by Alex Dryden
It was another half hour before Logan could lead him back to where they’d been. It was a rambling story, with many discursions about the beauty of the Russian colonel. But finally there she was again, as if emerging from a mist; a KGB colonel, a woman. She was a figure “everybody wants,” according to Plismy. “You, the British, and, most of all of course, the Russians,” Plismy stated. The French had given her a new name, a new identity. She was very valuable, very key to something-or-other, which Plismy had been vague about and clearly didn’t know, Logan thought.
Then Plismy had dropped a name—Fougieres—before Logan saw him mentally retrace his steps.
“That’s her cover name,” Plismy said.
“You’ll have to kill me now you’ve told me that,” Logan joked, and Plismy forgot his reticence and laughed until tears poured down his cheeks.
Logan then deftly guided Plismy away from the subject of the Russian colonel, but the talking soon died off. It was the natural end to the evening. Plismy was exhausted from the effort of projecting his own importance and from the drink.
Logan helped him into a taxi and threw his briefcase in after him. He hadn’t even needed to follow up his lie about the French bank. Then he returned to the bar and ordered another coffee.
He sat and thought for a long time before returning to his hotel in the Marais. There he used the hotel’s computer to check for the first flight south to Nîmes in the morning—a Saturday. There was one leaving in just over five hours’ time.
Then he asked the night porter for an atlas of France, and one was finally found with an index of place names at the back. Logan drew his finger down the page until he found it. Fougieres. It was a place name, not a code name. Fougieres was a small village about an hour’s drive north of Nîmes.
That was what he’d detected in Plismy’s voice, and in his withdrawal from the subject altogether after he’d spoken the name; a cover-up. It was a smooth cover-up of a mistake, one that would have gone unnoticed by anyone without Logan’s antennae. An inflection in Plismy’s voice, a little too much haste in the explanation, perhaps. But that was the answer. Fougieres was a place, not the code name for the woman.
Logan felt the heat rise again. Unless Thomas Plismy, newly elevated, drunk, sexually satisfied, and heady with new opportunities, was lying better than Logan had ever seen anyone lie, then Logan had gained a handhold from the evening. The French oil company was a story to cover his expenses, perhaps.
But the woman, the KGB colonel “everyone wants,” might be the nugget of gold he was such an expert at seeing through the dirt. That was a handhold that might help him to reach much higher up the mountain.
Chapter 2
THERE WAS NO WIND down at the foot of the tower block, just the hot stillness, as if the air itself had died.
But that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a wind thirty-three floors up—a crosswind, perhaps, strong enough to affect his aim. He couldn’t say until he was up there. And it would make all the difference.
Thick clouds, dirty grey around the edges, hung low over London and smothered the already breathless city. The stationary air was sultry with trapped August heat, and combined with the city’s usual palpitating energy, it had forced the temperature into the eighties.
The man calling himself Lars shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it. There was no way he would know if it was going to work—if the stillness down here prevailed up there in the sky—until he reached the top of the tower block.
He slung the tattered holdall, stained with cement powder, grease, working stains of various kinds, back over his shoulder and studied the area around the bottom of the tower.
There was a listless park playground with bare earth where grass had grown earlier in the summer. Some broken swings and a few huge cracked concrete hoops and dugouts for skateboarders had been laid out once for children’s entertainment, but were now the repositories for syringes, condoms, litter. A sculpture—at least he thought it was a sculpture—of intertwining metal in primary colours was stuck into another concrete platform. Empty bottles and food wrappings were scattered in every direction.
The prefabricated concrete pathways, splintered in places where the weeds had forced their way through, mirrored the decaying, weather-stained 1960s concrete edifice that soared grimly above them.
He had studied it half a dozen times already and knew the tower block and its surrounding area inside and out. He’d traced the routes in, the exit points, he’d watched the local characters for anyone who might cause trouble. Drunks who didn’t understand the danger he posed were the worst. He’d ridden the elevator to the top of the tower block many times and now recalled the stink of piss inside it. The English were pigs.
He’d also ridden the service elevator on several occasions, just to make sure.
Putting his hand in his pocket, he jangled the keys to the steel door that accessed the service part of the tower block, accessible only to firemen, utility workers, and council employees. It hadn’t taken him long, three weeks ago now, to take a mould of the locks and then have the keys cut. It reassured him that they were there in his pocket. He didn’t like to rely on just one exit.
It was a Saturday, and that was in his favour. Apart from a few teenagers kicking a ball around in the “park,” their baseball hats worn back to front and their faces sprouting adolescent hair in defiance of any style but their own uncertain manliness, there were few of the tower’s occupants in view. Maybe they were shopping or doing some other weekend business. Maybe some of them, at least, were already on their way to the football match; the first match of the season, the Charity Shield between the winners of the FA Cup and the Premier League.
Hopefully, this year the season would begin with a bang, he thought. But Lars didn’t even offer himself a sardonic inward grin at his little joke. He was as grim-faced as the tower itself, as expressionless as the sky and the city that slunk febrile beneath it.
He didn’t look up in anybody’s direction or catch anyone’s eye. He just traipsed across the battered concrete paving to the steel door the way a man called out on a Saturday for maintenance work might: grumpy, uncommunicative. He called himself Lars, in case anybody challenged him, and then he could retreat into an ignorance of the English language that he could speak perfectly well. Just another foreigner working for the council.
He would go up that way, he thought, up in the service elevator, and choose afterwards which of the two elevators to descend by.
There was nobody in view of the steel door, buried as it was along a trash-filled concrete corridor at the foot of the tower block. Even if there were, he was dressed for it: a plastic yellow jerkin with the council logo, overalls, and, pulled roughly over them, worker’s boots. The well-used holdall, packed with what he needed, weighed exactly thirty-two and a half pounds, and was slung over his shoulder. But he pulled his cap a little farther over his eyes, just in case.
The steel door opened easily to his forged keys, as it had done several times before. He locked it behind him, tested it with a push to be sure, and pressed the code for the elevator. It was already at ground level, so that meant there was nobody up there. Then he stepped inside for the swift ride to the top.
A steel ladder greeted him, as he knew it would, when he stepped out above the accommodation on the thirty-third floor. But before climbing the ladder, he inserted a key into the elevator mechanism that sent it to the bottom again. Then he connected a cord to the mechanism and carried the other end with him.
Then he climbed the ladder, unlocked a padlock that kept a steel trapdoor shut, and pushed it open all the way. He walked up the remaining four steps and out onto the flat, pink-gravelled roof where the lungs of the tower block—the heat vents and other apparatus—clawed their extremities into the sky. He laid the cord down on the roof, close to where he was going to set up, so he would see the cord move if the elevator was used, and propped the trapdoor open with a small pebble.
The first thing he did when he stood up, without
thinking, was sniff the air, test its eddies and currents. There was marginally more movement in it than there had been at the bottom of the tower block. He would have to measure it. There was an anemometer, of course, among the other necessities in the holdall. Over the distance he was planning to fire, even the heavy .50-calibre shell would form an arc of up to a hundred feet vertically and, depending on the wind, might err fifty feet to right or left. He knew that even he couldn’t cope with anything like a crosswind, not at this distance.
But in any case, there were still two hours before the match began, and anything might happen meteorologically in that time. He knew he’d be measuring the wind in the final minutes to be certain of the best information. It was a fine enough piece of work he had to do, even without a single breath of air to intervene.
He didn’t set up his equipment immediately, but laid the holdall carefully on the gravel roof unopened. There was a fine view. If you ignored the fact you were standing on a decaying glass-and-concrete rectangle, you could imagine it had been put here for the view, he thought. There were few high buildings around him, just three other similar blocks, slightly lower than this one, and London wasn’t a high city anyway. He could see all the way, unobstructed, the eight miles across town to the highest buildings that housed the banks and office blocks in the City and Canary Wharf.
The nearly one and a half miles between him and the football stadium was clear of anything high. Atop the tower block, he was far above anything in his line of fire.
But it wasn’t as easy as that. The distance was huge for the best sniper shot—close to record-breaking, he knew. And the stadium itself had a roof that curved up and then down, so that all inside it was obscured apart from one small corner of the pitch and one half of the eastern stand. That was fortunate, at least. If the director’s box had been on the western side, there’d be no shot.
Removing the fluorescent yellow council jerkin, he turned it inside out so that a grey lining he’d sewn in himself was all that could be seen. Then he unrolled some grey parachute silk from around his waist and spread it on the roof. He fitted snap-on aluminium struts from regular camping equipment into sleeves in the material that he’d also made and set up this rigid, flat canopy, two feet high, under which he could stretch full length, concealed. Though it was unlikely they would be looking for anything at this distance from the stadium, the police helicopters that monitored the match crowd would see nothing moving on the roof, no human figure.
He settled down under the canopy for the ninety-five-minute wait, and that was just for the match to start. It would require a goal from the home side to be able to make the shot at all. Otherwise the seated figure—his target—was half obscured by a wall. But a goal would undoubtedly bring the target to his feet, and that was the moment—“the moment of truth,” as the bullfighters called it. The mise à mort. He imagined the blade descending through the muscles of the bull’s neck, its shoulder blades opened by the lowered, charging head, a way to the heart exposed. He too would go for a heart shot.
London shimmered, but not with sunlight, just the heavy heat. Thank God the sun was behind clouds. Under the silk on the roof it would have been unbearable with the August sun beating down.
He listened to the faint sound of traffic down below. A seagull perched briefly on one of the heating vents, then flew off again.
Unzipping the holdall, he took out the gun stock first. He stroked it with his right hand; a precision piece, custom-made and then adapted for a left-hander. Left-handed Lars. It was very light, thirty-one pounds without the sight. The semiautomatic could be disassembled and assembled in three minutes with the right tools. It was a long-range rifle used by U.S. Navy Seals, among others.
It had been a difficult choice whether to go for the semiautomatic, with five rapid shots, or the simpler, maybe more accurate single-shot rifle. At this range he might easily need a second shot if there was an opportunity, and reloading would be slow. But he’d had to weigh taking a second or even a third shot against the marginally less accurate nature of the semiautomatic. Either way, there was a risk. The free-floating barrel gave less recoil than a bolt-action rifle, and that was also a consideration. Its accuracy was proven to a range of more than a mile. After that, it was entirely down to the hair’s-breadth expertise of the sniper himself.
He assembled the barrel into the steel receiver and fished out the Bender optical sights from the holdall; three screws either side, tightened with a key. You could take the sight off and fit it back on without it losing the zero. Then he fitted a forward bipod and rear bipod for maximum steadiness. He carefully placed the belt with its five shots, five individual opportunities if there was time, next to the mounted rifle. Then he turned over onto his front and set himself up in a firing position, legs splayed, the right one slightly cocked.
He looked through the sight at the directors’ box thirty streets away and read off the distance on its red digital rangefinder: 2,380 yards. It was a huge shot, but not impossible, not a record after all. The record was held by a Canadian corporal serving in Afghanistan, who’d killed an enemy over nearly a mile and half, and then immediately killed a second at eight hundred yards. Good shooting.
He zeroed in the rifle at a seat in the centre of the box, half obscured though it was. Then he rolled over and stretched his limbs and crawled out from under the parachute silk to spend the next half hour relaxing against a heating vent and watching and listening for the sound of helicopters, glancing at the still cord that disappeared through the trapdoor, and composing himself mentally for the task.
It came as a low hum at first, and he sat up, alert, before realising the sound was the crowd in the stadium, its collective 35,000-strong murmur rising above the stadium roof and wafting across the distance to the tower block. Crawling back under the parachute silk, he lay and waited.
The sound of the stadium’s speaker system sent announcements and rock music through the air. They were cranking up the crowd for the spectacle ahead. He looked down the sight and saw the directors’ box filling up. They were the last to arrive—greetings, handshakes. They were mostly Russians, flown in on private jets from Moscow that morning to watch the first big game amid the high hopes their man’s team carried for the forthcoming season in England and Europe.
He watched the target, standing, clapping one man on the back, shaking another’s hand. At 2,380 yards he could see the gold signet ring on his finger, the stubble on his chin, the colour of his wife’s earrings. But there was no clear shot. Then he watched them take their seats, and a roar went up for the kickoff in the centre of the pitch, which he couldn’t see.
The match coursed to and fro, he guessed, judging from the noises of the crowd, the partisan songs of rival supporters. Occasionally he saw action, down in the corner of the pitch on the eastern side that was visible to him; a corner kick, a long ball followed by an attacking player who trapped it and was then wedged in by defenders to prevent the cross. The target’s side was attacking against the goal mouth at that end, a goal he couldn’t see.
Once, there was a roar from the crowd behind that goal mouth, and the target came to his feet, beginning to clap his hands, only to stop and sit back down, an opportunity missed, both down there in the stadium and up here on the roof of the tower block.
The game had been playing for just over thirty-five minutes, and Lars was getting stiff with waiting, when a huge roar confirmed the goal he and the target had been waiting for. The target jumped to his feet, clapping, then raising his hands above his head in triumph in a sustained celebration of a goal.
Everything stopped. Five minutes before, the reading on the anemometer had been negligible.
Lars took his aim through the sight, marked up three bars above the zero to account for drop. The target remained in position, once turning to hug a man to his left. The celebration was sustained. Lars was still, his breathing utterly stopped. No muscle moved, except the one on his trigger finger. He pulled just enough to feel the resistan
ce. He was composed; the target was in full sight.
He hardly felt the recoil. But he lay still, exactly as he had been to take the shot. Through the sight, he saw the Russian appear to explode. A .50-calibre shell would penetrate two sheets of metal six feet apart; the target didn’t have a chance.
Within four minutes, Lars was off the roof, rifle and parachute silk packed away, the cord rewound, the pebble kicked from under the trapdoor. He took the service elevator back down. It seemed the lucky way. And as he descended, he thought of the shock, the incomprehension, followed by the mayhem and panic that would start in the director’s box and slowly spread through the stadium as it sank in.
The Russian was dead, of that he was certain. And tied up with him were $30 billion worth of assets, as well as his tight, close relations with the Kremlin, and with a business empire that stretched across the world. But that was the aftermath, he thought. That was nothing to do with him. That was effect; he was cause.
He locked the steel door at the foot of the tower block, checked the entrance to the concrete corridor, and stepped out across the playground, slowly, until he reached a white van parked in a street around the corner. The wind puffed suddenly. A front was coming in, and the wind would precede it.
Chapter 3
LOGAN RENTED A CAR at the Nîmes airport, 350 miles south of Paris. It was seven and a half hours after he’d put Plismy in a taxi. He hadn’t slept.
It was a Saturday; the air was clear and blue in the south, and the country as he drove north of the city was parched. When he crossed the bridge at Sainte-Maxime, he saw that the river was reduced to a trickle.
He wanted to be at Alès before lunchtime to set the first stage of his plan, and he drove the Peugeot into the old coal-mining town at the edge of the Cévennes just before midday. Removing all signs of the rental company, he threw them in a municipal dump at the edge of town and drove into a small mechanic’s shop situated up a dusty side street, which the Michelin guide said was open on a Saturday.