Reckoning

Book 4: Crime Minister

by Ian Barclay

Genres: Crime Fiction; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Ten American oil experts kicked out of Iran. Ten wanted men on a hit list stretching clear across the globe. They've stared dying one by one, within weeks of each other, the mode of murder different in every case. The kill count stands at five down, five to go. It's a case of international petroleum politics and its dirtiest and bloodiest. The big energy conglomerate doesn't want to pay the million, but it knows it has to. Because only Richard Dartley, the world's most expensive assassin and the man who never misses can beat a professional terminator every bit as deadly as himself.

Release date: October 14, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 425

Sample

They left the highway at Snail Road and then followed Commercial Street into Provincetown, catching glimpses of open water
in the gaps between the white clapboard houses.


“You can see what it must have been like when it was an old New England fishing town,” Leonard Hill said to his wife, beside
him on the front seat of the car.


“It’s pretty,” she said without much enthusiasm. The kids in the back seat had been getting on her nerves all the way from
Hyannis Port. She could not even be sure back there if the house behind the tall hedges had been the Kennedy compound. Leonard
had been too stubborn to stop and ask. Now he wanted to show them whales and had brought them farther along the Cape to Provincetown.
Frankly, she was more interested in Kennedys.


Closer to the center of town, stores lined the streets and people had to step off the narrow sidewalks
to pass one another. The parking lot was at the harbor. They walked along the Town Wharf to where white painted boats, with
two decks, were tied. Toward land, behind the town, they could see the tower of the Pilgrim Monument. At Plymouth Rock, a
couple of days ago, they had been told that there was no historical evidence that the Mayflower had landed first here in Provincetown before going on to Plymouth. No doubt people thought differently here. Leonard bought
tickets at a wooden kiosk on the wharf.


“We’re in luck,” he said. “The Sao Vicente sails in a few minutes and has been having sightings every time out this week.” He noticed his son fiddling with his Walkman
tape cassette player. The kid was forever walking around with the headphones on and the damn thing booming through his brain.
“Don’t play that now,” Leonard said to his son. “Let in the real world for a change.”


“That man gave me a new tape while you were buying the tickets,” the twelve-year-old boy explained. “I never heard the group
before.”


“Just wait,” Leonard said. “Play it later.” He looked down the wharf at the back of the man walking away, the one who had
given the tape to his son. He had broad shoulders and cropped blond hair. Leonard turned to his wife. “Why did he give him
the tape?”


“Said it was a promotion for some new band. He mentioned the name.” She shrugged. “They’re supposed to be the new thing.”
She was certain she had seen the man before at Plymouth. Well, almost certain.
But she would certainly know him again, and if she thought he was … Leonard would just laugh at her, or get mad and say she
was flirting with the guy, being kind of sensitive about that since he was away a lot and had to wonder what was going on
at home.


They crossed a gangplank onto the boat after Leonard handed a pretty girl their tickets. They climbed a flight of metal steps
to the upper deck and sat on a bench. Ahead of them, a man spun the ship’s wheel and looked through the glass-fronted wheelhouse
as he took the boat slowly away from the wharf, its big engine vibrating down below. He and another man had several days’
growth of beard and spoke to each other in Portuguese. A short chubby guy announced that he was the ship’s naturalist and
went into a spiel about whales being mammals and suckling their young and having to breathe air. The land slipped away from
them.


Leonard’s wife had two questions for the naturalist. Was it going to stay calm? What if a big whale, just fooling around,
lifted up the boat on his back?


The first whales they saw were minkes, which looked not much bigger than porpoises and didn’t spout. Nobody said so, but these
weren’t exactly the Moby Dick class. The Portuguese captain had been scooting the powerful ninety-foot boat around like a
motorbike, and now he took off at top speed, doing a kind of “wheelie” with the back end of the boat. The naturalist explained
that although the ship had all kinds of sophisticated equipment for navigation, measuring water depth and temperature, and
so forth, they still had
to use the old ways to sight whales. Radar cannot detect them because they contain no metal. Most sonar cannot pick up the
sounds whales make, except for supersensitive equipment not suited to rushing around on top of the water.


“We look for three things,” he said. “Birds dancing, footprints and puffs of smoke.” He paused to enjoy the mystification
he had caused. “The birds dancing are usually petrels. They often touch the surface with their feet as they hover over the
water to pick up small fish frightened to the top by the whale’s movements beneath them. A footprint is a slick boil in the
watei made by the flukes on the whale’s tail after it dives. This remains quite a while, because a good-sized whale can create
twelve G’s of force in a dive, about the same that an astronaut feels in a rocket launch. The puffs of smoke are the most
reliable sign. This is the plume of mist raised when a whale surfaces to blow. It has been holding its breath underneath the
water and lets it out in a big gasp when it surfaces, just like we would. The main difference is that the whale has mucus
to filter out the nitrogen, so it doesn’t get the bends when it surfaces quickly. It blows this mucus out along with condensation
and spray.” The naturalist looked at the Hill’s son. “What did the old whaler call out when they saw this?”


“Thar she blows,” the boy replied in a bored matter-of-fact voice as he fiddled with the headphones of his Walkman.

Next they saw a school of finbacks making foot
prints and blowing. They took in the facts that finbacks grow up to eighty-eight feet long, can swim at twenty-seven miles
per hour for seventeen hours without stopping, and can eat as much as three tons of food per day.


The kids were getting restless, apparently having expected some kind of scene out of a monster movie. Leonard’s wife was grateful
that the animals were ignoring them. His son said it was a pity they couldn’t harpoon one. That would be fun.


“Dad, can I listen to the tape now? I’ll use the headphones, so no one will hear.”

Leonard sighed. He wished his family had a closer feel for the outdoor world. It was partly his fault, spending so much time
away from them. The boy probably spent all his time in front of the TV. He nodded for his son to go ahead.


The boy pushed the PLAY button on the Walkman.

A ball of bright orange flame expanded instantly to a sphere of writhing, blinding light. The shock wave blew out the wheelhouse
windows and lifted two passengers bodily over the rail and dumped them -in the sea. Others were less fortunate. Leonard Hill,
his wife, boy and girl lay on the deck, unrecognizable, blackened, mutilated, dead. The heat of the explosion had blistered
the paint ofiF the ship’s steel. Those sitting nearest the Hill family had been partly protected by the bench and by the bodies
of the bomb’s first victims. They lay on the deck, injured, groaning with pain. The naturalist and the two Portuguese had
been knocked unconscious by the blast. They lay on the wheelhouse floor. One of
the Portuguese sat up and looked in a bewildered way through the smoke at the bodies and people staggering around. The ship
was still moving forward, veering to starboard.


An unhurt passenger at the stern rail yelled forward, “We’ve lost two overboard. I threw life preservers to them.” He pointed
to where they were in the water.


The Portuguese got unsteadily to his feet, went to the wheel and brought the Sao Vincente around. He slowed the engine and sent out Mayday calls over the radio, giving their position.


A humpback whale rose alongside, its tiny eyes peering at them from its huge barnacle-encrusted bulk. It was as if the sea
creature sensed they were in trouble and came in close, wanting to help.


Charley Woodgate threw the Washington Post on the Maryland farmhouse kitchen table and said, “Last thing the naturalist fella remembers was seeing the kid push the
button on the Walkman. It had to be the cassette. Someone must have given it to the kid.”


“Who were the victims?” Richard Dartley asked.

“No names given until they notify next of kin. Seven dead, nine badly wounded. A cassette bomb.” Charley shook his head in
disgust. “I don’t like the sound of it.” Woodgate made weapons for a living, so he had more than an idle interest in what
exactly had happened. “There’s no one in this country who makes stuff like that, unless it’s one of those IRA men from Northern
Ireland, hiding out. They use cassettes over
there, radio-controlled. But those fellas are usually not for hire.”


“You’re thinking they hit another oilman?” Dartley asked.

“I got that feeling.”

“I think you could be right,” Dartley conceded. He was Woodgate’s nephew, about forty, square-jawed with high cheekbones.
His hooded eyes were a light gray-green, and his thinning black hair was crewcut. His muscular body was that of a man who
ran ten miles a day and pumped iron.


Charley Woodgate was in his sixties and had a lame leg, the result of a wound at Monte Cassino, when he got the notion to
chase the Germans off the hill on his own. “Could be some maniac, of course,” Charley said, “but I’m ready to bet it ain’t.
And a loanshark or drug hit would never be done that way.”


“How many of those oilmen are here in the States right now?” Dartley asked.

“Three. One with his family in Ohio, another hiding someplace in the south, the third in L.A.”

Woodgate and Dartley had been tossing back and forth the possibilities of an offer from an oil company for some days. Middle
Eastern fanatics had been wiping out American employees of the oil company, and the company wanted someone to neutralize the
assassins in a hurry. The money was good, but neither Dartley nor Woodgate were very keen on the job. As a professional hitman,
Dartley needed a precisely defined target. He
was a lone wolf and had no illusions about confronting a horde of Moslem fundamentalist zealots.


The World American Oil Company had approached Charley Woodgate, who acted as Richard Dartley’s contact. In turn World American
was acting on behalf of one of its subcontractors, Global Hydrocarbons, which had its main office in Houston, Texas. Global
Hydrocarbons was an oil and gas exploration firm. Ten of their field geologists were mapping major new fields in Iran for
World American when the Shah was overthrown. All ten escaped, but only after severe mistreatment at the hands of the Islamic
fundamentalists. Global transferred them to Iraq. After they were there a short while the Iran-Iraq war started—and was still
continuing.


They had not been kicked around in Iran solely because they were Americans. The Ayatollah’s men wanted the mapping data on
the new fields. World American was being expelled and the Iranians were taking over oil production themselves. They were hiring
European technicians to replace the Americans, but there were not too many people with the skills and knowledge of the Global
geologists.


The Iranians stopped short of torture—or hadn’t gotten around to it by the time the Americans escaped. All were detained for
lengthy questioning. It was made clear that their lives were in danger, and that the only safe thing for them to do was to
arrange a quick exit by making up new geological maps of the exploration area, since they had destroyed the ones they had
been working on. To their credit and pride, not a single one of the
Americans gave them even the smallest bit of information. They were kicked and forced to stand for hours as a matter of routine,
and they were told constantly that they would never leave Iran alive unless they cooperated, but nobody had taken a razor
blade or lighted cigarette butt to them. They escaped over the Turkish border in a Volkswagen minibus driven by two Iranian
employees of World American.


What happened next was not so clear. Information was given to the Iraqi armed forces on the new fields and the installations
already in place to service them. Iraqi bombs and missiles reduced everything to twisted metal and rubble, making the fields
impossible to develop. Charley Woodgate had been unable to find out who had given the information to the Iraqis, whether it
was World American, Global Hydrocarbon or some or all of the ten geologists. That hardly mattered anymore. Khomeini blamed
the geologists as individuals and swore that the long arm of Islamic justice would catch up with them and so forth. That was
where the matter rested, for some years—until the geologists started dying one by one, within weeks of each other. Clearly
the Ayatollah’s threat was being fulfilled.


“No one thought anything very much when John Arnold was killed in Kuwait,” Charley told his nephew. “He was crushed beneath
his jeep when it flipped over a hillside. No one saw it happen and Arnold was alone. Yet everybody believed, naturally enough,
that it was an accident. A lot of oilfield work is dangerous and the men there are used to serious accidents happening.
Then Bernard Phillips was shot after a barroom argument in a small Texas town. He didn’t even work for Global Hydrocarbons
anymore, so no immediate connection was made with the closeness of his death to that of Arnold. The shooter got away and Bernard
Phillips just became part of the country’s handgun mortality statistics.”


“I could buy those two deaths close together as just a coincidence, since they were in different parts of the world and one
seemed an accident,” Dartley confirmed.


“Third one to go was Joseph Donovan, in Saudi Arabia,” Woodgate continued. “He died with a knife in his back at a market in
Riyadh. Fourth was Roger Elliott. He was working for Global in Indonesia at the time. They still haven’t put a name on what
was in his coffee. The damn thing worked by slow paralysis until his lungs finally quit pumping. So there you have it—a faked
accident, a gun, a knife, poison. They don’t stick to any mode of operation.”


“They’re going out of their way to make the killings look dissimilar,” Dartley said, “which in a way is a common thread. What
interests me more is that the first and third killings took place within four hundred miles of each other. Why go halfway
around the world to do the killing in between in Texas?”


“Could be they have separate hit teams, one working here, one in the Middle East.”

“Then this job is not for me,” Dartley said. “I don’t want to get into anything like that. But I don’t
believe that’s what is happening. I think the assassins had some reason to strike first in Ku. . .