Tom Cain - Assassin

No sooner had he got rid of the ambassador than the light went on again.

‘It’s Bobby DiLivio in the speechwriters’ office,’ came his assistant’s voice. ‘He wants to know if you can spare him five minutes to look over the opening paragraph of the President’s speech.’

The men who make tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars a year from organized crime do not possess the intelligence agencies – with electronic infrastructure capable of spying on virtually any communication, anywhere – available to the world’s richest nations. They can, however, pay for the very best private-sector specialists in every form of surveillance and investigation. They also have the advantage that they do not even have to pretend to be bound by the law. They are thus free to bribe, blackmail, coerce and otherwise extort information. They routinely use assassination to further their aims. And they can, like any other spy network, insert their people as sleeper agents into legitimate occupations.

Bobby Kula, for example, was a highly regarded computer wizard who played an invaluable role developing and maintaining the operational software that enabled the Department of State to do its job. He was an Albanian-American, a fact of which he was proud, having arrived in the US with his parents when he was just four years old. He was equally proud of his doctorate from ‘Course 6’, otherwise known as the Electronic and Computer Science department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His security-clearance procedure had shown no record of any criminal activity; no predisposition to aberrant behaviour of any kind; no reason at all to suspect that he posed any risk to the security of his adopted country. It would have taken a detailed understanding of Albania’s clan-based culture to understand that Bobby Kula was distantly related on his mother’s side to a senior member of a gang run by the Visar clan, which had become one of the biggest international players in the trafficking of drugs, weapons and, above all, people. The importance of this family tie had been drummed into him from his earliest boyhood: both the advantages that it offered and the duties it involved.

It was pure chance that Kula overheard two State officials talking about the President’s proposed war on slavery while sitting in a men’s room cubicle, invisible to the officials standing at the urinals. His response was anything but random. He understood at once how the new policy could impact on the family business and conducted a private trawl through the department’s computers, easily bypassing the security systems that he himself had helped develop and install, to find out more about it.

Having come up with a date and a place for the President’s announcement, Kula called a friend at the Albanian embassy in DC and asked him and his family over for a barbecue he and his wife Cindy were having that Sunday afternoon. The invitation would have aroused no suspicion, even if Kula were being watched, which he was not: Albania is an ally of the US and it is perfectly normal for diplomats of all nations to make social contacts in the cities where they are posted. It is, in fact, their job. That this particular diplomat was also connected to the Visar clan was a detail of which the American security agencies were unaware. But even if they had been, there are few agents able to speak Gjuha shqipe, the language of Albania, particularly not in the colloquial north-western Geg dialect in which Bobby Kula and his contact were chatting over the franks, slaw and Coors Lights. The contact used the same dialect when passing the news on to the palatial villa in the hills of Nueva Andalucía, looking over the Spanish resort of Puerto Banús, where Arjan Visar was spending the weekend.

Visar was an intellectual among gangsters. He had a chess-player’s mind, was able to think several moves ahead, devising strategies of his own and anticipating those of his opponents. He came to a swift conclusion about the implications of the information he had received and what needed to be done, but not wishing to act rashly, he gave himself a further hour to let his mind settle. Then he reconsidered the problem and concluded that his initial response was the correct one. Only at that point did he start giving orders.

Damon Tyzack was invisible to anyone driving by less than fifty yards from where he lay on the grassy slope. But he could see the cars and trucks on the narrow local road, just off Highway 88 in Amador County, northern California. And he could hear the tyres whispering on the blacktop, like waves on a shingle beach. The landscape, too, possessed a gentle, rolling swell, and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada were softened to a smoky grey by the dying light of a summer dusk. The tourism people hereabouts called their patch the Heart of the Mother Lode, in memory of the forty-niners who’d thronged there during the Gold Rush. These days the mines were gone, or converted into visitor attractions, and the land was given over to vineyards and ranches, like the one that sprawled for a couple of thousand acres on the far side of the road.

The owner was a financier by the name of Norton Krebs, whose business was based in San Francisco, 125 miles away. For the past five years, Krebs had handled investments for corporations controlled by Tyzack and his associates. These investments had lost a great deal of their value and the kind of clients Krebs had cultivated took a less forgiving view than the average investor of a financial adviser continuing to pay himself large fees while delivering poor performance. They saw the destruction of their wealth as, in every sense, a capital offence. So Krebs was marked for death.

The hit would go down within the next few minutes, but the hard work had been done over the past several days. The morning after he’d arrived in San Francisco, Tyzack had ridden Amtrak’s California Zephyr train to Salt Lake City, then caught a bus to Boise. There he’d bought a second-hand Toyota Tacoma truck, for cash, using fake ID in Carver’s name. He drove it back down to Amador County and spent three full days familiarizing himself with the details of Norton Krebs’s life, movements and environment. He took care to speak to people in the towns of Jackson, Iona, Sutter Creek and Amador City, nearest to the Krebs ranch, both to gain information and leave a memory in their minds – a memory of a dark-haired, green-eyed Englishman.

Late on Saturday night, he’d driven across northern California and into Nevada, to the parking garage of the Lake Tahoe casino where Krebs was spending the weekend. That was where Tyzack had replaced the tyre-valves of Krebs’s Escalade with valves that looked identical to any casual inspection, but which contained a radio-activated explosive filament. When triggered, they were enough to cause a blow-out that would, if carefully timed and located, cause any but the finest driver to lose control of their vehicle.

The booby-trapped valves were an old Russian trick, but Tyzack had been taught about them when he had served in the British Special Forces. Tyzack hadn’t spent long serving Her Majesty. But he’d learned a very great deal.

Beneath him the road curved sharply to the left, following the line of the valley. Just before the turn, the land fell away from the road into a minor ravine around thirty feet deep. A live oak tree grew by the side of the ravine, centuries old to judge by the mighty girth of its trunk and the spread of its evergreen branches.

Between the road and the ravine stretched a barbed-wire fence. Norton Krebs was a perfectionist. He prided himself on demanding nothing but the best. He’d spent a fortune upgrading the boundary of his land with wire that was strong enough to stop a charging bull, stretched tight between posts bedded firmly in the ground. Tyzack was counting on that perfectionism to kill his target.