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Assassin's Run: A David Slaton Novel

Assassin's Run: A David Slaton Novel

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Assassin's Run: A David Slaton Novel

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6 horas
Aug 21, 2018


USA Today bestselling author Ward Larsen's Assassin's Run revives globe-trotting, hard-hitting assassin David Slaton for another breathless espionage adventure.

When a Russian oligarch is killed by a single bullet on his yacht off the Isle of Capri, Russian intelligence sources speculate that a legendary Israeli assassin, long thought dead, might be responsible. However, David Slaton—the assassin in question—is innocent. Realizing the only way to clear his name is to find out who’s truly responsible, he travels to Capri.

While he searches, a web of disparate events unfolds across the Middle East. Three ships, owned by the group of Russians, deliver a mysterious cargo to the shores of the Arabian Peninsula. In Morocco, a Russian aerospace company begins flight testing an innovative new drone.

From Switzerland to the Red Sea to Morocco, Slaton gradually uncovers a conspiracy of monumental scope. It is a plot that will change the world strategic order—and one that goes straight to the top of the Russian government.

David Slaton Novels
#1 Assassin's Game
#2 Assassin's Silence
#3 Assassin's Code
#4 Assassin's Run


Aug 21, 2018

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Assassin's Run - Ward Larsen



It was just as well Pyotr Ivanovic didn’t realize he was about to die. As a man who comprehensively enjoyed a good meal, his last on this earth would be free of any misgivings regarding his soon-to-be-issued digestif.

He glanced out the starboard window at a night-shrouded sea, the occasional breaker highlighted in dim moonlight. Lovely as the panorama was, it was far less compelling than what rested before him on the white-linened table. His new chef had outdone himself tonight. The steak before Ivanovic was a choice cut, thirty ounces of grain-fed beef flown in from Australia and seared to perfection. Against that, the potatoes Lyonnais were but an afterthought, the haricots verts no more than garnish. The bottle of Bordeaux, he allowed, did the steak justice, one of the best from his extensive shipboard collection. Thankfully, the new man had learned quickly. Ivanovic did not count calories. He courted them openly, throwing himself upon the culinary altar of any chef who could do them well. Tonight’s meal, as it turned out, was more special than most. It was a celebration of sorts, marking the beginning of the most ambitious undertaking of his career.

Which made it very ambitious indeed.

The head of his security detail came through the salon door, bringing a gust of wind with him. October had arrived full force on the Tyrrhenian Sea, the opening volley of winter’s campaign. Ivanovic looked up in annoyance, but he knew there was no use in berating the man—that was life at sea.

The ship was called Cassandra—ship because no vessel 190 feet long could be referred to as a boat, and Cassandra as a prod at his late mother. He still laughed inwardly at that: the ship had already been around the world once, while her namesake, as far as he knew, had never in her life traveled more than ten miles from the miserable Ukrainian village in which she’d been born.

The yacht had been built to his demanding specifications by a man who, if not the finest marine architect in Greece, was certainly the most expensive. The mahogany planking beneath his feet was inlaid with gold trim, and every fitting and furnishing was of the highest quality. Marble floors and columns predominated, so much weight that the poor architect had warned the boat might capsize. Another three million had allayed the man’s worries, something to do with stabilizers and ballast to keep the ship upright, and causing Ivanovic to jest that her keel had been laid not in lead but gold. Ultimately, however, he had what he wanted—not a refuge for the odd vacation, but rather a stage, a platform from which all manner of business and pleasure might be consummated.

His thickset security chief padded across the salon. He was dressed in his usual ill-fitting suit, and his only visible accessory—sourced not from Gucci or Hermès, but rather Beretta—bulged obviously beneath a wrinkled lapel. The man handed over a communications printout. This just arrived, he said in Russian.

Ivanovic took a ten-page printout in hand and removed his reading glasses from a pocket. Is the loading complete? he asked.

Yes. The ship will sail shortly after midnight from Sebastopol.

Ivanovic skimmed the report, which contained an official manifest purporting what was being carried and where it was being taken. He chuckled at the creativity involved, and with some effort extracted the few truths. The destination was listed as Mumbai, which covered things nicely. Argos, a ship his new subsidiary had acquired only last month, was to leave Crimea for the Black Sea, then run a gentle slalom through the Bosporus Straits, followed by a left turn into open water. There she would disappear into the Mediterranean’s river of commerce.

Bring me any new updates, Ivanovic said dismissively.

His security man disappeared and he readdressed his steak, his eyes still scanning the paperwork page by page. He was remorseless in his attack, his hands sawing hunks of flesh and plugging them into his mouth. At the other end of the twelve-foot table a young woman sat ignored, but that was nothing new. It had long been Ivanovic’s custom to work through dinner—he’d always felt he was at his best behind a good meal, his senses at their most heightened.

You are not eating, he said distractedly, his eyes pinned on a cargo manifest.

Ursula, the new blonde from a tiny village in Siberia, twirled her fork through a salad.

It is too much for me, she replied.

He measured a lewd reply, but the sport of it escaped him. He was already growing tired of this one. She was young and rail thin, eyes as blue and empty as a cloudless midday sky. She’d spent the day shopping on the island of Capri, now three miles off the starboard beam. Ivanovic had no doubt she’d spent every dollar of the ten thousand he’d allotted. What had to be a new dress clung like shrink wrap, and the bracelet flopping on one of her wrists looked like a diamond-studded handcuff.

When will we leave for Saint-Tropez? she asked.

Ivanovic ignored the question, sensing a bit of negotiating capital for later use in his suite.

He finished his steak, and with barely a pause the cook appeared with a massive crème brûlée in one hand and a torch in the other. In a flourish of culinary stagecraft, the cook lit his flame and soon had the topping caramelized into a crust that looked positively volcanic.

Ten minutes later, his great belly full, Ivanovic stepped out onto the wide aft deck, which doubled as a helipad, and prepared his customary cigar. Fighting a brisk wind, he managed to light it, and stood in survey of his surroundings. In the distance Capri rose from the sea, and a string of amber to the east outlined the Amalfi Coast.

Earlier today, viewing the harbor of Capri, he’d seen one other ship in Cassandra’s league. Ivanovic had checked the ship’s registry, and was surprised to find that it wasn’t owned by a Russian, but rather a Greek. Probably that bastard marine architect, he mused. Twenty years ago it would have been a Saudi, before that a Brit. Today, however, across the Med, the competition was largely between the oligarchs. Men who wore their wealth as a badge in the face of invariably humble beginnings.

Ivanovic himself was a case in point. The son of a Ukrainian pig farmer, he had always known he was destined for more than his muck-booted elder. How much more had surprised even him. He’d walked out of the foothills of the Carpathians at fifteen, and within two years found himself in Moscow doing small favors for third-tier mobsters. In time, the grade of both his dealings and the crooks he associated with rose in parallel. And now the bar had risen one last time. To a point that could go no higher.

He heard footsteps behind him, and turned to see his security man again.

Is there something new? Ivanovic asked.

No sir. I just wanted to mention … I think it might be safer inside.

You worry too much.

The security man, whose name was Pavel, and who was the closest thing Ivanovic had to a friend, nearly said something. Instead he stood down.

Ivanovic said, They tell me Abramovich’s new ship will be nearly a hundred meters.

Pavel shrugged. I wouldn’t know.

A hundred meters. That’s a very round number—someone should do it.

Pavel eyed Ivanovic’s cigar, clearly calculating how much longer it had to burn. Ivanovic went to the starboard rail as a wayward cloud blotted out the moon. He pulled a long draw on his Cohiba, then flicked a bit of ash into the wind-driven water below.

*   *   *

From a distance, the sinewy young man looking through his scope saw a fragment of white-hot ash flutter down to the sea. The burning cigar itself was bright, like a beacon atop the rotund lighthouse that was Pyotr Ivanovic. He saw another man on deck, yet had no trouble distinguishing which of the two to target. The Ukrainian stood out in any crowd, his height and girth at the limits of human potential.

The shooter was still getting used to the new scope, a synthetic hybrid of optical and infrared imagery, and he was pleasantly surprised. Technology in armaments had never been a Russian strength—manufacturers there had long leaned toward simplicity and robustness. The picture before him was unusually sharp, if a bit undermagnified.

The story behind his equipment had been explained to him by a pair of engineers, this in itself a departure from long-held practices. They told him the scope was not a Russian design, but had in fact been acquired from America’s leading edge research facility, the Sandia National Laboratories. This was nothing new. Russia had long ago stopped trying to keep pace with the West, realizing it was far more economical to let them do the expensive research, development, and testing, then simply steal the results. It had been going on for decades, going back to the Cold War. In those heady days, virtually every new American airplane was followed within a few years by a curiously similar Soviet twin. A time lag had been unavoidable then, Soviet developers forced to work largely from photographs, which necessitated considerable guesswork and reverse engineering. Now the internet age had simplified things greatly—today Russia simply hacked into computers and filched proven blueprints, shortening the time to shelf considerably.

The assassin checked the scope’s calibration one last time, then verified the synchronization. It was the first time he’d used this system in the field—even his practice had been limited to tightly controlled simulations. The rifle was at least familiar, which gave a degree of confidence. Best of all, his level of personal risk on this mission was less than on any he’d ever undertaken.

A gust of wind brushed the shooter’s cheek. On any other day it would have got his attention, but tonight he ignored it entirely. His finger began to press the trigger and his breathing slowed, the habits of eight years taking hold. It couldn’t hurt. Finally, in what could only be termed a playful impulse, he jerked his finger through the final half inch of travel.

The big gun answered, bucking once and belching a tongue of flame. All as expected. The bulky suppressor helped, but there was no dampening the supersonic round. The killer resettled the scope for what seemed an interminable amount of time. He was almost ready to admit a miss when Ivanovic jerked violently.

He saw the Russian’s head slam forward on a neck carrying its last neural transmissions to the limbs below. His massive body seemed to hesitate for a moment, like a felled tree deciding which way to drop. Then he cartwheeled over the ship’s rail and into the sea.

The splash was momentous.

It was all the confirmation the killer needed. Job done, he tidied up his gear, surveyed carefully his course of egress, and blended into the night.


Compared to the launch of her dead owner a thousand miles away, the departure of Argos from the docks of Sebastopol caused barely a ripple. She was a Russian-flagged vessel, a 312-foot carrier of general cargo. The ship’s hull was weathered and her fixtures dated, but there was not a hint of slackness in her rigging, nor any chatter in the hum of her engine. Nearing the end of an unremarkable service life, she’d spent years hauling fertilizer to Syria, a surprisingly profitable niche until civil war brought agricultural production there to a grinding halt. Shifting to more reliable trade, Argos had found steady if marginally profitable work running dry goods and machinery between Black Sea ports and the more sedate corners of the Middle East.

The ship’s recent transfer of ownership had little apparent effect on her operation. Most of the crew had stayed on in a tight job market, including her skipper, a thickset Armenian named Amad Zakaryan. As sea captains went, Zakaryan was a decent sort, with a reputation as a competent if conservative master who held deep familiarity with the routes he plied. Argos was his second command, this for a man who’d been running the Black Sea since he was a teen. He’d started out pulling dock lines and scraping rust, working his way up to master over the course of three decades. In that time he’d seen great change in the merchant marine industry, much of it for the better.

The changes he saw tonight, however, were not to his liking.

Argos maneuvered up the deepest channel in the Port of Sebastopol, a weaving passage through ebony water that did justice to the adjacent sea’s name. On display to starboard, as if lined up for inspection, were bits and pieces of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It was the smallest of that nation’s naval commands, comprised largely of ships that were castoffs from the frontline cold water fleets. The docks had grown marginally busier since the annexation of Crimea, and from the wing of the bridge Zakaryan watched the hulking shadow of a destroyer slide past in the pier’s yellow-sulfur lights. Being intimately familiar with the harbor, he knew this particular warship hadn’t seen open water in five years. Of course he knew why. For an economically struggling Russia, unable to fund major repairs, more of her navy was falling each day to little more than placeholder status. Like mortgaged hotels on a Monopoly board, eye-catching but valueless.

Soon the last wharves slid past, and the channel opened up to greet the black void ahead. Zakaryan issued an order to raise the speed, but he remained on the catwalk. He half turned his head to address the man standing behind him.

I should know what we are carrying, the captain said. It was the third time he’d posed the question, and while he didn’t expect an answer, he thought the business of getting under way might be his last rightful chance to ask.

The man standing by the rail, who wore heavy cargo pants and a thick sweater, gave a classically Slavic shrug. His name was Ivan, or so he said, and his accent was unmistakably Russian. A Russian named Ivan. That had been the captain’s first thought when they’d met yesterday afternoon. God help us had been his second.

There had been little interface when he’d first come aboard. Zakaryan had shown the man to his quarters on the upper deck, followed by a cautious exchange as they stood watching the deck crane lift a series of pallets aboard—none of them was particularly large, but they were obviously heavy based on the creaking of the cables and the efforts of the men on the guidelines. That was when the captain had first asked what they were carrying. The second query came around midnight, after Zakaryan had signed what was clearly a dubious cargo manifest—not unheard-of in these parts. Neither query had gotten a response. Now, with the ship plowing toward open water, it seemed his last chance.

What if we experience a fire in the hold? Zakaryan pressed. My men must know what they are dealing with.

Don’t let your boat catch fire, said Ivan. His hair was close-cropped, his manner blunt, and a pair of squinting eyes gave nothing away.

What speed should we make?

We are in no hurry. We need to breach the Suez six days from now.

Breach, Zakaryan thought, as if we’re blasting through a door. To Ivan’s name and nationality, he added a third descriptor: army. It did not bode well.

Indeed, the captain’s orders for this voyage were unique in all his years at sea. When it came to matters of storms, mechanical problems, or trouble with the crew, Zakaryan would be in charge. When it came to anything else—where they were going, what they were carrying, and when they would arrive—a Russian soldier named Ivan was in command. Every crewman’s cell phone had been secured in a locker under his bunk, and even the two-way radios were off limits, to be used only in Ivan’s presence. In Zakaryan’s experience, it was an unprecedented surrender of authority, but there had been little choice. The ship’s new ownership group, which went by the hazy name of MIR Enterprises, was represented by a man named Romanov who had made clear that if Zakaryan didn’t comply, a replacement skipper could easily be found. He’d heard such threats before from owners, yet something told him this new group would go through with it. Whatever cargo they were plying, it wasn’t going to be left stacked on a pier for the honor of one journeyman sea captain.

Zakaryan tried a different tack with his new co-commander. I checked the arrival schedule in Mumbai, he said, referring to their ostensible destination. The port administration there has no record of our sailing—they won’t be expecting us.


Zakaryan waited, but nothing else came. Frustrated, he stepped to the forward rail and looked out across a dead-calm sea.

Do not worry, Captain. All will become clear. In two weeks you will be back in Sebastopol with a very nice bonus.

Knowing defeat when he saw it, Zakaryan bent his head toward the passage to the bridge. Make speed seven knots, he called out.

Seven knots? queried the man at the helm. It was a decidedly inefficient speed, barely enough to keep steerage.

The captain shot his subordinate a hard look.

Seven knots it is, sir.


Notwithstanding its vicious nature, the murder of Pyotr Ivanovic was handled with practiced discretion on the Isle of Capri. Long a jewel of Italy’s robust tourism industry, the island was a haven for the well-heeled, and the idea that one of its wealthiest visitors had been shot dead on his mega-yacht was something to be tamped down.

The local carabinieri, who had little enthusiasm for high-profile cases, took a guarded investigative tack. To begin, there was nothing that could be called a press conference—the few details that did escape were more along the lines of whispered insinuations. To his credit, the inspector in charge, a compact and circumspect man named Giordano, checked off squares in his investigatory ledger as best he could.

He began by securing the crime scene, which in this case meant locking down what was nearly an ocean liner. With the captain’s assent, the inspector ordered that Cassandra remain, for the time being, anchored precisely where the murder had taken place. He then set about determining who was responsible for the vessel, and with no great surprise discovered that Cassandra’s chain of title was so impossibly convoluted that its disposition might take months, if not years, to determine. With foul play all but certain, he arranged for a postmortem on the body, and only then shifted to the matter of notification.

Giordano’s attempts to locate Ivanovic’s next of kin were an exercise in frustration. He began with the ship’s safe, which was accessed with the help of the captain, and found it largely empty. There were no relevant legal documents, in particular a will, nor any suggestion of where such papers might be stashed. The crew were equally unhelpful—none of them could remember Ivanovic ever mentioning a blood relative. The inspector’s inquiries to the Russian embassy were met with indifference. Ivanovic’s lawyer, a man from Kiev whose bluster far exceeded his grasp of Italian law, and whose phone number changed with curious frequency, assured the inspector unreservedly that he kept in his possession papers granting him personal oversight of Ivanovic’s estate—and that if Giordano could somehow expedite certain documentations, a ten-thousand-euro assistance fee might land in his own account.

The inspector demurred. The phone number changed again.

Because even the most egregious of sinners deserved some manner of last respects, Giordano committed to a chain of phone calls, thirty-one to Russia alone, seeking guidance on what to do with Ivanovic’s body after the postmortem. In a hopeful moment, he discovered that the victim hailed from the tiny village of Milove, a tangle of dusty streets set tenuously on the Ukraine-Russia border. He even managed to reach the office of the town church, an Eastern Orthodox house whose deacon lamented that the name was regrettably common in town. No one admitted to remembering Pyotr Ivanovic.

Seeing his murder investigation faltering straight out of the gate, Giordano shifted his focus to the victim’s recent history. It took little investigative effort to confirm that Ivanovic was indeed one of the most pretentious, and presumably corrupt, oligarchs to rise from the ashes of the Soviet era—something akin to being the nastiest viper in the pit. This, the inspector realized, was perhaps a solution in itself: Such a notorious character would certainly have made enemies over the years. But how could he track them down?

Giordano decided to begin with the low-hanging fruit. He interviewed each member of the ship’s crew, Ivanovic’s dumbstruck security detail, and the lone female guest who’d been on board. He dutifully mapped out Cassandra’s anchorage that night, and with a diagram in hand, he pressed each of them for any sights, sounds, or intuitions to explain who might have put a very large hole in their former employer. The only result was a wasted day, Giordano getting nothing to pique his interest.

When he was finally out of questions, the inspector gave permission for nonessential crew and staff to depart with their belongings. A young and very pretty Russian girl, who seemed none too distraught—and whose duties on board had been made quite clear by the room steward, who in his interview had mimed certain salacious acts—was also allowed to depart. Giordano bid the woman goodbye in her stateroom, just before going off shift, and as he did so he could not ignore that her manner of dress was hardly that of a grieving lover. She was resplendent in fitted Dior above and Manolo below, and the makeup stand in front of the mirror showed signs of a heavy engagement.

Only after Giordano’s departure did she make her move, presenting to the crew of the launch six wardrobe cases, and keeping to herself a large, and evidently quite heavy, handbag. A young carabinieri lieutenant, one of the small rotating contingent who stood watch over the crime scene, insisted on inspecting the handbag at the foot of the gangway. Inside he discovered nearly one hundred thousand euros, in various denominations, and enough gold coins and diamond jewelry to fill a good-sized safe deposit box. After considerable shouting and gesturing, and in a hopeless mix of languages, Cassandra’s captain became involved. The woman claimed that the trove had been gifted to her by her beloved Pyotr. The captain alleged she was pilfering all of it, and that without the cash he would have no means of paying a skeleton crew to maintain the ship. An even more disjointed argument ensued until the lieutenant waved his arms demonstratively to impose his ruling: the woman could keep the jewelry, but the cash and gold were to be returned to the ship’s safe. Everyone recognized half a victory, and the deal was struck.

With the flurry settled, and on the second day after Pyotr Ivanovic’s death, only the captain and five crewmen remained on board to manage Cassandra. All were looking forward to an extended paid holiday on the Isle of Capri.

Refusing to admit defeat, Giordano changed course the next day. Using the ship’s log as a reference, he made inquiries along her months-long trail across the Mediterranean. In a call to Cannes he talked to a provisioning agent who claimed not to remember Ivanovic, but who told Giordano that he would be most appreciative if the inspector would forward his company’s name and number to Cassandra’s new owner whenever the matter was settled. An event planner in Monaco, who’d arranged a dockside party, angrily claimed to be owed damages for a ruined chocolate waterfall.

Through all his inquiries Giordano sensed not a tear shed nor a voice choked with remorse. It was as if every person who’d ever known the Russian, save for his ersatz attorney, had gone into hiding. For Giordano, it was a departure from his previous experiences involving the death of wealthy individuals. Long-lost brothers and mistresses typically came out of the woodwork, professing to anyone who would listen their closeness to the dearly departed. Bankers and creditors materialized like apparitions, stacks of legal documents in hand. Here, however, it was as if Pyotr Ivanovic, and everything he’d ever touched, was in some way contaminated.

And it was there, somewhere between a village church in Ukraine and a chocolate fountain on the bottom of Monaco’s harbor, that Giordano’s disjointed inquiries reached their end. Pyotr Ivanovic was known widely across the Mediterranean party circuit, throughout banking and legal circles, and had left a string of bitterly shorn mistresses. When it came to the matter of burying him, however, there was not a single volunteer to the spade.

The inspector was stymied. With his investigation fast grinding to a halt, he was left with a yacht impounded in his harbor, a body no one would bother to claim, and a supporting cast of vermin abandoning a ship that wasn’t sinking.

In what was only a fleeting thought, the senior inspector from Capri thought he perhaps should have taken the ten thousand after all.

*   *   *

Though Inspector Giordano would never realize it, his sputtering inquest into the death of Pyotr Ivanovic did stir one small pocket of interest. It surfaced, of all places, in a conference room in Langley, Virginia. A junior CIA analyst, who specialized in metadata filtering, made an astute correlation between the murder of Ivanovic and a separate inquiry at the agency. The connection was tenuous at best, but enough of a thread that she advanced it to her supervisor at their morning meeting.

To her surprise, the division chief, who had herself been newly promoted, took a keen interest in the discovery. She asked specific questions about how Ivanovic had been killed. The only firm detail was as unusual as it was spectacular—by all appearances, he had been shot by a sniper. If the Italians knew more than that, they were holding their cards close.

In a decision the junior analyst thought speculative at the time—but one that months later would earn them both promotions—the division chief sent instructions to the Rome station to look quietly into Ivanovic’s death. They were to begin with AISI, Italy’s internal security agency.

Within twenty-four hours, the division chief from Langley, whose name was Anna Sorensen, was in the office of CIA director Thomas Coltrane.

Three hours later she was on the next commercial flight to Rome.


If the Italian township of Vieste could be distilled to a single theme, it would be that of light. Even at the height of autumn, sun splashes carelessly across a smooth Adriatic, its reflections capturing a city whose white stone walls seem to lift from the sea. Like most towns on the right-hand shore of Italy, Vieste is a place with a history as hard as its calcified cliffs, where Turkish corsairs plundered and pirates marauded, and where quarreling popes battled for dominance. Altogether, an incongruous heritage for a town whose very name invokes purity itself, drawn from Vesta, the Roman goddess of hearth, home, and family.

David Slaton kept a steady pace as he navigated narrow sun-washed lanes. Were he not preoccupied, he might have paused to appreciate the structures around him. The sidewalks, walls, and arches he saw were cut from local stone, everything square-edged and functional. As a stonemason, his range of expertise had expanded greatly in recent years. Indeed, he was reaching a point where he thought he might be able to distinguish any city in Europe based on a single representative building. On that pastoral Monday morning, however, the stonework of the southern Adriatic coast was not his priority. The tradecraft Slaton was engaged in was an altogether different variety, one whose success was measured not in what caught the eye, but rather what escaped it.

He drew little notice from the locals, although his sandy hair and Nordic features spoke of a gene pool to the north. He stood over six feet tall and carried a discernibly muscular build—not the inflated thickness developed in a gym, but a more functional, blue collar version. Testament to the stone craftsman he occasionally was.

He’d stepped onto Vieste’s main pier twenty minutes ago with an uneven gait, sea legs being an unavoidable consequence of three weeks on a small boat navigating open ocean. The awkwardness wore off quickly, and he moved now with a purpose. He mixed languidly with the crowds in busier sections of town, and more quickly where traffic was sparse. He did nothing to draw attention, and little escaped his eye. A car traveling with deliberate slowness passed uneventfully, and a pair of men loitering near the post office he quickly deemed harmless. So too, the bored guard at the entrance of a bank, and a helmeted delivery driver on a scooter. In each instance, information logged, evaluated, and filed into a mental bin that, were it to have a name, might be labeled: nonthreatening. There was of course an alternate bin, but that was thankfully empty. As it had been for months.

The reasons for his caution—there were two—lay a mile behind him in the cabin of an Antares 44 catamaran anchored in the town’s blue-aqua harbor: his wife and young son.

They’d slipped into port at first light, Windsom riding a following breeze, and set anchor inside the long breakwater. Dawn was Slaton’s preferred hour for arrival into any port. It allowed some daylight for navigation, always desirable when approaching an unfamiliar anchorage. It was also invariably a time when senior port captains and customs administrators lingered at their breakfast tables. When Windsom’s anchor had struck bottom an hour earlier, it did so with its usual symbolism—in that moment, the two realms in which Slaton and his family existed reached their necessary, and always awkward, intersection. Civilization on one hand, and their commitment to escape it on the other. It had been that way for more than a year, and so far they’d muddled through. A month at sea, then venture ashore to resupply, and perhaps, if things went smoothly, to eat a meal they hadn’t cooked themselves and sleep in a bed that wasn’t moving.

This morning, in keeping with their private protocol, Christine and Davy had stayed behind on Windsom while Slaton set out in the launch toward shore. Customs and immigration procedures required that he present the ship’s papers and all three passports. The documents he carried were something less than legitimate, but forgeries of such high quality that they’d never been challenged. At least not in Kuala Lumpur or Mykonos, and certainly not in the Maldives. Every destination, however, had its idiosyncrasies.

Slaton had researched things beforehand, and from a cruising reference manual he’d extracted what should have been an eminently simple process. Vieste, being a minor port of maritime entry, kept no dedicated customs facility, nor was there a standing port office. The only obligation was to report Windsom’s arrival in Italy to the local police precinct.

And there his problems began.

He found the precinct building easily, only to discover that it had been abandoned due to damage from a recent earthquake. A notice posted at the entrance stated that, while repairs were being made, a temporary office had been established on the opposite side of town. Vieste being a compact place, Slaton set out on foot and reached the correct district in fifteen minutes. There he encountered another roadblock—quite literally. The street in question was under repair, and barricades denied access to the temporary address. Slaton rounded the block, and soon encountered signs directing him to the new station. Then a third sign contradicted the two he’d previously seen. Slaton drew to a stop on the sidewalk. Apparently the carabinieri’s coordination with the ministry of highways, or signage, or whatever directorate was in charge, had gone wildly afield. It reminded him of stories he’d read about World War II, when partisans across Europe altered road signs to confuse the invading forces.

Welcome back to the real world, he said under his breath.

He spotted a café nearby, walked over, and struck up a conversation with an idle waiter—Italian was one of his better languages, although he spoke it with a Swiss accent, a vestige of his schooling as a young boy. The waiter explained that a water main had cracked, and that most of the businesses on the street had been forced to relocate.

The carabinieri? Slaton inquired.

"Yes, they were here for a time, but had to move like everyone else. I heard they are now near the old

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