The Assassin's list Read online

  The Assassin's list

  Scott Matthews

  Scott Matthews

  The Assassin's List

  Chapter 1

  Being in the wrong place at the wrong time happened to other people, not Janice Lewellyn. Not until the last night of her life, anyway.

  Just before twelve o’clock that night, she was speeding back to her office on the sprawling campus of Martin Research in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. A memo her boss needed before a field test of their new chemical weapon detection system wasn’t complete. The itinerary for next week’s visit by the Secretary of Homeland Security had been left out. She had time to get that done. Everything was packed, a couple of hours at the office, and she’d still have time to get the kids up and family to the airport. She’d sleep on the plane, and rest in Maui.

  The vacation, ordered by her doctor, was supposed to provide a rest before starting an aggressive chemotherapy treatment for ovarian cancer. The vacation couldn’t have come at a worse time. Cancer scared the hell out of her, no question, but she was prepared to fight it with or without a vacation. She wasn’t prepared, however, to let her boss down. Properly hosting the head of Homeland Security when he visited was her responsibility.

  A rich perfume of roses carried on the summer breeze as she stepped from her car in the executive parking lot. Some savvy landscaper had placed a small rose garden nearby. Deep red rhododendrons and azaleas lined the walkway, and two acres of lush green lawn surrounded the four-story glass and stainless steel office building. A reflecting pool ringed the building on three sides, bathing it in a soft blue light. It was the most beautiful place in the world to work, she thought for the hundredth time.

  ~~~

  At the back of the executive office building, Kaamil Sayf waited in the shadows outside an emergency fire door. At midnight, the security system his company installed and maintained would crash and go offline for five minutes. In those five minutes, he needed to run up four flights of stairs to the CEO’s office, retrieve a keylogger device he’d placed on the CEO’s computer a month ago, and get back out before the security system rebooted.

  On the outside, after his prison conversion to Islam, he led a covert cadre of assassins working as employees of the International Security and Information Services, or ISIS. The mission he trained for, and was selected to lead, aimed to assassinate powerful American leaders. Mighty America killed its enemies with cowardly high-flying drones, but the world would soon know how jihadists killed enemies, up close and personal.

  Before the first strike next week, he had to ensure encrypted passwords for the security plan at the chemical weapons depot had not changed. The only way to know was to retrieve the keylogger that recorded every keystroke on the CEO’s computer.

  When his watch flashed 12:00 a.m., Kaamil used a key to open the steel fire door and ran up the stairs. He knew the old security guard posted at his station at the main entrance wouldn’t hear him, just as he knew the security cameras wouldn’t record his visit for the next five minutes. No one was expected in the building.

  He raced down a long hallway to the middle of the top floor. Through Janice Lewellyn’s office, he entered the CEO’s inner sanctum. Kaamil was under the large rosewood desk when the elevator doors chimed. Somebody besides the security guard was in the building. Kaamil pocketed the device, getting up as the office lights came on, and froze.

  Sweat formed on his forehead when he heard someone walking into the office.

  “What are you doing in here?” Janice Lewellyn demanded. “Why are you hiding in Mr. Martin’s office?”

  “Take it easy, Mrs. Lewellyn, you know me. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m just checking to make sure the upgrade for the security system is working.”

  “Since when do you do middle-of-the-night upgrades without my clearance? I think you better stay here while I call security. You shouldn’t be in Mr. Martin’s office.”

  “Call security. They know all about it. I’m just doing my job, Mrs. Lewellyn.” Kaamil feigned a smile, hoping she didn’t notice the beads of sweat on his forehead.

  As Janice Lewellyn turned toward the phone on her desk, Kaamil took an Emerson combat folding knife from his pocket. Moving quickly, he caught her from behind and pulled the razor-sharp blade across her throat.

  Lowering her body to the floor, he cursed his rotten luck. He would keep on the surgical gloves he was wearing until he left the building. And pray to Allah nothing was left behind to identify him, because his five minutes were almost up.

  He would have enough trouble explaining the collateral damage to his leader without worrying about the police.

  Chapter 2

  Adam Drake stared at the ocean from a window seat in their favorite restaurant. Kay had been gone a year, but the memory of her laughing, sitting across the table from him was as vivid as a beautiful hologram. If only they had found a cure, or her chemo had worked, he would still be holding her hand. Still be looking forward to every minute he got to spend with her.

  That kind of magical thinking didn’t help. The reality was, she was in pain and now she wasn’t. The pain was now his. She was dead. He wasn’t. The Bible might say there’s no greater love than laying down your life for a friend, but what it doesn’t say is the greatest pain comes when you can’t. Especially when the friend is your wife.

  He could not believe it had been a year. Every day of it had been a miserable, aching, lonely waste and drinking too much hadn’t numbed the pain. It just left him with sleepless nights, thinking of their three short years together. All he had was one whirlwind year courting the most beautiful girl in Oregon, one happy year still in shock she said yes, then one long year watching her succumb to cancer.

  “Mr. Drake, you have a phone call, sir,” said Joyce, the Tidal Rave’s dining room manager, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “I’m sorry for intruding, but he said it was an emergency.”

  Drake got up and followed her past the window tables and booths to the front desk. How had someone found him? He hadn’t known where he was going when he took the day off.

  “Drake here.”

  “Adam, I’m sorry to bother you,” his father-in-law said, “but I need your help.”

  Senator Hazelton, a four-term United States Senator from Oregon, rarely needed anyone’s help and had never asked for his. Coming on the anniversary of his daughter’s death, Drake suspected the Senator, or more likely his wife Meredith, was making sure he was all right.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, there are some perks. I tracked you by satellite,” Senator Hazelton said dryly.

  Some perks, Drake thought.

  “I know you don’t want to think about business right now, but I need a favor. A friend of mine could use some legal help. I can’t think of anyone better than you to help him.”

  Drake was now certain his mother-in-law’s concern had prompted the call. The Senator knew top lawyers in Portland, Washington D.C., and the country, for that matter. He didn’t need Drake’s legal talents to help a friend, even when he was at the top of his game, which he hadn’t been for the last year.

  “My friend’s company is handling some important research for us,” the Senator continued. “His secretary was killed in his office last night and aside from the tragedy of it all, it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. You’ve prosecuted complicated cases like this where corporate theft may be involved. Would you give him a hand, act as a consultant, and guide him through this?”

  So that was it. A supporter was in a mess at an unfortunate time, and the Senator owed him a favor. True, Drake had handled some big trade secret cases in the D.A.’s office as the lead felony prosecutor.

 
“Senator, I don’t think I can help you. I’m just not ready to take on a case like this right now,” Drake said.

  Senator Hazelton hadn’t seen him in six or seven months. If he had, there was no way in the world he would ask him for help. Dark bags under his eyes, a puffy face, he looked haggard and felt like a fighter too tired to come out of his corner for the next round.

  “Adam, I need you on this one. There are reasons I can’t discuss over the phone. I need someone I can trust.”

  There was more to this than just walking a constituent through some crisis, Drake thought.

  “All right, Sir. Tell your friend I’ll call him tomorrow when I get back to town.”

  “Actually, I invited him to come over tonight. Could you be here by seven? We’ll have dinner. Meredith has been asking when we’ll see you.”

  “Okay, I’ll try to be there by seven,” Drake said and ended the call.

  He knew he couldn’t put off seeing Kay’s parents forever. Tonight was as good a night as any to get the meeting behind him. They lost a daughter, he recognized that, but hugs and kisses weren’t going to help him sleep through the night, or make anything matter again.

  Drake walked back to his table to finish his coffee. His father-in-law was used to getting his way, in politics and life in general, but he never interfered in his life. He appreciated that. If the Senator wanted his help now, he’d get it, whether it was politics or his mother-in-law asking to see him. Either way, it didn’t matter. They were all that was left of his family, and he’d do what he could.

  Drake’s father died in Vietnam on his second tour, wearing a green beret. Aside from the legend that went with his Distinguished Service Cross, Drake only knew his father from his mother’s stories. She raised him as a single mom, working as an emergency room nurse, until she died in a car accident caused by a drunken teenager. He’d been a sophomore in college then. There was no other family, and he’d been on his own after that, until Kay.

  Chapter 3

  Senator Hazelton’s home was in Lake Oswego, an old money suburb of Portland. He and Meredith moved there shortly after he became the managing partner of the most powerful law firm in the city. He wasn’t born rich, but the careful and graceful use of his legal skills soon made him one of the most respected and wealthy men in the city. Encouraged to enter politics, he served two terms in the state legislature before he was asked to run against the incumbent U.S. Senator, Willard Monroe. Despite the incumbent’s five terms in the Senate, the younger attorney connected better with the citizens, won the election, and hadn’t been seriously challenged since.

  Two hours later, after driving his Porsche 993 as hard as the absence of detectable State Police would allow, Drake approached the exit for Lake Oswego. He thought about the night he met Kay. It was after law school, after his time in the army and after working in the District Attorney’s office for five years. The athletic club he belonged to was hosting a dinner and dance for participants of a triathlon he had just finished. Kay had attended and asked him to dance.

  “I’ve seen your picture in the paper. Are you as good a prosecutor as you are a triathlete?” she asked him.

  “I’m a better prosecutor,” he answered, as she led him to the dance floor. “I don’t come in second as a prosecutor.”

  She introduced herself simply as Kay Hazelton, but he knew who she was, just as she knew he knew. The papers called her the brightest flower on the Portland social scene. She didn’t seem to care. She appeared in more newspaper photos working a soup kitchen line in jeans and a sweatshirt than at charity events in a fancy dress. She was attracted to people and causes that mattered, she told him later. What attracted Kay to him that night was still a mystery.

  “Does that mean you’re willing to send innocents to jail, just to win? Do young men, trying to survive by selling drugs, deserve a lifetime behind bars? Why not restorative justice instead?”

  “Miss Hazelton, if you and your father want to restore felons, whatever that means, you’re welcome to try. You’d be making a mistake, in my opinion. Drug dealers have a choice to make, just like the choice you made when you decided to become a teacher. They make bad decisions. Those decisions hurt people. Your decision to teach helps people. Both have consequences, and it’s my job to deal with the ones that hurt people.”

  They danced for a moment before she asked, “If I made bad decisions in my life, would you still dance with me?”

  “Miss Hazelton, I can’t imagine any decision that would keep me from dancing with you. Of course, I might still have to put you in jail.”

  That had been the beginning of a courtship that lasted almost a year before he asked Kay Hazelton to marry him. Then, of course, he’d had to talk with her father.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” the Senator said, when he led Drake into his den. “Would you like something to drink?”

  A couple of double whiskeys, Drake remembered thinking, would be nice.

  “No, thank you, I’m fine, Sir. I’d like permission to marry your daughter,” he blurted out. No use beating around the bush, the Senator was expecting him.

  “I appreciate your good manners, son, but I’m afraid you’re too late. I gave my daughter permission to marry you months ago,” the Senator said with a smile. “Now, would you like that drink?”

  That was four years ago. Now, driving to the house where he had that first drink with the Senator, his memory flashed scenes of their outdoor wedding. The manicured lawn sloping down to the lake from the brick Victorian Kay lived in most of her life, a reception with bridesmaids dancing barefoot in front of a bandstand after the guests had left, and finally, following the curving cedar-lined driveway when they left on their wedding night.

  He hadn’t been back to the Hazelton’s home since Kay’s funeral. He had talked with her mother on the phone, of course, and had lunched with the Senator once, but he’d declined invitations for dinner.

  The house looked the same as he turned in. Lit by the soft glow of wooden luminaries, he saw Kay’s old upper bedroom window between the tall western red cedars that lined the drive. It was the very best of the six bedrooms, she had proclaimed. On the northeast corner of the house, it offered a view of the lake and of Mount Hood’s snowy peak in the distance. She didn’t mind that it was the smallest of the six bedrooms, it was the room she picked when she first walked through her new home.

  As he neared the turnaround in front of the house, Meredith Hazelton stood at the open front door. She hadn’t changed a whit, but her vigilance told him that they must have added security cameras since his last visit. His mother-in-law was, in his opinion, the best looking seventy-year-old woman he had ever seen. With light brown hair and sparkling eyes, she was a vision of what Kay would have looked like in another thirty-three years.

  Rolling to a stop, he got out and waved over the roof of his car. Drake stretched to get rid of the tightness in his shoulders, and gave himself a moment to compose his emotions.

  “Adam, I hoped I would see you today,” Meredith said, as she hurried to greet him with a kiss, wrapping her slender arms around him. She didn’t let go, and Drake felt her sadness as she rested her head on his chest.

  A year of loneliness swept through him.

  “I shouldn’t have stayed away so long, I’ve missed you. I’m sorry.”

  “We knew,” she said, taking his hand and leading him up the front stairs. “You’re here now. Come say hello to your father-in-law. He’s missed seeing you.”

  He found the Senator in his study standing at the window, looking at the lake with a cell phone held to his ear. Walnut paneling above a caramel Berber carpet gave the room a serious, solid sense in contrast with the framed black and white political cartoons adorning the walls. The desk was red oak topped with glass, a legal pad, and a flat-screen monitor.

  The Senator waved to Drake and ended his conversation. Even in jeans and a V-neck sweater, the sleeves pushed up over tanned and still well-muscled forearms, the man looked like a senat
or. His silver hair framed a face that made you think of Cary Grant, with a smile that said everything was going to be all right. Tonight, the smile was familiar, but the eyes were different. They attempted to match the smile, but didn’t make it.

  “Adam, thanks for coming,” he said, giving Drake a quick hug. “How are you?”

  “I’ve had better days.”

  The Senator nodded and put his hand on Drake’s shoulder. “Let’s go outside and talk before my friend gets here. We have time for a drink while Meredith finishes the dinner.”

  The terrace at the rear of the house was red brick, with a waist-high wall lined with flowering planters. Sweet smells of flowers mixed with the scent of freshly mown grass. Sadly, it was all just as he remembered.

  “Here, hope you’re still drinking bourbon,” the Senator said behind him.

  Not just bourbon, Drake recognized with the first sip, but Jim Beam Black, his favorite. The Senator preferred single malt Scotch, but this was the first time he’d served him bourbon.

  The Senator looked out over the lake, and finally said, “I met Richard Martin twenty-five years ago when I first ran for the state legislature. He’d just started his company here and was promoting Oregon for high-tech industry. We became friends, and he’s been one of my most loyal supporters. His company’s doing research for Homeland Security. I helped him get the contract, and I’d like you to help him.”

  “Does his secretary’s murder have anything to do with his work for the government, or you for that matter?” Drake asked.

  The Senator turned and seemed to be surprised by the question. “No, no, this has nothing to do with me. He’s developing monitoring systems for chemical and biological weapons we don’t want smuggled into the country.”

  So this was something more than just helping an old friend whose secretary had been murdered.