Slaton drove nonstop for two hours, happy to have had the foresight of keeping the Mercedes’ gas tank full. When he finally pulled onto a gravel siding, he had a sharply angled overlook of Lugano, Switzerland, just north of the Italian border.
For the last hour he’d weighed how much longer to keep the rental Mercedes. He decided it would soon be linked to Davos, making it a poor option for crossing into Italy. His identity papers were almost certainly still clean—he’d paid cash at the rooming house and checked in under a throwaway name. He had also done his best to avoid cameras, and doubted any high-quality photographs were circulating, although these days one could never be sure.
The greatest uncertainty: How serious were the police about finding him?
He’d been seen nosing around a crime scene, and fled when confronted. Suspicious, but on its face no more than a minor offense. He supposed that, at the very least, it would make him the Swiss equivalent of a “person of interest” in the inquiry into Romanov’s murder. The police would ask questions around Davos, but no nationwide hunt would be instigated for a man in a dark blue ski jacket.
Not yet.
The natural escape from Davos would have been north toward Zurich, with its people and airports and trains. By going south, Slaton knew he’d made an unexpected move. Yet that wasn’t why he’d done it.
His ski jacket was resting on the passenger seat. Slaton pulled it closer and sank his hand into the left front pocket. He removed the spent round he’d recovered, snapped on the interior light, and inspected it closely for the first time. He’d seen many a fifty-cal round in his time, all the lethal variants: standard ball, tracer, armor piercing, and the ever-popular explosive incendiary. What he held now was none of those.
The projectile appeared extremely well machined, not a standard metal jacket but high-grade steel that had undergone minimal deformation after passing through a rifle barrel, half a mile of air, one human, six feet of snow, and a final deceleration through ten inches of Alpine mud. Yet there was one distinct aberration in the finely manufactured projectile—the tip had been completely crushed, and beneath the remnants of its thinly capped nose he saw something other than burnished metal: a tiny wafer, now mangled, that shone almost mirror-like in the reflection of the SUV’s dome light.
Slaton sat mystified.
After a long period of thoughtful silence, he returned the spent bullet to his jacket pocket. From another he retrieved the phone the CIA had given him. He turned it on and placed a call.
* * *
“There you are,” Sorensen said, picking up immediately.
“I’ll assume that’s only a turn of phrase and that you don’t have my position nailed down right now,” Slaton replied.
“I’m not trying to find you, but apparently others are. We got word that the police in Davos are looking for a guy who was seen tampering with their crime scene today. They say he was on the tall side, and a very good skier. They suspect he’s one of the two men responsible for killing Romanov.”
“Two men? That’s what they think?”
“It’s a theory.”
“So is Castro ordering the hit on JFK.” Slaton noted a slight intermission between their exchanges, an oddly comforting sign that told him the call was encrypted. “Did you learn anything else?” he asked.
“The police interviewed Ovechkin. As soon as they ran out of questions, he bolted from town.”
“Any idea where he went?”
“No, but I’d say he’s running scared.”
“Can’t say that I blame him. With his two business partners dead, he’s the last man standing.”
“It causes me to wonder what’s in the articles of incorporation of MIR Enterprises. His ownership stake might have gone up two hundred percent in the last week.”
“You think Ovechkin is behind these shootings?”
“It has to be considered.”
Slaton thought about it. There was a certain interdependency among Russia’s kleptocratic elite, but they were also a cutthroat lot. He remembered how Anton Bloch, the former Mossad director, had once characterized the breed: They exist like crabs adrift in the ocean on a plank of wood. In heavy seas some are invariably swept away, a few perhaps with a nudge. “It’s possible,” he said. “But I’d still give odds that Ovechkin is getting fitted for body armor right now. And as for those articles of incorporation, good luck tracking them down.”
“Obscured ownership?”
“You’ll find more shells around MIR than in the Red Sea. Speaking of which, are you still tracking those freighters?”
“We’ve got a bead on all three. Cirrus and Argos have both anchored, one off the Saudi coastline and the other in the Gulf of Aden, near the Yemen-Oman border. Both are just outside the twelve-mile limit.”
“Any idea what they’re doing?”
“As far as we can tell, just sitting there. We did get some message traffic—it was captured by one of our missile cruisers near the Gulf of Aden. Apparently Cirrus reported on VHF that they were having minor technical problems.”
Slaton didn’t reply right away.
“I know,” she said, “it sounds suspicious that both would break down at the same time.”
“It sounds impossible. What about your third boat?”
“Tasman Sea is moving through the Straits of Hormuz as we speak.”
“Same bad neighborhood,” Slaton remarked. “So what do you think the chances are that Tasman Sea will anchor for a technical stop somewhere in the southern Persian Gulf tonight?”
“Pretty high. We’re going to watch them all closely. What about you—other than stirring up a hornet’s nest at the scene of the crime, have you made any headway?”
Slaton eyed his jacket. “Maybe. I’ve got some research to do.”
“Research?”
“I’ll explain when I know more. In the meantime, I think it’s important to find out where Ovechkin has gone.”
“That may not be easy.”
“I’m sure your agency is up to it.”
“I don’t have an agency behind me—not yet, anyway. I’m still on a manpower budget … but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Are you at the embassy?”
“I am.”
“How’s my family?”
“They’re great. Want to talk to them? They’re just down the hall.”
Slaton did, and for the next twenty minutes he suffered not a single thought about dead oligarchs or suspicious freighters. Christine and Davy lifted his spirits, and he assured them he’d be home soon. Only after he ended the call did it occur to him how obscure that concept was. Where was their home at that moment? A guest suite in the United States embassy in Rome? A docked sailboat in Amalfi?
No, he realized. It had nothing to do with cities or residences. It’s wherever my wife and son are.
He turned the phone off, cranked the Mercedes to life, and pulled out into thin traffic. It was time to advance his primary reason for turning south from Davos. It was time to visit an old friend in Milan.