The Mark of the Assassin Read online

  He cleared away his dishes and washed them in the sink. Then, for the next hour, he systematically worked his way through the cottage and burned anything that suggested he ever existed.

  Delaroche took the morning train from Brest to Paris and a midday train from Paris to Zurich. He arrived one hour before his bank closed. He left his small grip in a locker at the station and converted some of his French francs at a bureau de change.

  He walked along a glittering street lined with brightly lit, exclusive shops. In a Gucci boutique he used cash to purchase a simple black attaché case. He told the clerk he did not require a bag, and a moment later he was walking along the sidewalk again, the attaché dangling from his right arm.

  It was snowing lightly by the time he reached the austere front entrance of his bank. The only clue as to the nature of the establishment was the small gold plaque beside the door. Delaroche pressed the buzzer and waited while the security guard inspected him through the lens of the video camera mounted over the door.

  The door lock snapped open, and he was let inside a small secure entrance room. He picked up a black telephone and announced he had an appointment with Herr Becker. Becker arrived a moment later, immaculately dressed and polished, shorter than Delaroche by a bald head that shone in the fluorescent light.

  Delaroche followed him down a silent, dimly lit, beige-carpeted hall. Becker led him into another secure room and locked the door behind them. Delaroche felt claustrophobic. Becker opened a small vault and withdrew the money. Delaroche smoked while Becker counted it out for him.

  The entire transaction took less than ten minutes. Delaroche signed the receipt for the money, and Becker helped him stack it neatly inside the case.

  In the entrance room, Becker looked out at the street and said, “One can never be too careful, Monsieur Delaroche. There are thieves about.”

  “Thank you, Herr Becker. I think I can handle myself. Have a pleasant evening.”

  “Same to you, Monsieur Delaroche.”

  Delaroche did not want to walk a long distance with the money, so he took a taxi back to the station. He collected his bag from the locker and purchased a first-class ticket on an overnight train to Amsterdam.

  Delaroche arrived at Amsterdam’s Centraalstation early the following morning. He moved quickly through the crowded hall, eyes red-rimmed from a night of fitful sleep, and stepped outside into the bright sunlight. The sight of the bicycles struck him: thousands of them, row upon row.

  Delaroche took a taxi to the Hotel Ambassade in the Central Canal Ring and checked in as Señor Armiñana, a Spanish businessman. He spent an hour on the telephone, varying his languages in case the hotel operator might be listening, speaking in the coded lexicon of the criminal underground. He slept for a time, and by late morning he was seated in the window of a smoky café a short distance from his hotel.

  The bookstore was there, across a busy square. It had developed a well-deserved reputation for snobbery, for it specialized in literature and philosophy and refused to stock commercial fiction or thrillers. The hotel clerk said the manager once physically removed a woman who dared to ask for the new book by a famous American romance writer.

  It was a perfect place for Astrid. Twice, he caught a glimpse of her—stacking books in the front window, giving advice to a male customer who was clearly more interested in her than in any book she might be recommending.

  Astrid had that effect on men, always did.

  It was why Delaroche came to Amsterdam in the first place.

  She was born Astrid Meyer in the town of Kassel near the East German border. When her father walked out on the family in 1967, her mother abandoned his name and reclaimed her own, which was Lizbet Vogel.

  After the divorce, Lizbet settled in a lakeside cottage in the mountains of Switzerland, outside Bern. It was familiar territory. Late in the war, in July 1944, her family fled Germany and sought refuge in a nearby village. It was there, alone in the mountains with her mother, that Astrid Meyer began her lifelong fascination with her grandfather, Kurt Vogel.

  A heavy smoker his entire life, Vogel died of lung cancer in 1949, ten years before Astrid was born. In the end his wife, Gertrude, had tried to bring him down from the mountains, but Vogel believed the alpine air held his salvation, and he died at home gasping for breath.

  Trude Vogel knew next to nothing of her husband’s wartime work, but what she did know she told to Lizbet and Lizbet told to Astrid. He had given up a promising legal career in 1935 to join the Abwehr, the German secret service. He had been a close associate of the chief of the Abwehr, Wilhelm Canaris, who was executed for treason by the Nazis in April 1945. He had deceived Trude for years, telling her that he was Canaris’s legal counsel. But late in the war he admitted the truth—he had recruited agents and sent them to England to spy on the British.

  Lizbet remembered the night.

  Her father had moved the family to Bavaria, because Berlin was no longer safe. She remembered her father arriving at the house, very late, remembered his presence in her bedroom, framed against the faint light of the open doorway. Later, she remembered the sound of her mother and father talking softly in the kitchen, and the smell of her father’s supper. And then she heard the sound of dishes shattering, the sound of her mother gasping. She and her twin sister, Nicole, crawled to the top of the stairs and looked down. Below, in the kitchen, they saw their parents and two men wearing the black uniforms of the SS. One man they did not recognize; the other was Heinrich Himmler, the most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler.

  For years Lizbet Vogel believed her father had been a Nazi, an ally of Himmler and the SS, a war criminal who had chosen to die in the mountains of Switzerland rather than face justice in his homeland. Her mother, she concluded, secretly believed the same. When her mother was dead, Lizbet told the story to Astrid, and Astrid grew up believing her grandfather was a Nazi.

  Then, on an afternoon in October 1970, a man telephoned the cottage and asked if he could visit. His name was Werner Ulbricht, and he had worked with Kurt Vogel at the Abwehr during the war. He said he knew the truth about Vogel’s work. Lizbet told him to come. He arrived an hour later—gaunt, pale as baker’s flour, leaning heavily on a cane, a neat black patch over one eye.

  They walked for a time—Werner Ulbricht, Lizbet, and Astrid—and then sat on the grassy bank of the lake and drank coffee from a thermos bottle. Despite the snap of autumn in the air, Ulbricht’s face was bathed in sweat from the exertion. He rested for a time, sipping his coffee, and then told them the story.

  Kurt Vogel was no Nazi; he hated them with a passion. He came to the Abwehr on condition he not be forced to join the Party, and Canaris had been more than happy to grant him his wish. He was not an in-house legal counsel to Canaris. He was an agent runner and a damned good one at that: meticulous, brilliant, ruthless in his own way. One of his agents in Britain was a woman. Together, they learned the most important secret of the war—the time and place of the invasion. They also learned that the British were engaged in a massive deception to conceal the truth. But in February 1944, Hitler fired Canaris and placed the Abwehr under the control of Himmler and the SS. Vogel kept his information to himself, and joined the anti-Hitler plotters of the Schwarze Kapelle, the Black Orchestra. When the July 20 coup attempt ended in disaster, many of the Schwarze Kapelle plotters were arrested and executed. Vogel fled to Switzerland.

  Lizbet’s eyes were damp when Ulbricht finished the story. She stared at the lake, watching the wind ripple the surface. “Who was the other man who came with Himmler to my mother’s house?” she asked.

  “He was Walter Schellenberg, a very senior officer in the SD. He took over the Abwehr when Canaris was fired. Your father deceived him about the invasion.”

  “The woman who was his agent . . . ?” Lizbet asked, voice trailing off. “Was he in love with her? Mother always thought he was in love with someone else.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Tell me the tr
uth, Herr Ulbricht.”

  “Yes, he loved her very much.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Her name was Anna Katerina von Steiner. Your father forced her to become an agent. She never came back from England.”

  Astrid’s obsessive fascination with her grandfather began that afternoon. Her own grandfather, an ally of Wilhelm Canaris, a brave Schwarze Kapelle resister who tried to rid Germany of Hitler! In the attic she found a chest of his things her mother had saved: old law books and a few ancient photographs, brittle with age, some clothing. She studied them for hours on end. When she was old enough she even imitated his appearance: the spiky hair that looked as though he had cut it himself, the pebble-lensed eyeglasses, the dour undertaker’s suits. She tried to imagine the agent named Anna Katerina von Steiner, the woman he had been in love with. In her grandfather’s papers Astrid could find no trace of her, so she painted a portrait of Anna in her imagination: beautiful, brave, ruthless, violent.

  When she was eighteen, Astrid returned to Germany to attend university in Munich and immediately became involved in leftist politics. She believed Nazis were still running Germany. She believed the Americans were occupiers. She believed industrialists had enslaved workers. She imagined what her grandfather, the great Kurt Vogel, would have done. He would join the resistance, of course.

  In 1979 she gave up her studies at the university and joined the Red Army Faction. The leaders said she would have to give up her real name and choose a nom de guerre. She chose Anna Steiner and vanished into the world of terrorism.

  She was living on a houseboat on the Prinsengracht. At three o’clock in the afternoon she walked out of the bookstore, freed her bicycle from the rack, and set out across the square.

  Delaroche signaled the waiter for a check.

  She walked for a time, pushing the bike, obviously in no hurry. Delaroche trailed softly after her. She had changed little in the years since he had seen her last. She was tall and vaguely awkward, with beautiful but graceless legs and long hands that seemed forever in search of a comfortable resting place. Her face was from another time and place: luminous white skin, broad cheekbones, a large nose, eyes the color of mountain lake water. Her hair always changed with her mood and her politics, but now, in early middle age, it had returned to its natural state: long, blond, held back by a plain black clasp.

  He followed her north along the Keizersgracht. She crossed the canal at Reestraat, then headed north again along the Prinsengracht. She passed into the shadow of the Westerkerk, the site of Rembrandt’s unmarked grave. Delaroche increased his pace, closing the distance between them. Hearing his footfalls, she spun quickly, hand reaching inside her handbag, alarm on her face.

  Delaroche took her gently by the arm.

  “It’s only me, Astrid. Don’t be afraid.”

  Krista was forty-five feet long with a wheelhouse aft, a slender prow, and a fresh coat of green and white paint. It was tied up next to a boxy barge, and to get aboard Astrid and Delaroche had to scamper across the neighbor’s aft deck. The inside was clean and surprisingly large, complete with a galley kitchen, a salon, and a bedroom in the prow. The weak light of late afternoon trickled through a pair of skylights and a row of port-holes along the gunwale.

  Delaroche sat in the salon, watching Astrid as she busied herself with coffee in the galley. They spoke Dutch, for she was passing herself off as a divorcée from Rotterdam and didn’t want the neighbors to hear her chattering in German. Like all Amsterdammers, she was obsessive about her bicycle. She had lost four to thieves since settling in the city. She told Delaroche about the day she was strolling along the Singel and came upon a man selling used bicycles. Among the stock Astrid spotted one of her missing bikes. She told the man it was hers and demanded he give it back. He said she was crazy. She looked beneath the seat and found the name tag she had placed there. He said she was a liar. She grabbed hold of the bicycle and announced she was taking it back. He tried to stop her. She lashed sideways with an elbow, breaking his larynx, and then shattered his jaw with a vicious roundhouse kick. She picked up the bike and strolled away to a chorus of cheers, the heroine of every Amsterdammer who had ever lost a bike to the black market.

  She carried the coffee to the salon and sat down across from Delaroche. She removed the clasp from her hair and allowed it to fall about her shoulders. She was a stunningly attractive woman who had learned to conceal her beauty in order to blend into her surroundings. For a moment he enjoyed just looking at her.

  “So what brings you to Amsterdam, Jean-Paul? Business or pleasure?”

  “You, Astrid. I need your help.”

  She shook her head slowly and lit a cigarette. Delaroche anticipated she might be unwilling to work with him. She had killed often, and she had paid a very high price—a life spent underground on the run from every secret service and police force in the West. She was more settled than she had ever been, and now Delaroche was asking her to undo it all.

  “I’ve been out of the game for a long time, Jean-Paul. I’m tired of killing. I don’t enjoy it like you do.”

  “I don’t enjoy it. I do it because I’m paid money, and it’s all I know how to do. You were very good at it once.”

  “I did it because I believed in something. There’s a difference. And look at what it’s gotten me,” she said, gesturing at her surroundings. “Oh, I suppose it could be worse. I could be in Damascus. Jesus, that was awful.”

  Delaroche had heard she’d spent two years hiding in Syria, courtesy of Hafiz al-Assad and his intelligence service, and another two years in Libya as the guest of Mu’ammar Gadhafi.

  “I’m offering you a way out, a chance to put it all behind you, and enough money to live comfortably somewhere quiet for the rest of your life. Do you want to hear more?”

  She crushed out her cigarette and immediately lit another. “Damn you.”

  He rose and said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “How many people are we going to kill?”

  “I’ll be back in a half hour.”

  He went back to his hotel, packed, and checked out. Thirty minutes later he was climbing down the companionway of the Krista, clutching his small overnight bag and a nylon case holding his laptop computer. They sat in the salon again, Delaroche hunched over his computer, Astrid perched atop an ottoman. Delaroche went through the targets one by one. Astrid sat still as a statue, legs folded beneath her, one long hand cupping her chin, another holding a cigarette. She said nothing, asked no questions, for like Delaroche she had the gift of a flawless memory.

  “If you help me, I will pay you one million dollars,” Delaroche said, at the conclusion of the briefing. “And I will help you settle somewhere safe and a little more pleasant than Damascus.”

  “Who’s the contractor?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That’s not like you, Jean-Paul. They must be paying you a great deal of money.” She drew on the cigarette and blew a slender stream of smoke at the ceiling. “Take me to dinner. I’m hungry.”

  They had been lovers once, a long time ago, when Delaroche assisted the Red Army Faction with a particularly difficult assassination. They went back to the Krista after dining in a small French restaurant overlooking the Herengracht. Delaroche lay on the bed. Astrid sat down next to him and silently undressed.

  It had been many months since she had brought a man to her bed, and she took him very quickly the first time. Then she lit candles, and they smoked cigarettes and drank wine as rain rattled on the skylight above their bodies. She made love to him a second time very slowly, drawing his body into her long arms and legs, touching him as though he were made of crystal. Astrid liked to be on top. Astrid liked to be in control. Astrid trusted no one, especially her lovers. For a long time, she lay pressed against his body, kissing his mouth, staring into his eyes. Then she rose onto her knees, legs straddling his body, and it was as if Delaroche was no longer there. She toyed with her hair, she stroked the nip
ples of her small, upturned breasts. Then her eyes closed, and her head rolled back. She pleaded with him to come inside her. When he did she convulsed several times, then fell forward onto his chest, her body damp with sweat.

  After a moment, she rolled onto her back and watched rain running over the skylight.

  “Promise me one thing, Jean-Paul Delaroche,” she said. “Promise me you won’t kill me when you’re finished with me.”

  “I promise I won’t kill you.”

  She rose onto her elbow, looked into his eyes, and kissed his mouth.

  “Have you seen Arbatov lately?”

  “Yes, in Roscoff a few days ago.”

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “Same as ever,” Delaroche said.

  18

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Elizabeth Osbourne waited on the corner of 34th and M streets, jogging in place, blowing on her hands against the cold morning air. She looked at her watch. Susanna was five minutes late. She had many faults, but tardiness was not one of them. She walked across the street to a pay phone and punched in Susanna’s home number. The answering machine picked up.

  “Susanna, it’s Elizabeth. Pick up if you’re there. I’m waiting for you on the corner. I’ll give you a few more minutes, then I have to get going. I’ll try you at work.”

  She dialed Susanna’s desk at the Post. Her voice mail picked up.

  Elizabeth hung up without leaving a message.

  She looked up 34th Street but saw no sign of Susanna or Carson.

  She called home and checked her machine to see if Susanna had left a message there. The answering machine told her she had one message. She punched the access code, but it was only Max telling her a lunch meeting had been canceled.