Andrew Britton - The Assassin

He looked over and saw she was shivering violently in the cold rain. A brief flash of lightning lit her pale face; her lips were tinged with blue. The temperature had plummeted since nightfall, and he knew it couldn’t be more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe closer to 30. She needed to get inside immediately.

He grabbed her good arm and pulled her down to the last houseboat. It was a large craft — nearly 60 feet in length — with a fiberglass arch over the flying bridge. Kealey climbed over the rail and helped her over. There was an aluminum table bolted to the deck, surrounded by chairs, potted plants by the rail. He went to the sliding glass door and tried to open it, but it was locked. There was a mat under his feet. He lifted it but didn’t find a key. Looking around, his gaze was drawn back to the plants. Ignoring Naomi’s bewildered expression, he crossed the deck and kneeled by the clay containers. He started dumping the soil out of them, one after the other, running his fingers through the dirt. Finally, he saw something glinting silver. He grabbed the key and went back to the door.

“How did you know that was there?” Naomi managed to ask. She was leaning against the exterior wall, shaking impossibly hard, her arms wrapped tightly around her body.

He didn’t reply, unlocking the door and sliding it open. He stepped inside, and she followed him in.

The salon was filled with comfortable, overstuffed couches, worn rugs on the floor, the galley beyond. There was a little light from the riverside lamps, enough to make out the general layout. Naomi went to one of the couches immediately. She collapsed onto the cushions and curled into a tight ball, her whole body trembling. Kealey went straight through to a side hall, finding the master stateroom a few seconds later. He searched the room, but it quickly became apparent that no one had been on the boat for a while. Unable to find any clothes, he stripped the blanket off the bed, then went through to the head. He rinsed the dirt from his hands in the sink. There was one towel on the rack. He grabbed it and went back to the salon. Kharmai was still in the same position.

“Naomi, you have to get out of those clothes.” She didn’t respond, her face pressed into the back of the couch. He sat on the edge and shook her gently. “Come on, sit up.”

She slowly did as he asked, and didn’t protest when he lifted the fleece pullover over her head, only wincing slightly when her left arm came up. Kealey thought the cold must have numbed the pain. The T-shirt came next. Then he pulled off her shoes, socks, and finally her jeans. Kealey quickly grabbed the towel and pressed it into her hands. She absently started to rub it over her damp skin. He looked away, resisting the urge to appreciate her seminude form. When she was mostly dry, he wrapped the blanket tightly around her and used the towel to finish drying her hair. Then he sat next to her and pulled the blanket down from her left shoulder.

“How bad is it?” she asked, turning to look for herself. Her voice was stronger now; she was starting to warm up a little. Her lips had returned to their normal color, and there was a pink glow to her cheeks which he found encouraging.

“Not as bad as I thought,” he said honestly. He could only find three puncture wounds. Two of the bearings were just beneath the skin, but the other was much deeper. He was guessing the first two were ricochets, the third a direct hit. She had been behind and to the left of Bennett when the explosion occurred; it was possible that the bearings just beneath her skin had passed through Bennett’s body before hitting her, which would explain why the wounds weren’t deeper. He felt a sudden, insane urge to laugh out loud. “You have no idea how lucky you are.”

“What about you?” she asked, looking suddenly alarmed. “Were you hit?”

Kealey hadn’t had time to think about it. He’d pulled off his pullover in the river, so he checked his exposed arms, then looked for holes in his T-shirt. The cuts on his hands had been rinsed clean, and he could see they weren’t too bad. He tried to focus, letting the adrenaline ebb, feeling for anything wrong. Nothing seemed to be out of place.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Listen, you have to get to a hospital. Your arm isn’t bad, but you can’t leave it. Not even until the morning.”

She shook her head immediately, the anxious expression falling away, replaced by a look of intense concentration. “The police will be checking the emergency rooms. We can’t risk it.”

“What about the embassy?”

She closed her eyes and leaned back on the couch, desperately trying to think of a way out. Bennett had been working with them as a favor to Jonathan Harper. Nobody else at the embassy even knew they were in the country, let alone what they were doing, but once they went to the CIA’s chief of station, they’d have to explain what had happened. His reaction would not be pretty, but that would be nothing compared to the fallout at Langley.

Naomi shook her head, realizing that there was no way she could fix the situation. The truth would come out sooner or later, and when it did, her career would be beyond saving. She suddenly felt a hot wave of guilt; she was thinking about her career while Shane Bennett — a fellow officer, a decent man — was lying dead in Ruhmann’s apartment. She remembered what had popped into her head as she’d stared down at Ruhmann’s ruined face, and she suddenly realized it was true: she had lost something fundamental, some inner sense of compassion. Somehow, without even noticing the change, she’d become a harder person than she’d ever thought possible.

“I guess we have no choice,” she finally said. Her voice was heavy with resignation and something else that Kealey couldn’t quite place. “The truth will come out sooner or later. Let’s just get it over with.”

“I have to find a phone. It won’t take long. I looked around… I don’t think anyone’s been here for a long time. You’ll be fine until I get back.”

He started toward the door. Naomi hesitated, then called his name. He turned to face her.

“Ryan, I…” She looked away and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, hoping the dark obscured her features. Her face felt hot. Once again he had saved her life at the risk of his own. If there was ever a time to express her feelings, this was it. But even though the words were on the tip of her tongue, she just couldn’t get them out.

“Don’t take too long, okay?”

BERLIN

The U.S. Embassy in Berlin is a boxy, charmless building of gray stone located in the embassy district south of Tiergarten, shielded behind a vast array of red and white barriers, concrete planters, and rows of razor-sharp concertina wire. The guardhouse is manned by unsmiling German police officers bearing automatic weapons; to stumble upon the sight, a tourist might start to wonder if the tangible divide between East and West was still in place.

Just after 7:00 the next morning, Ryan Kealey lay on a bunk in a spare room on the second floor. A television tuned to CNN was mounted against the far wall. The volume was barely audible, as Naomi was sleeping soundly in the next bed, but he could hear enough to get the general drift. The situation in Iraq was escalating day by day. Twelve hours earlier, a series of coordinated attacks had taken place in Basra, propagated by Syrian insurgents. Three police stations were bombed in the space of forty minutes, along with a local office of the International Red Cross. Since the attacks occurred in the evening, the number of reported casualties was surprisingly low. As a result, the story took a backseat to the more dramatic events in Baghdad. Six hours before the bombings in Basra, a truck laden with seventy pounds of HMX had crashed into a Green Zone checkpoint. Seventeen were reported dead, including 5 U.S. soldiers, among them a captain in the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.