L'Assassin Read online

  “There’s at least one camera in the kitchen. There are sure to be others. I didn’t look around and you shouldn’t either. But after we go back inside, at some point check your watch against the clock. Then look at the ribbon holding the clock on the wall. Just at the top of the ribbon, where the hanger goes into the wall, is a camera no bigger than this.” Jean Marie held the glowing end of his cigarette under Louis’s nose.

  “Aha,” said Louis. “So that’s it.”

  “What?” said Jean Marie. “Then you did know?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Louis. “But it may explain the robbery, or what I took to be a robbery. My house was robbed a while ago. It seemed inconsequential at the time. Not much damage, not much taken. But that might be a part of what the robbery was about. I was wondering, and now, thanks to you, Jean Marie, I have a good idea.”

  “What do you want to do?” asked Jean Marie. “I’ll help you, of course.”

  “What do you mean?” said Louis.

  “Do you want them removed? The bugs, I mean. I’d suggest leaving them alone for now.” He thought about that for a moment. “I’m sure it’s not us,” he said. “Not the French, I mean. I’ll help you find and get rid of them if you want.”

  “I know you will, Jean Marie. Thank you.” Louis reached out and touched Jean Marie’s shoulder. He had known him since he was a small boy. “For the moment, I think I’ll do nothing.”

  “That’s right,” said Jean Marie. “And don’t try to find the others. You should do that only when you are ready for them to know that you know. You know who’s doing it, don’t you?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Is it Bowes again?”

  “I’m guessing it is, but I don’t know why. Once I figure out why, then I’ll know what to do.”

  Louis went to Renard’s office the next morning. He scanned the walls of the office as he walked in. Maybe the entire village of Saint Leon was bugged. Louis told Renard about the camera Jean Marie had found. Renard laid down the pencil he was holding. His eyes widened. “You don’t mean it. Is that true? So that was it,” he said. “Jean Marie found it? So that was it.” He stood up. “Where is it? Show me.”

  Louis laughed. “I’ll show it to you later. I don’t want whoever it is to see us staring into their camera. First I need to figure out what they’re after.”

  There was always the possibility that they simply meant to intimidate Louis. Even someone as familiar with espionage and eavesdropping as Louis was could be thrown off by having his life watched and listened to. He might even be driven to do something incriminating. It was not unknown for people who knew they were being observed to begin behaving as though they were actually guilty of something. “Knowing you are being watched changes everything,” said Louis. “You become self-conscious and furtive. That might be of use to Bowes.”

  “If it is Bowes,” said Renard. “You keep assuming it’s Bowes. But you don’t know. Besides, this is different from the burglary. The camera was cleverly placed. You weren’t meant to find it. Maybe,” suggested Renard after a minute’s thought, “the correct answer is the most obvious one. Maybe someone just wants to know what you’re up to.”

  “But I’m not up to anything. And surely anyone who would plant such devices would know that already. Maybe,” said Louis, “they want my vinaigrette recipe.”

  As it happened, it was Solesme who figured out what they were after, whoever they were. Louis did not tell her at first that the camera was even there. But Solesme always knew when he was keeping something from her. “I keep things from you for your own good,” he said. “For your safety,” he added.

  “For my safety?” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous. I have a few months left. At best. What safety are you talking about?” Louis tried to protest. She raised her hand to his mouth to stop him. “Besides,” she said. “I want to know everything. Everything about everything. While I can still know anything about anything.”

  Louis told her about the camera, and Solesme thought about it for a moment. She did not ask to see it. But then she wondered whether a hidden camera might not be used to show something going on that had in fact not necessarily actually gone on. “Maybe it is not there to inform the one who placed it there. Maybe it is there for other people. Don’t you call it misinformation?”

  “Disinformation?” said Louis.

  “Disinformation,” she said. “After the American war in Afghanistan weren’t Osama bin Laden’s people using cameras to show he was still alive and well? But no one knew for quite a long time whether he was alive or not, and many believed he was not. And the Americans showed trucks in Iraq that were supposedly mobile biological laboratories or some such business, and they turned out not to be. And then there are those kidnappings and beheadings. The people in those tapes claim to be certain people doing certain things. But are they who they say they are? They quote holy verses, but isn’t that for public consumption?

  “Maybe someone, he, if it is him again”—Solesme did not like to even pronounce Hugh Bowes’s name—”is staging something. Maybe he wants it to look like something is going on in your house that is not really going on, something that might somehow incriminate you.”

  “So,” said Louis, “the camera could have been planted long before the robbery.” He thought about it for a moment. “Maybe,” he said, “they’ve been in and out of my house …”

  “Think of it,” said Solesme. She shuddered. “It is horrible.”

  “It is an unpleasant prospect,” he said. “But now we know something.” Louis stared at Solesme for a moment and then took her by the arms and kissed her forehead enthusiastically. “You are right. You are right. I am sure you are right,” he said.

  “Of course I am right,” she said.

  And, in fact, she was right.

  IV

  Hugh Bowes gazed through the tinted glass as his car carried him along Pennsylvania Avenue. The reflected sunlight danced from one office building to the next as they drove, and Hugh raised his hand to shield his dazzled eyes. Seymour, his driver, slowed down as they approached the White House and threaded their way through the concrete barricades. Police wearing bulletproof vests and carrying automatic weapons stood along the way and watched them pass.

  Seymour lowered the front and rear windows so the White House guards could peer inside. Once the guards recognized both the driver and his passenger, the heavy iron gates swung open. A guard waved them up the drive toward the White House while another guard phoned to announce their arrival.

  They stopped under the portico, and Seymour got out and stepped to the back of the car. He lifted the wheelchair from the trunk, unfolded it, and rolled it forward. Hugh waited until Seymour opened the car door before he swung his legs out. He planted his feet and pulled himself upright. Seymour held him by one arm and Hugh lowered himself onto the chair.

  Hugh had gotten fatter since his retirement. He had less hair too, although it was still black and still slicked back against his head. The thick lenses of his glasses made his eyes, which were actually rather large and soft, seem small and remote, as though he were looking at you from far inside his skull. The result was a look of utter indifference, which he had learned over the years to use to excellent effect.

  Hugh took a variety of medications with every meal, and there was a growing list of things he could not eat or drink. He had never been particularly fit, but now his body appeared to consist almost entirely of unsupported flesh. He preferred not to know this about himself, so he dressed and undressed without looking in the mirror. He consulted mirrors only when he was fully clothed, to make certain that his collar was crisp and straight, his tie properly knotted, his jacket smooth across his breast, his hair in place.

  Hugh had not reached this state of decrepitude because of illness or age. He could have been said to be decrepit out of conviction. He despised his physical self and found it to be a nuisance and an impediment to the success and fulfillment he continually pursued. Hugh rode when he co
uld walk. He leaned on someone’s arm when it was available. When the physicians who treated him dared to suggest he should try to take a short walk every day, he regarded them with contempt.

  Hugh lived almost entirely in his mind, where he was quick and agile and could still maneuver with grace and intelligence and patience. His ambition was as enormous as it had ever been. It was true he lived on broiled fish and rice, but his appetite for power remained huge and all but insatiable.

  Hugh had once been married to a beautiful and accomplished woman. He had hoped, when they married, that marriage to her would complete him, an astonishingly, almost touchingly, naïve hope for a man of his experience and position. But it had not worked out that way. How could it have done so? She had failed to recognize his needs or to engage his desires, principally because he had done his best to conceal his needs and desires from her.

  When Hugh had courted her, she must have seen something in him besides his intelligence and success, a suggestion of warmth perhaps, or a certain tender fragility, for he had both. But these were qualities about himself that Hugh detested, and so, once they were married, he saw any effort by Ruth—that was her name—to connect with his warmth, or his fragility, or any of his other human qualities as insulting and contemptible. It was as though she were pointing out his essential insufficiencies to him. Her efforts were greeted on his part with chilly wariness at first, later with withdrawal from her, and eventually with hostility and rage.

  Hugh had not proved to be at all skilled at love. After Ruth died, he had never tried romantic love again. Love did not suit him. Enmity was another matter altogether. Enmity was his métier. He had discovered varieties and manifestations of enmity that dazzled his opponents even as it left them defeated at his feet.

  Hugh Bowes moved through life strategically. He had positioned himself well from the very beginning of his career and had climbed from one point to the next without ever yielding his desire for power and influence and, ultimately, for control. By the same token, Hugh could be kind and generous, but these actions were not the result of feelings of kindness or generosity. Hugh knew what kindness and generosity looked like, and he did his best to exhibit these traits when it suited his purpose. Along the way he dispatched personal rivals, enemies, and those who just happened to get in his way with cunning and skill, and with such artfulness that they usually did not know that it was Hugh who had done them in. People were charmed and amused by him, even as he was plotting their annihilation.

  Hugh could not love those close to him, but he loved his enemies. Not as the Bible instructs that we should. He loved them once they had fallen, because they had fallen. He loved them for having been vanquished by him. He loved them for being weak or inept or vulnerable, and for revealing to him, yet again, his own power, or, put another way, for helping him conceal from himself his own terrible and unforgivable fragility.

  Politics was the perfect medium for Hugh’s temperament and ambitions. It required skill and cunning of the sort that came naturally to him. He saw politics, and especially high international politics, as the arena where champions met to do battle. Like Hugh, his rivals had few illusions beyond their own importance. They engaged in their wars, their treaties, their shifting alliances, their betrayals and realignments without concern for those who suffered. They operated without sentiment or, for that matter, acrimony. They saw themselves as above sentiment.

  Louis Morgon was the fly in Hugh’s ointment. Louis had a way of intruding into Hugh’s thoughts at inopportune moments, like now, for instance, as Hugh waited to see the president. The trouble was that Hugh could not forget that he had suffered defeat and humiliation at Louis’s hands. Hugh had the sense that Louis, more than anyone else, had seen into his soul. Of course, Louis would have found this idea preposterous. He knew some of Hugh’s weaknesses, that was all.

  A copy of Louis’s tape recording of Hugh’s threatening voice had recently come into Hugh’s possession. There was no denying that it was Hugh’s voice on the tape. And it was angry. “Stop the son of a bitch. Stop him!” Those were his words. But what did they mean? And who was he threatening? It would be easy to manufacture a plausible and harmless explanation for his outburst. One could not even tell from the tape where and in what context the recording had been made. If there were other copies of the tape, as Hugh was certain there were, it demonstrated nothing so much as the fevered imagination of the man who had made the recording in the first place. It would be easy to show that Louis Morgon was a deranged and confused man whose mind was awash in silly delusions and imaginary conspiracies.

  “The president is ready for you, sir.” The president’s military aide, a pretty, young marine colonel, got behind the wheelchair and pushed Hugh across the carpet. Someone opened the door from inside, and the president rose from his chair. He walked around from behind the desk and extended his hand. “Hello, Hugh. I hope you’re well.”

  “Very well, Mr. President. Thank you.”

  “Well, thanks for coming, Hugh. I appreciate it. We all do.” The president nodded to indicate the people around him.

  “I am glad to be of service, Mr. President,” said Hugh, smiling and nodding toward the president.

  The secretary of state, Hugh’s successor; the director of Central Intelligence; and the chief national security advisor had risen from their places on opposite couches. The secretary nodded toward Hugh. Hugh peered through his spectacles and smiled at the secretary.

  The two men did not like or trust each other. Each believed that the other had more influence with the president than he deserved. The present secretary of state thought that the discredited policies that Hugh’s administration had authored were a large part of the reason they were now living in an age of terror. Hugh considered both the current secretary and the president amateurs. He thought their policies were based on superstition and half-baked history. They allowed domestic political considerations to guide foreign policy, which, to his way of thinking, could only be harmful to both domestic and foreign politics, and which he would have prevented were he still in office.

  “I think you know my intelligence people, Hugh?” The president turned to indicate the three men standing behind him.

  “Yes, Mr. President, we have met. Gentlemen.”

  “May I start, sir?” said one of the three after a brief pause. He was the president’s chief national security advisor, a short, thin, eager man with glittering, rimless glasses, a strong jaw, and slicked-back hair.

  “Go ahead, Phil,” said the president. He returned to his chair behind the desk and folded his arms to listen.

  “As you know, Secretary Bowes, from our previous communications with your shop, it appears that some of our efforts are paying dividends. However, we were wondering, sir—”

  “Which efforts might those be?” Hugh interrupted.

  “Sorry, sir. Intelligence efforts. Infiltration. Let me back up a bit.” There was not a bit of irony in the man’s voice. He stepped aside to reveal a chart propped up on an easel behind him. It purported to show the organizational connections of major terrorist groups around the world. Some of the groups represented by small circles were linked to each other by dotted lines, while others had question marks between them. There was a thicket of dotted lines going in every direction.

  Phil looked at the chart and then laid out in scrupulous and, as far as Hugh was concerned, excessive detail what one quick look at the chart had already revealed: that, as far as anyone in the room knew, some terrorist groups were linked to others, and some were not. But no one knew for certain which were and which were not. It was almost always the case that the more explicitly and specifically intelligence was enumerated, the less likely it was to be known to be true. Specificity always seemed like a good substitute for certainty.

  Phil went on about how some intelligence assets were beginning to yield useful information about the activities of militant Islamic organizations, and most particularly al Qaeda, “in Europe, Asia, Africa …” He pro
ceeded to name nearly every continent. He began naming countries—”Russia, Pakistan, Turkey, Spain”—before Hugh cut him off.

  “In short?” said Hugh, looking sharply at the man.

  “I am afraid, sir, there is no ‘in short,’ “said Phil. The current secretary of state allowed the corners of his mouth to flicker into a brief smile. “We have always believed,” Phil continued, “that these cells were not connected in any way. They were essentially independent units making independent plans to commit terroristic acts, or so we thought.

  “And yet we are picking up indications lately, particularly from some of the valuable data you have sent our way”—he kept paying homage to Hugh—”but also from sources we have developed through Langley and elsewhere”—here Phil turned slightly to acknowledge the director of Central Intelligence—”indications that these are not all sleeper cells, as we had believed.

  “There appears to be central direction, in fact, a command and control center, implied in much of the chatter we are hearing. If we could establish the connections between various cells and discover who is directing things, then we could take a large step toward preventing the next attack, which we all know will eventually come.” He went on in this fashion for some time.

  “I think I see where you are going,” said Hugh, cutting Phil short again. “What have you got?”

  “Sir?” Phil was momentarily confused.

  “If you let me see what you have got.”

  “Transcripts, actual tapes?”

  “Primary sources. Yes. Whatever you’ve got,” said Hugh.

  “Sir, we have reams, thousands of cartons, raw data, transcripts, tapes, video …”