American Assassin: A Thriller Read online

  Lewis looked down at his World War II Elgin A-11 U.S. military watch. His father had given it to him on his deathbed three years earlier. Lewis had replaced the worn strap and kept the watch in near-perfect shape. It was seven-fourteen in the evening. Nothing on his desk was that urgent, and besides, it was a perfect evening to get out on the open road and clear his mind. He collected the two open files and spun his chair around to face a gray metal safe, which was already open. Lewis placed the files in the proper slot, closed the safe, and spun the dial. He left the office door open, as there was nothing other than the contents of the safe that needed to be protected.

  His motorcycle was parked in the first space in front of the building. Lewis took off his sport coat and tie and carefully folded and placed them on the seat. He unlocked one of the saddlebags of the BMW 1200 motorcycle and retrieved a gray and black leather riding jacket and pair of chaps. He never rode his bike without them. Even with the thermometer pushing ninety degrees. Imprinted on his brain was the road rash a friend had received when he'd been forced to lay his bike down on a hot California afternoon. The jacket and tie were placed in the saddlebag and he put on his gray helmet. The motorcycle hummed to life and Lewis climbed on. Sixty seconds later he tipped his visor at the sentry standing post at the main gate and blew past him. A minute after that he was rocketing up the entrance ramp onto Interstate 64 and on his way north. The drive would take a bit more than an hour, which Lewis didn't mind in the least.

  No phones, no one knocking on his door wanting him to listen to his problems. Lewis was finding it increasingly difficult to find the time to clear his mind and focus on the task at hand. A big green sign informed him how many miles he had to travel to reach Richmond, but he barely noticed. He was already thinking of their new recruit. That had to be why she had called. Lewis set the cruise control at 70 mph, adjusted himself on the seat, and checked his mirrors. He considered how much work he had put into this one candidate. The man was as close to perfect as anyone they'd come across in the almost two years he'd been working on the program. Lewis leaned into a turn and wondered if it was possible for Hurley to run the kid out in one afternoon. Unfortunately, he knew the answer to that question, because he'd seen him do it on more than one occasion.

  CHAPTER 8

  LAKE ANNA, VIRGINIA

  IT was a moonless night sky and all but a few of the exterior lights were off so as to not attract bugs. The mutts had just finished their run and another hundred up-downs and a few more exercises designed to fatigue little-used muscles and maybe get one or more of them to quit so they could get down to the serious stuff. Unfortunately, all seven were now filing into the barn in a manner not much different than that of cows returning from a day grazing in the pasture. Their heads were down, their pace was slow, and their footing unsure, and fortunately the arguing was over. The only thing they could think about at the moment was sleep.

  Hurley took a sip of bourbon and looked out across the lawn. Despite the fact that it was his seventh in the past three hours, he was not drunk. When it came to booze, and a lot of other things, the spook had the constitution of a man three times his size. Tonight, however, his normally unshakable confidence was a little wobbly. Hurley was feeling a nagging indecision that to the average person was a daily occurrence, but to a headstrong, decisive man like him was rare. The shiner on his eye and his throbbing headache were nothing more than a nagging physical symptom. A few more glasses of Maker's Mark and they would be thoroughly dulled.

  The problem was between his ears--a crack in his psyche that had put him in a rarely visited but increasingly familiar place. It was gnawing at the back of his head, trying to crawl into his brain stem and take him down. The signs were all there: tight chest, quick breath, a sudden desire to get the hell out of Dodge and go somewhere, anywhere but here. For a man who was used to being in control, used to being right all the time, it was the most unwelcome feeling he could imagine. He'd rather get kicked in the head until he was knocked unconscious than try to wrestle with this crap.

  The fix, Hurley knew, involved something he still wasn't used to. He'd spent years burying his problems, patching them, hiding them under anything he could find. His job was too important, there were too many enemies to confront and not enough men willing to do it. There was too much to do, the stakes were too high for him to sit around and feel sorry for himself. He was after all a product of the Cold War. While the children of the sixties cut loose and got in touch, Hurley cut throats and got as out of touch with his feelings as was possible. He darted around Europe in the late fifties and early sixties and then Southeast Asia in the midsixties. The seventies brought him to South America, the early eighties to Central America, and then finally, for the biggest shit show of all, he landed in the Middle East. The entire thing was a gigantic multidimensional chess match with the Soviets, a continuation of what had happened at the end of World War I and then the aftermath of World War II.

  Getting in touch with his thoughts or feelings, or whatever they were, was not something Hurley relished. There was right and there was wrong, and in between an abyss filled with society's whiners, people who had inherited the luxury of safety and freedom, while having done nothing to earn it. He had never heard these opinions pass the lips of his mother or father. They didn't have to. He was born during the Depression, but they had lived through it. They'd moved from Chicago to Bowling Green, Kentucky, with their five kids, to escape the long food lines and massive unemployment of the inner city. Hurley had come of age not knowing any better. His lot in life seemed just as good as the next kid's. He'd taken that stoic demeanor and joined the army. After serving his stint, he enrolled at Virginia Tech on the GI Bill and graduated with decent marks. That final spring a man from the federal government who was extremely interested in his military record and asked him if he'd like to see the world. Asked him if he'd like to make a difference. Hurley bit.

  Officially, he'd spent the last twenty-one years darting in and out of war-torn countries and doing his part to create a few wars, too. Unofficially, it had been longer than that. He'd been on the very edge of the conflict between the Soviets and America and had no illusions about which side was the more noble of the two. All a person had to do was spend a little time in Berlin to understand the effects of communism and capitalism. Talk about a tale of two cities, East Berlin and West Berlin were living, breathing examples. Posters for the governments who had run them since the end of World War II. One side was a vivid Kodachrome film and the other a grainy old black-and-white pile of crap.

  Hurley had never been more proud than when that damn wall came tumbling down. He'd spilled his own blood in the battle and had lost a few friends and more sources than he could count or wanted to remember, but they'd won. Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of time to enjoy their victory. Hurley and a few others already had their eyes on the jihadists. He'd come across them when he was helping bleed the Soviet Union of cash, equipment, manpower, and eventually the will to continue its despotic experiment. It had been in the Khyber Pass, and at first he saw nothing that made him nervous. These people wanted their land back and the Soviets out. The problem started with the religious zealots who were being shipped in from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a handful of other crappy little countries.

  Hurley loved to swear, drink, and chase women, which put him on a collision course with the puritan, fun-sucking, Wahhabi jihadists from Saudi Arabia. He almost instantly developed a special dislike for them, but didn't understand back then that they would want to spread their jihad beyond the jerkwater mountains of Southwest Asia. That came later, when he started to see them meddling in the affairs of the Palestinians. It was starting all over again. The Soviets had been contained and beaten, and now this new enemy was out pushing its agenda. Hurley had a bad feeling about where it was headed, and on top of that, for the first time in his life he felt tired. This threat was not going away, and he suddenly wasn't sure he could find, let alone train, the next batch of kids who would be need
ed to meet the threat. He needed help. Unfortunately, asking for help was not something Hurley was good at.

  He heard one of the dogs bark and then the sound of a motorcycle drifted through the pines. It was not the rumble of an American-made motorcycle, rather the purr of a Japanese or German bike. Hurley breathed a small sigh that was part relief, part resignation. It was the doc. He realized Kennedy must have called him.

  A single beam of light slashed through the trees and a moment later the motorcycle coasted round the corner. The bike was so quiet, Hurley could hear the tires on the gravel driveway. The bike rolled its way up to the house and the rider eased the kickstand into the down position and then killed the engine. After retrieving a flat piece of wood from one of the molded saddlebags, he put it under the kickstand and then took off his helmet.

  Thomas Lewis ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair and looked up at Hurley. He immediately noticed the swelling over the eye, but he was more concerned with a look on the man's face that he had only recently grown to understand. "Tough day?"

  Hurley tried to laugh it off. "No easy days in this line of work. You know that."

  Lewis nodded. He knew all too well the toll that their business could inflict on a person, and not just the body. The physical injuries were fairly straightforward. They could either be mended or not. The assaults on the mind and soul were an entirely different matter.

  CHAPTER 9

  BEIRUT, LEBANON

  THE battered, dusty, Peugeot slowed to a crawl. The driver leaned out over the steering wheel and looked left and then right down the length of Hamra Street. His friend in the passenger seat did the same, but in a more halfhearted fashion. There was no stop light, nor was there a stop sign, but habits formed during war died hard. Samir was the youngest of four brothers. Three of them had died in the civil war that had destroyed this once-beautiful city. His closest brother, only thirteen months his senior, had been killed by an RPG while crossing this very intersection. To the Westerners who covered the bloody civil war, Hamra Street was better known as the Green Line. Ali and his friends called it no-man's-land.

  It was the street that divided East and West Beirut and, to a certain degree, the Muslims from the Christians, or more accurately the Shiite Muslims from the Maronite Christians. There were neighborhoods on each side of the line where you could find pockets of Sunnis, Armenians, Greek Orthodox, and Druze. Some of these outposts were more exposed than others, and they had all but disappeared during the lengthy and savage civil war, while a few of the more entrenched ones were now rebuilding. The civil war in many respects resembled the mob warfare of Chicago in the 1920s, but with much bigger guns.

  With the war officially over for almost two years, virtually every part of the city was showing signs of life. The Christians to the east were rebuilding at a blistering pace, and the Muslims to the west were struggling to keep pace. Construction cranes dotted the skyline, and you were now more likely to get killed by a dump truck or a bulldozer than a sniper. At least in certain areas. Hamra Street was not one of those areas. The buildings were still gutted shells, perfectly suited for a sniper to lie in wait.

  Samir scanned the building across the street to his left while his friend Ali, who was sitting next to him, did the same thing to their right.

  "Still cautious," the man in the backseat said in a coarse voice.

  Samir looked sheepishly in the rearview mirror. "Sorry."

  Assef Sayyed nodded and took another drag from his cigarette. He remembered that Samir's brother had been killed not far from here. A lot of good men had been killed along this godforsaken stretch of road. Sayyed, however, did not make small talk with his men. Such familiarity led to their getting ideas. Ideas were not good. They only needed to follow orders. He also had no desire to get too close to the all-but-disposable men who worked for him. It was far easier to mourn the loss of someone you didn't know well than the loss of a close friend.

  Once Samir received the go-ahead from Ali, he gunned the engine and tore across the broad street, over the abandoned trolley tracks, and into a canyon of half-demolished buildings on the other side. A year or two earlier he would have never dreamed of taking this shortcut. The car continued for two blocks, dodging piles of rubble, and then hung a sharp left turn. Building by building, block by block, things got better. The first sign was that the roads were clear of debris. Scaffolding and cement mixers were the next positive sign, and then finally they came upon a row of buildings that actually had windows, although the stone facades were pockmarked from artillery shells and small-arms fire.

  Two young men stood in front of a roadblock, AK-47 assault rifles at the ready. Samir slowed the car to a stop and looked at the young face of the man who was pointing the barrel of his rifle at his head. They were all young these days, or old, but there were very few in between. An entire generation had either fled the country or been killed. Samir jerked his thumb toward the backseat and watched the guard's eyes open wide as he recognized the ruthless Assef Sayyed. The young man gave a quick bow of respect, and then ordered his colleague to move the barricade.

  The block was sealed at both ends. Some had started to question the manpower and effort that went into this, but all Sayyed had to do was flash them one of his withering stares and they were silenced. The Syrian intelligence colonel was of the mind that this peace was more of a lull in the fighting, and the second they let their guard down they would pay for it dearly. He continually advised the other militias to reconstitute, to find new recruits and to train them diligently, and to use this lull in the fighting to stockpile arms and ammunition. With each passing month it was becoming increasingly difficult to convince them to direct their resources to the next battle. To the men under his command, however, there was no questioning his orders. Sayyed had made certain of that by putting a bullet through the forehead of one of his aides at a staff meeting just two months earlier.

  Sayyed tossed his cigarette in the gutter and entered the office building. Extension cords ran along the floor and the wall to bring power to various levels. The place had been functional for just two weeks, and Sayyed did not plan to use it for more than another few days at the most. The greatest vulnerability for his side was a complete lack of air power. If some dog in Israel found out where he was, he could have jets scrambled and dropping bombs on him in less than twenty minutes.

  He took the stairs down to the basement level. The smell of raw sewage was an instant reminder that the city was still suffering the ills of almost fifteen years of fighting. Two men were in the hallway-standing next to a kerosene lamp. They were still without power in the basement. Without having to be told, the men moved away from the door. The older of the two snapped off a distinctly British salute.

  "Colonel, it is good to see you."

  Sayyed ignored the greeting. "Where is Colonel Jalil?"

  The man jerked his head toward the door. "He is inside with the prisoner."

  Sayyed motioned for him to open the door.

  The guard extended his hand. In it was a black hood. "To hide your identity."

  Sayyed gave him a disdainful look, and the man put the hood away and opened the door. A man sat naked in the middle of the room tied to metal chair. One man was standing beside him, another in front. Both were wearing black hoods. Sayyed entered the room and walked directly to the prisoner. He grabbed him by his hair and yanked his head up so he could see his face. Sayyed stood there searching the man's features for half a minute. So far he only had a trickle of dried blood on his upper lip. Other than that he looked untouched.

  "Who are you?" Sayyed asked.

  "My name is Nihad Wassouf."

  Sayyed stared at him for a long time and finally said, "I think you are a liar. In fact I think you are a Jew."

  "No!" the man protested vehemently. "I am a Syrian."

  "I doubt that."

  "I would not lie about such a thing. Check with the names I have given you."

  Sayyed was already doing just that, but this
man seemed like a rat to him, and those lazy fools back in Damascus could be tricked. Without warning, Sayyed walked over to a small cart. A variety of tools were lying on the surface. His hands danced from one to the next. He did not want to do anything that would require medical attention at this point. Finally, he settled on a pair of pliers. Sayyed walked back to the man and held the pliers in front of him. "I am not as nice, nor am I as patient as these two men. I will ask you only one more time ... what is your real name?"

  The man stammered for a second and then said, "Nihad Wassouf."

  Sayyed reached out and straightened the prisoner's forefinger on his left hand. He clamped the pliers down on the quarter inch of nail that extended beyond the tip of the finger and rocked it back and forth a few times. The prisoner began to squirm. A line of crimson blood appeared at the edge of the nail bed. "Tell me your real name."

  "I already have ... I swear."

  "Why are you looking for the American?"

  "I was sent here to negotiate his release."

  "By who?"

  "His company."

  "I think you are lying."

  "No ... I am not. Call my friends in Damascus. They will vouch for me."

  "I do not believe you."

  "Please. I am only a messenger. They are willing to pay a great sum of money."

  "What if you are a spy?"

  "I am not."

  "Liar!" And with that Sayyed tore the man's fingernail completely out of its bed.

  CHAPTER 10

  LAKE ANNA, VIRGINIA

  THE doctor peeled off his leather riding gear and stood on the porch listening to Hurley recount the afternoon's events. He did so as passively as possible, even though his concern grew on several fronts. Interrupting, he'd learned with Hurley, was a bad approach. It was best to let him get it all out. Questions or comments could be perceived as a personal attack, which in turn would elicit a spirited counterattack, all of which the doctor knew was very counterproductive.