The Mark of the Assassin

over the gray-green countryside of Kent;
    her long hand lay suggestively over a thigh hidden by thick headmistress
    stockings. The train arrived at Dover. Michael stepped from the
    compartment. The girl collected a leather shoulder bag and followed. She
    was tall, as tall as Sarah, but possessing none of Sarah's grace and
    feline physical agility. She wore a black thigh-length leather coat and
    black combat-style boots that clattered as she walked. Michael hurried
    from the platform to the ferry terminal. He purchased a ticket and
    boarded the vessel, a 425-foot multipurpose ferry capable of carrying
    1,300 passengers and 280 cars. He entered the passenger seating area on
    the main deck and sat down next to a window on the port side of the
    boat. He looked across and saw Graham Seymour sitting in the center of
    the room, dressed in blue jeans and a gray Venice Beach sweat-shirt,
    carrying a guitar case. Michael quickly looked away. The girl from the
    train entered, sat down directly behind Michael, and immediately started
    smoking. Michael read his newspapers as the ferry set sail. Dover
    vanished behind a curtain of rain. Every few minutes Michael glanced at
    the port side rail, for it was there, midship, that Awad was to appear.
    Once he went to the snack counter, which allowed him to scan the faces
    of everyone seated in the passenger lounge. He purchased murky tea in a
    flimsy paper cup and carried it back to his seat. He recognized no one
    but Graham and the girl from the train, who was engrossed in a Paris
    fashion magazine.
    A half hour passed. The rain stopped, but now, well into the Channel,
    the wind increased, and white-capped rollers raced toward the broad prow
    of the ferry. The girl rose, purchased coffee from the bar, then sat
    next to Michael. She lit another cigarette and sipped coffee in silence
    for a moment. "There he is, next to the rail, in the gray raincoat," she
    said, a hint of Beirut in her English. "Approach him slowly. Please
    refer to him only as Ibrahim. And don't try playing the hero again, Mr.
    Osbourne. I'm well armed, and Ibrahim has ten pounds of Semtex strapped
    to his body."
    MICHAEL FOUND THE FACE VAGUELY FAMILIAR, like a boyhood friend who
    materializes in middle age, fat and balding. He had seen the face many
    times before but never close and certainly never in person. He had seen
    the hazy right profile snapped by the shooters of MI5 during one of
    Awad's visits to London. The fuzzy full face captured by the French
    service during a stopover in Marseilles. The old Israeli mug shot of the
    young Awad: stone thrower, expert maker of Molotov cocktails, child
    warrior of the Intifada who nearly beat to death a settler from Brooklyn
    with a chunk of his beloved Hebron. The Israeli photo was of limited
    value, for the Shin Bet had got to him first and left him nearly
    unrecognizable with bruises and swelling. For a long moment Michael and
    his quarry stood side by side at the rail, each fixed on his own private
    spot of the swirling Channel waters, like quarreling lovers with nothing
    left to say. Michael turned and looked at Awad once more. Please refer
    to him only as Ibrahim. For an instant he wondered if the man truly was
    Muhammad Awad. Wheaton's tedious admonitions echoed through Michael's
    head like boarding announcements at an airport.
    To Michael, the man standing next to him looked like Awad's older, more
    prosperous brother. He was dressed for business in a costly gray
    overcoat and tasteful double-breasted suit visible beneath. The features
    had been altered by plastic surgery. The effect was to erase his
    Arabness and create something of uncertain national origin--a Spaniard,
    an Italian, a Frenchman, or perhaps a Greek. The prominent Palestinian
    nose was gone, replaced by the narrow straight nose of a northern
    Italian aristocrat. The cheekbones had been sharpened, the brow
    softened, the chin squared, the deer-brown eyes washed pale green by
    contact lenses. The back teeth had been pulled to give him the feline
    cheeks of a super model. Muhammad Awad's life read like a pamphlet of
    radical Palestinian revolutionary literature. Michael knew it well, for
    he had compiled Awad's biography and rasum for the Center with help from
    the Mossad, the Shin Bet, mi-6, and half the security services in
    Europe.
    His grandfather had been driven from his olive and orange groves outside
    Jerusalem in 1948 and cast into exile in Jordan. He died the following
    year of a broken heart,