orinoco was disrupted.

  Instead he smiled, exposing a mouthful of large, greenish teeth, and waved a vial filled with amber liquid. The young woman had whispered that he had just taken the substance in trade from a Russian hit man. Veneno muy potente. Very potent stuff.

  She read the details from a wrinkled sheet of paper. “Parathion. Chemical first cousin of Sarin, the nerve gas of Tokyo subway fame. Diethyl nitrophenyl thiophosphate. A powerful insecticide one hundred percent fatal upon skin contact at present concentrations. Predeath symptoms including initial paralysis, headache, spasms, abdominal pain, muscle weakness, involuntary twitching, diarrhea, convulsions, nosebleeds, nausea, loss of sphincter control, heart block, respiratory distress, and pulmonary edema.”

  Death within thirty minutes of respiratory failure—a slow asphyxiation consistent with neurological damage from a stroke.

  He had paid a bargain price and considered himself lucky. Curare would have been quick and difficult to detect, not to mention natural, but this poison would give the man what he deserved. And it would be simple to administer. A simple drop or two rubbed into the skin, assuming the proper precautions against accidental inhalation.

  Perfect for use by the UN wing’s newest backup massage therapist.

  And just right for the ill-timed demise of one of Europe’s most hated men—Dylan’s latest assignment, commissioned by a one-time UN commander in Serbia who was wrongfully blamed for failing to stop one of the Balkans’ worst massacres. The disgraced functionary had promptly resigned and “gone native”—which in this case meant vanishing whole into the former Yugoslavia’s substantial population of displaced refugees. And which also meant that, known only to the holders of the world’s deepest intelligence secrets, he had become the head of a Croatian terrorist cell. A dispenser of justice to the Serbian killers of women and children who had ruined his life.

  Dylan couldn’t wait to make the call. He would ask the go-between to patch him through in person for a firsthand report. It was risky and irregular, he knew, yet he wanted to personally tell his client the truth about those vague reports just beginning to surface from the world’s satellite news networks, hinting at a sudden death in Belgium.

  The man would laugh, he imagined, maybe sing a triumphant ditty in his native Portuguese, and gleefully hang up. Then within the hour, seven sweet digits would blink into the digital vaults of a bank deep in Switzerland, whisked effortlessly into his balance register from the distant end of some electronic corridor off in Asia or the Caribbean.

  On days like today, he loved his job.

  CHAPTER

  _ 9

  The killer of Radovan Mladov took a cleansing breath, glanced up at the darkening sky, and thought again of his gradual and unlikely descent into a career as a shadow-world assassin.

  His earliest childhood victims had been mule deer on his grandmother’s farm, followed by firing-range target silhouettes at age eighteen after enlisting in the army. His skill had quickly channeled him into sniper training, then Special Forces, and eventually five years in Delta Force “wet work.” Solo sanctions.

  He trailed his memory across some of those early missions with a wistful shake of the head. He could still taste the thrill of jumping solo from the roaring entrails of a C–130 over the night-darkened terrains of Afghanistan, Columbia, and Somalia. He had worn little more than a standard-issue ghillie suit—a poncho fastened with camouflage-painted ribbons to break up his outline against the ground. The suit had concealed a bristling array of high-tech survival, killing, and communications gear stashed about his body.

  More than all that, though, he had loved the solitude, the intoxicating self-reliance. Melting into the landscape completely alone and concealed. A passing shadow. A human trigger already pulled. A bullet of flesh and blood, homing in on its doomed target.

  Yet he’d always taken a special satisfaction in knowing that his targets had been bad guys. African warlords. Balkan drug traffickers. Terrorists of every stripe. His mode of national service might have been more disturbing, although he had considered it no less honorable than the work of a mortar operator or artillery gunner.

  Even when the Cold War had ended and his identity dissipated into the realm of joint CIA/NSA black ops, he had always taken pride in the necessary nature of his work. The righteous choice of targets. It might not have made polite conversation, but the fact remained that the world had people in it who needed killing. And he was often on a short list of the best men alive to answer his nation’s call for the job.

  The homicidal chill of centering a man’s head in the crosshairs, of ending someone’s life with a twitch of his trigger finger—that was simply the operational downside. The burden of his mission, just as claustrophobia was to a submariner, or boredom to an officer in a missile silo.

  And now that he had disappeared even further from the mantle of government service—barely knowing even the identity of his employers, but instead trusting in decades-old relationships, code words, and drop-boxes—he still clung to the fraying mantle of his perennial rationale. Today’s bad guys might have been lesser threats to national security, yet they were still major-league scumbags.

  No, he wasn’t some mere hit man, he reminded himself. No conscience-for-hire. He was one of the best in the world at a job that might seem alluring to some yet was agonizingly difficult, incredibly dangerous, and despite its justifications, he realized—potentially corrosive to the soul. If those hazards did not make his occupation exactly respectable, well, they nevertheless enabled him to hold his head up high.

  Most of the time he wasn’t even a killer. He was an unspecified artistic type—painter, actor, writer, musician—living alone in Manhattan’s Tribeca district, a bohemian existence that none of his girlfriends or acquaintances questioned or took special notice in. Men of such hazy pursuits were a dime a dozen in his neighborhood. For some reason, no product of a life’s work was ever expected—only the means to continue paying the rent on shabby-chic lofts and the tabs on never-ending supplies of morning espresso and trendy overpriced cuisine.

  He traveled a great deal, and most of his casual acquaintances though
t this was due to his sideline of occasional modeling. According to Gretchen—the latest raven-haired jet-setter with an undetermined European accent to grace his bed—he was here on some German magazine shoot of unspecified duration.

  A faint vibration at his thigh told him the pager was going off. He had several impulsive clients. Some refused to wait even one second before either granting him an assignment or shifting it to someone else. Sometimes one of them would even call in the final seconds of a sanction to cancel the order. Naturally he resented the vacillation, but it was better than killing someone unnecessarily. The clients still paid, of course. But they always appreciated the ready access.

  Without breaking stride he reached down into a low-slung pocket of his cargo pants and retrieved the pager. A well-dressed elderly couple was approaching him on the sidewalk. He could feel their gazes on him, their eyes probing him for some polite nod or affirmation. He glanced down with a vague smile to avoid eye contact.

  The display’s green letters read, 555–310–2998. His eyes widened at the sight.

  Two minutes later he stepped onto a quiet cobblestone street overshadowed by residential buildings. There a dark blue Mercedes sedan with Dutch plates awaited him. He climbed inside; instantly the engine roared and he sped away in European fashion.

  Before he’d gone a hundred yards, he was on the cell phone to America.

  “This is Rover,” he said.

  “Shadow Leader here. Remember when I told you the day would come when we needed some extreme backbone from you?”

  “Yeah, I remember. I told you I had no shortage of that, if you cared to take another glance at my record.”

  “Yes, but I did not explain myself. And that day has now come, my friend. It couldn’t be a nobler cause or a higher risk to the world if you fail. But it won’t be easy.”

  “Yeah?”