Hour of the Assassins Read Free Page B

There were favors exchanged through friends I have in the Syndicate. And money. I know you, Caine. You’re a hunter. You’re the Afghan hound I’m setting to kill the wolf.”
    â€œThat won’t do it,” Caine said. “Why the six-month deadline, the thirty-year wait?”
    â€œThat’s easy. I pushed it out of my mind. After the camp, nothing meant anything. Love, hate, joy, grief, these were only words. Morality had no meaning, so why not sell garbage to the swine? I was past caring. All I wanted was money, pleasure, power, so that I need never remember, never look back.”
    Listening to the story, Caine was reminded of something Yoshua had said the night they hit Abu Daud in Paris. That was back in the days when he was only a year out of training. Before Laos and Nam. Before it all fell apart. He was one of the Company’s bright young men in those days. Then, it all went down the tubes in Asia and he spent a year shuffling paper in Langley, while heads rolled after the Chile fiasco and he knew he had to get out. Remembering that night in Paris was like eavesdropping on another era. He remembered that they were drinking in some nameless café off the Boulevard Saint-Michel and Yoshua, who was only a courier with the Mossad and had never done any wet work before, had pronounced in a drunken, maudlin tone:
    â€œWhich of us is not a Nazi in the end?”
    â€œBut you’re a Jew,” Caine had replied.
    â€œDo you think that makes us any better? Listen, I come from a country where maybe a quarter of the population came from the camps. So I know. A few, a very few of the survivors were purified by their suffering and became true saints. But most of them are bastards. Do you understand? To survive they became just like the Nazis. Worse. They care for nothing.”
    So in a curious way, the fact that Wasserman was a tough son of a bitch made the whole thing believable.
    â€œWhat happened three months ago?” Caine asked seriously. The job was starting to become real for him.
    â€œI went to my doctor. I have an inoperable cancer of the lymph nodes.” Wasserman nodded and smiled ironically. “You see, Caine, I have barely ten months left to live.”

CHAPTER 2
    The seagull hovered a few feet above the waves, his gray wings outstretched, unmoving. He seemed caught for eternity in the pool of light cast by the floodlights mounted on the restaurant’s outside deck. Beyond the light there was only the immense blackness of the Pacific Ocean at night. With a quick movement the gull folded his wings and plummeted into a rising swell. Almost immediately he began to fly back up into the light, a slender silvery fish wiggling in his beak. Suddenly three loudly squawking gulls erupted out of the darkness and attacked the first gull, attempting to steal the fish. The first gull managed to swallow almost half the fish before the rest was stolen by one of the others. The gulls wheeled and shrieked and then they were gone. The floodlights lit only the incoming surf that shook the pilings on which the restaurant stood.
    The Moonglow was one of those glass and wood restaurants, liberally sprinkled with hanging ferns and authentic-looking papier-mâché beams, that dot the California coast. On either side of the restaurant stretched a line of expensive beach houses that sold for upwards of $300,000 to buyers who wanted to live like beachcombers. A small group of rubberneckers stood on the restaurant’s outside deck, sipping margaritas and congratulating each other on the view.
    Roused by a change in the girl’s tone of voice, Caine turned back to her, once more conscious of the undertone of conversation at the other tables. It seemed to him that he was looking at her from far away, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Not that she was hard to look at. Her long blond hair was beautifully set off by her deep California tan, which made a striking contrast