John Abbott - Scimitar

The assignment was top priority in that one of their own was in imminent danger and remedial action was imperative. This may not have been a true mayday situation, where exposure and arrest — or even termination — of an agent was imminent; the job fell just short of an emergency Code Red designation. But it was serious enough, and Sonny’s orders were unmistakable. In the trade, “measles” was the international nomenclature for any killing engineered so that death would seem to have occurred either accidentally or through natural causes. Francine Dumar had to be eliminated, but discreetly. Francine Dumar had to contract a deadly case of measles.

He arranged her suicide. Overdose of the sleeping pill Seconal — which he’d forced down her throat one cold November night while her parents were attending a concert at the War Memorial on West Lafayette. Suicide note in her own handwriting — duplicated by their cobbler in New York. Sonny’s initial research had indicated that she was very popular at school, and also sexually promiscuous. The note explained in adolescent prose, which he himself had composed, that her period was three weeks overdue and she thought she was pregnant. Entirely plausible, given her reputation. He still considered it a brilliant touch, considering how inexperienced he’d been at the time.

Francine Dumar. A beautiful girl with long dark hair and brown eyes. He remembered that she’d been wearing nothing but a nightgown when he came into the small development house through a back door he’d picked with a nail file, the way he’d been taught at Kufra. She’d pleaded for her life. He’d pulled her head back by the long dark hair, forced the pills into her mouth, clamped his hand over her nose and mouth until she was compelled to swallow. Thirty-five of them, ten more than the lethal dose. She was comatose on the bedroom floor before he left the house. He knew she would be dead before her parents got home from the concert.

Saddest assignment he’d ever had.

Her father later defected, possibly suspecting that his only daughter had been murdered by his own people. His name appeared regularly on GID hit lists, but Langley had given him a new identity and so far he hadn’t surfaced anywhere.

Sonny looked at his watch.

He planned to revisit the Plaza early tomorrow morning, this time without the informative Miss Lubenthal as a mentor and guide. With her eager assistance today, he had learned the location of the pantry servicing the Baroque Room...

“May I take a peek into the kitchen, please?”

“Well... why would you...?”

“I just want to make sure it’s clean.”

“Clean? Well, I can assure you it meets the highest sanitary standards. In any event, that isn’t the kitchen. It’s the pantry. The kitchen is downstairs.”

“Oh. Well, how does the food get up here?”

“On the elevator.”

“And is the pantry where they prepare it for serving?”

“Yes.”

“Well, may I take a look at the pantry then?”

“I’d be happy to show it to you, but there’s an Orthodox Jewish wedding tonight, and the caterer might not like...”

“The caterer?”

“Are you familiar with the word trayf ?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“Well, I just don’t think he’d like us in the pantry while he’s setting out his kosher dishes and things.”

... and had also been able to locate and mark in memory all the exits leading from the room. Tomorrow morning, he would wander the back stairs without Miss Lubenthal in tow, searching for both an escape route and a possible lay-in location, should his final plan call for one. Earlier this afternoon, under guise of asking about a dais for his sister and her bridal party...

“Do they ever do that? Sit at a separate long table?”

“Oh, yes, to avoid seating conflicts between the two families. That way, the bride and groom, together with the bridal party, sit at a table on a raised dais, and there are no problems. Here in the Baroque Room, we normally...”

... and had gone on to show him where the dais was usually placed, there on the left, with the huge arched windows facing the park at right angles to it.

That’s where Thatcher’ll be sitting, he’d thought.

And maybe Bush as well.

With an exit door close by, leading to the pantry on the left. And directly ahead, a visible flight of steps climbing upward.

He would reconnoiter those steps tomorrow morning. Meanwhile...

He picked up the receiver again, and dialed the 800 number for Epsilon Chemical Supplies in Meriden, Connecticut.

The liaison officer seemed not at all bothered by the fact that counterfeit British passports were in circulation. Apparently, this was a common occurrence and not something to get one’s feathers—

“In any case,” Geoffrey said, “it was only one passport. That is, they were one and the same passport, with different names in them, you see. The dead Scotsman’s passport, that is.”

The liaison officer glared at him.

His name was Joseph Worthy, or so he’d said, who knew what it might really be? He explained to Geoffrey at once that he was not with Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Office, as he’d told the noisy Miss Phipps, but served instead as liaison between MI6 and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, of which the British Consulate here in New York was an integral part. It was the Secret Intelligence Agency, in fact...

“SIS, MI6, call it what you will,” Worthy said.

... who’d contacted him early this afternoon to report the alarming fact that two women with identical green scimitar tattoos had been found dead in Manhattan, both of them carrying false British passports. The passports, he was now saying, were of no interest whatever to him. Sixpence a dozen, buy them in any local pharm...

“Well, surely not,” Geoffrey said.

“Figure of speech,” Worthy said.

“I should hope so.”

“The scimitar tattoo, on the other hand, is something of concern, especially since a former prime minister will be here in the city a fortnight from now.”

“Nine days from now, actually,” Geoffrey said.

“Worse yet,” Worthy said. “Who’s the police officer investigating these homicides?”

“A man named Allan Santorini. He’s with Homicide North. In the Twenty-Fifth Precinct uptown.”

“Seem any good?”

“A typical New York detective,” Geoffrey said, and shrugged. Unwashed, unshaven and uncouth, he thought.

“Does he have any idea what those green scimitars might mean?”

“No. And neither do I.”

“Does the name Sayf Quaṣīr mean anything to you?”

“No, what is it?”

“It’s an elite Libyan intelligence group.”

“It’s an Iranian terrorist group,” Santorini said.

“ Simsir ,” the other man said, and nodded. “I’m familiar with it.”

They were sitting in the twelfth-floor offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at 26 Federal Plaza downtown. Santorini had called here the moment he’d made his computer discovery. The special agent with him now was named Michael Grant. He was fifty-three years old and balding, and he told Santorini that his biggest recent assignment had been rounding up a gang of rustlers — here in the East, would you believe it, rustlers! — who’d been dumb enough to move cattle interstate from New York to Pennsylvania, thereby invoking the wrath of the federal agency. Through the windows behind him, the Statue of Liberty and the Jersey shore were clearly visible.

“Do these people tattoo themselves?” Santorini asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” Grant said.

“Little sword on their breasts?”

“I’m not that familiar with them.”