Stuart Woods - Dirty Work

"And where would that be?"

"I have a cottage in Connecticut, in a lovely colonial village called Washington, and if you're willing to ditch your bodyguards, I'll take you up there."

"To the country? Now, that sounds wonderful."

"I have some catching up to do in my office," he said, "but I'll be ready to go by mid-afternoon. Put some things in a bag."

"Will do."

It was closer to four before Stone got free of work. The two bodyguards worked both sides of the street before calling Carpenter on her cell phone to report the coast clear. By that time, she and Stone were sitting in his car, waiting for the word to move. When it came, Stone opened the garage door with the remote and drove away from the house, closing the door behind them. They turned up Third Avenue, and as they made a left on Fifty-seventh Street, they nearly ran down a young woman, a well-dressed blonde.

The black Mercedes E55 with the darkened windows meant nothing to Marie-Therese, except that it had nearly killed her. The young woman meant nothing to Stone and Carpenter either.

Stone drove to the West Side Highway and turned north, toward Connecticut.

"How long a drive?" Carpenter asked.

"An hour and forty minutes from this spot," Stone said.

"Can I cook you dinner tonight?"

"I was going to take you out, but if you really know how to cook, well…"

"You'll just have to wait and see, won't you?" she said.

Marie-Therese showed one of her passports at the front door of the embassy on the Upper East Side and was let in. She approached a window in a thick glass wall.

"May I help you?" the woman at the window asked in Arabic.

"Yes," Marie-Therese replied. "I would like to speak to the vice-consul in charge of tourism."

The woman blinked and paused for a moment. "We do not have a vice-consul for tourism," she replied.

"Please tell him that Abdul suggested I speak with him."

Again, the woman said, "We do not have a vice-consul for tourism."

"He is expecting me," M-T replied.

"One moment, please." The woman left the window and went to a telephone. She spoke a few words, listened, then returned to the window, filled out a pass, and pushed it through the narrow opening. "Take the elevator to the fourth floor. You will be met."

"Thank you," M-T replied. She turned and walked to the elevator, then rode it to the fourth floor. As she stepped out of the car two men in civilian clothes approached her.

"Your handbag, please," the shorter of the two said. He was thickly built, with thick, black hair. Though clean-shaven, his beard showed through the skin.

She handed it over, then raised her arms for the search.

The shorter man emptied the handbag onto a small table in the hallway and quickly found the pistol and the ice pick. He picked them up in one hand and the handbag in the other. "Follow me, please." He led her down a hallway to the rear of the building, stopping at a steel doorway. He tapped a code into a keypad beside the door, then opened it and motioned for her to follow. He climbed a flight of stairs, entered another code beside another steel door, then took her down a hallway to a comfortably furnished office, where a rather handsome man sat at a desk, writing on a pad. The shorter man set M-T's handbag and weapons on the desk and left.

Without looking up, the man motioned for her to sit down. He kept her waiting while he finished writing, then closed the folder before him and set it aside.

"You have come to see us sooner than I expected," he said.

"I had a little time on my hands," she replied.

The man took a pair of latex gloves from a desk drawer, then picked up her little pistol. "Crude but effective, no doubt," he said.

"It does very nicely at short ranges. I wouldn't like to try to hit a target across a street."

He stood up, took a clump of keys from his pocket, and unlocked a steel cabinet. From it he removed a black cardboard box and set it on his desk.

"I'm told that you are proficient with firearms," he said.

"I am."

He handed her a pair of latex gloves, then opened the box, removed a pistol from it, and laid it on the desk. "Have you ever seen one of these?"

M-T donned the gloves, picked up the weapon, and examined it. It was a.22-caliber semiautomatic with a slightly thicker barrel than she would have expected. She ejected the magazine and examined that, too. "I've never seen one like this. It has no markings of any kind."

"We took it from a CIA agent in Beirut late last year," the man said. He took a silencer from the box and handed her that, too. She installed it with a simple half turn. "Very nice," she said. "An assassin's weapon – light, easily concealed, and, I've no doubt, very accurate, especially with the silencer."

"It was custom-manufactured for the CIA. Only a couple of hundred were made, according to the man we took it from in Beirut. While it has no manufacturer's markings and there are no identifying marks on any of its parts, we have discovered that the barrel's rifling leaves a very distinctive pattern on the bullets fired from it. Part of the inside of the barrel is a freely rotating cylinder, so every time the weapon is fired, a different ballistic pattern is etched onto the bullet."

"I've never heard of that," she said admiringly. "It's ingenious."

"We have also learned that if any American police department runs a ballistics check on one of its bullets, the FBI comparison program will flag it as being very special and highly classified."

"So, when the police remove the bullet from your traitorous colleague, it will be known that he was killed with a CIA weapon?"

"Exactly. But if you fire more than once, each bullet will appear to have come from a different weapon."

"And who is the gentleman? Do you have a photograph?"

"He is the man who brought you to this office," the man said. "The shorter of the two who greeted you at the elevator. Do you remember him well enough, or do you still want a photograph?"

"I remember him very well," M-T replied.

"He lives six blocks north of the embassy," the man said, "and he always walks home after work, leaving at around five-thirty. He walks up the east side of Park Avenue, where the sidewalks are wide and not crowded, even at rush hour."

"Will today be soon enough?" M-T asked.

"Today will be very satisfactory. What assistance do you require?"

"I will need an untraceable escape vehicle – a motorcycle, preferably – and someone to drive it. Can you do that in the time available?"

"We can manage that."

She looked at her watch. "I have a little over an hour. I'll reconnoiter and phone you with a location."

He wrote a number on a piece of paper and showed it to her. "Memorize it," he said.

She did so, then put the weapon into her handbag and stood up. "If there's nothing else?"

He took an envelope from his desk and handed it to her. "Some walking-around money, as the Americans say."

"I assume that, since the ballistics will identify the bullet as CIA, you will not need me to dump the weapon where it can be found?"

"Please keep it, with my compliments," he replied, standing up.

They shook hands, in spite of the latex gloves, and she left.

Downstairs, she walked to Park Avenue, then uptown. Four blocks along, she found a recessed, wrought-iron gate leading to a narrow alleyway beside a large apartment building. She stood in the recess and looked up and down Park. This would do nicely. She used her cell phone to call the number.

"Yes?"

She gave him the address of the building she stood next to. "Please have the vehicle follow your friend from a little distance. When the driver sees him fall, he is to pull up near the body. I will hop on, and he can drop me a few blocks away."