by Lee Child
‘You saying it couldn’t have made the shot?’
‘Not a hope in hell. You could give Kott or Carson or Datsev the best AK-47 ever made, and they’d be useless beyond about four hundred yards. But the shot that killed Khenkin was about sixteen hundred. Four times as long. They wouldn’t even have hit the right building. Plus, the round is puny. It would have barely gotten there at all. They’d have had to launch it upward about thirty degrees, like dropping a big fat curveball over the plate. Up and down, like a ballistic missile. Which is an impossible shot. And even if they had made it, the bullet would have arrived with so little energy you could have swatted it aside with a ping-pong paddle. It would have bounced off Khenkin’s hair gel. But it didn’t. It blew his head right off his shoulders.’
‘So?’
‘It wasn’t any twenty-year-old Vietnamese kid with an AK-47.’
‘Then why was he there?’
‘I’m guessing he was a part of a package deal. Kott or Carson or Datsev or whoever hired some local support. Which in Paris might well be Vietnamese. There’s a big community. I’m sure most of them are on the up and up, driving taxis or whatever, working hard, but equally I’m sure some of them are gangbangers. They put maybe ten or a dozen on the street, as a rolling cordon around the guy, to protect the escape. No doubt the old man who stopped me was one of them. He was running interference. And they put the kid in the attic, as a decoy. They’re blooding him. He’s making his bones. Get arrested, stay quiet, hang in there, and he’s a made man. I bet there was no firing pin in his gun. Just so they can be sure of getting him off on the technicality.’
Scarangello was quiet for a spell, and then she said, ‘It has to be Datsev, right? What would Kott or Carson have against Khenkin?’
I said, ‘I’m sure O’Day has all kinds of theories about that.’
But it turned out the Socratic method had its limitations. O’Day and Shoemaker and Nice had gone through plenty of back and forth, but had elicited no truths implicitly known by all rational beings. They had collected detailed briefings from Paris, and Moscow, and London, and diagrams, and photographs, and video and after-action reports, and they had been through the data many times over, but they had reached no conclusions. They were waiting to see what I had to say.
We landed at Pope Field in the late afternoon, less than a day after we left it, having gained back the six hours we lost on the way out. Scarangello wanted to shower before we all sat down and got into it, which seemed reasonable, so O’Day gave us thirty minutes, which I spent in the shower too, first rinsing Khenkin off my coat, which was easy enough, because the fabric was waterproof, so the gunk sluiced right off. I kept it going until the remaining beads of water showed up clean, and then I patted it dry with a towel. Then I hosed myself down, and used the shampoo, and used the soap, and then dressed again fast enough to hit the buffet room before the conference started. There wasn’t much on the tables, but at least there was coffee, so I took a cup and headed upstairs.
O’Day was in his customary spot, and Shoemaker was right there next to him. Casey Nice greeted me with her smile, and I sat down, and Scarangello came in after me, glowing from the hot water, hair still wet, in another black skirt suit.
O’Day said, ‘First let’s dispose of the Vietnamese.’
I said, ‘There’s a first time for everything.’
He didn’t smile. I guessed he had looked only about eighty years old during that ancient conflict, and had been in charge of some of the strategy, possibly, and was therefore still a little sensitive about it. Casey Nice filled the awkward silence. She said, ‘We’re assuming the rifleman or his paymasters hired a local criminal element for local support. Or as a way of getting permission to operate on their turf. Or both.’
‘Likely,’ I said. ‘Unless the paymasters are the Vietnamese. Maybe it’s a government thing. Maybe they’re going to invade Russia.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Not very,’ I said. ‘I agree with you. It was local support.’
‘In which case as a matter of pride and discipline they won’t spill anything meaningful. Which leaves us with absolutely nothing except our own interpretation of a very confusing and incomplete scenario.’
‘Nothing incomplete about it. Not from Khenkin’s point of view, anyway.’
‘We think he travelled to Paris anxious to convince us and the Brits that Datsev wasn’t involved. Do you agree?’
I nodded. ‘He said it was beneath Datsev to audition.’
‘And the DGSE tells us Khenkin seemed obsessed with showing the shot was going to miss. Which it was, apparently. Left and a little low. Moscow says Datsev never misses. And left and a little low happens to be Kott’s signature from Arkansas. With those paper targets we saw.’
I said, ‘It wasn’t Kott on that apartment balcony.’
O’Day looked up. ‘And you know this how?’
‘The DGSE lady figured the shooter was seated behind a planter. But Kott trained for a year lying down prone. It’s like sleeping. Everyone has a natural position. And sitting behind a planter isn’t Kott’s.’
O’Day nodded.
He said, ‘Good to know.’
Casey Nice said, ‘But Khenkin couldn’t have known that. All he could have claimed is that Datsev wouldn’t have missed. So he was a happy camper, until he got shot. Which is where it gets confusing. As in, it wasn’t Datsev, and then suddenly it was. Because there was history between Datsev and Khenkin, and presumably no history between either Kott or Carson and Khenkin.’
I said, ‘Stand up.’
She said, ‘What?’
‘Stand up and take off your shoe.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do it.’
She did it. She stood up, and she said, ‘Which shoe?’
‘Either one,’ I said. I stood up too. She bent and slipped off her left shoe. I crossed the room to the door. Like every other door in the place it was a painted wood rectangle about six feet six inches high and two feet six inches wide. I said, ‘Suppose this was a glass panel. Suppose you knew it was pretty tough. Suppose I gave you one chance to shatter it with the heel of your shoe. A good solid blow. Show me where you would hit it.’
She paused a beat, and then she limped and padded towards me. She reversed the shoe in her hand and held it like a weapon. She stopped. She said, ‘I don’t know enough about it. This is ceramics technology. This is the science of strong materials.’
‘Datsev and Kott and Carson aren’t scientists either. Do it by instinct.’
I saw her glance at one spot after another. She raised the shoe, tentatively, and moved it a little, as if involuntarily, as she rehearsed different alternatives in her mind. I said, ‘Talk me through it.’
She said, ‘Nowhere close to the edge. I think it would just chip, nothing more, like a small bite out of a large cookie.’
‘OK.’
‘Not dead centre, either. I feel the shock of the impact would kind of spread out uniformly, and equally, and then maybe bounce back internally, off the edges, and kind of cancel itself out. It might just flex, like a drum skin, if I hit it in the centre.’
‘So where?’
‘Somewhere off-centre but not too far off-centre. So the shock would be kind of asymmetrical. So the internal stresses would help.’
‘Show me.’
She gave it one last look, and raised the shoe, and mimed a big swing, and ended up with the heel on the paint just inside the upper left quadrant, such that if the size of the door was scaled up to the size of the bulletproof shield in Paris, then the spot she was marking would be a little over five hundred millimetres in from the left, and a little over seven hundred millimetres down from the top.
I said, ‘The second shot was supposed to kill the guy. Not the first. The first shot was supposed to break the glass. That’s all. Therefore it wasn’t a miss. It was dead on target.’
Casey Nice hopped around near the door and got her shoe back on, and then we sat dow
n again. I said, ‘I think Khenkin understood all this from the start. What the DGSE had figured out made it more likely it was Datsev, not less. He came to Paris hoping his boy was in the clear, but everything he saw told him he wasn’t.’
Shoemaker said, ‘Any one of the three could have made that shot.’
‘But what about the next shot? I think that’s what was on Khenkin’s mind. Because whoever was shooting had to jump his aiming point about six inches up and to the right to get the guy. Real fast, too. Which is a hell of a thing to do, on the fly, from fourteen hundred yards. It meant the muzzle would have to move about seven-thousandths of an inch. Not more, not less, and fluently, and fluidly, and very precisely, but also calmly. There was no time to settle and check and breathe. If the glass had shattered, the French guy would have been in the wind more or less immediately. At least he would have been hopping around like crazy. As it was he was buried in agents about two seconds later. Think about it. You shoot, you move the muzzle seven-thousandths of an inch, and you shoot again, all way faster than I can even say it. That would have taken supernatural skill. And Datsev was supernatural, according to Khenkin.’
O’Day said, ‘OK, we’re making progress here. The shooter was Datsev.’
I said, ‘Khenkin certainly thought so. I was watching him. He was a tough nut, but there was a soft side to him. He was grumpy in the morning, because he had gotten up too early. But he was happy, too. At that point it was just a fun day out in Paris. It was someone else’s problem. Mine, probably. He paid for my breakfast, even. Then the chips started to fall, and then it wasn’t such a fun day after all. Because now it was his problem. He was going to have to go home and break the bad news. He didn’t want to do that. There was a bit of the bureaucrat in him.’
‘But then Datsev shot him and saved him the trouble.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Datsev didn’t shoot him.’
TWENTY
I SAID, ‘YOU have to think about that second shot. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Get on the phone and call our five best snipers. The Recon Marines, the SEALs, Delta Force, wherever. I’m sure you could do that. I’m sure you’ve got them all on speed dial. I’m sure they all work for you, really, the same way Datsev worked for the KGB.’
Shoemaker said, ‘The KGB was history a long time ago. Now it’s the SVR.’
‘Old wine, new bottles.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘Ask our best guys about that second shot. Ask them about two trigger pulls, like a fast double tap, with nothing in between except a six-inch deflection at fourteen hundred yards. All with a rifle over five feet long, that weighs more than an iron bar.’
‘What would they tell me?’
‘They’d tell you hell yes sir, they could make that shot blindfolded.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Problem is, then you’d say, stop with the rah-rah bullshit, soldier, and tell me the truth, and to a man they’d swear that shot was impossible.’
‘Apparently Khenkin didn’t think so.’
‘He believed his own hype. Datsev is human, just like you or me. Well, me, anyway. He couldn’t have made that shot. No one on earth could have made that shot.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘There were two shooters.’
The room went quiet at that point, and I used the time to finish my coffee. I said, ‘One of them was either Datsev or Carson, and the other one was John Kott.’
O’Day raised his head, slowly, like an old grey turtle coming up out of the sand, and he said, ‘You just told us quite emphatically that Kott wasn’t there.’
‘I said he wasn’t on the balcony. He was in the dining room, prone on the dining table, the end part of which was about the size of an eight-by-four sheet of plywood. He was aiming over his partner’s head. Think about it. Two snipers. One is cross-legged behind the planter. The other is prone on the table. They’ve been there thirty minutes. They’re in the zone. They’re breathing slow. They’re just floating along. The French doors are open. The one behind the planter is set up on the glass shield. He’s chambered with an armour-piercing round. He’s chosen the exact same aiming point Ms Nice did. Purely by instinct. Above and behind him, the one on the table is chambered with a match-grade bullet. He’s set up on the French guy. On his temple, probably. Maybe the guy’s wearing body armour under his suit. Not much of an impediment, probably, but why risk an unknown factor? The head is better. So it’s right there in the scope. He’s just waiting for the glass to break.’
‘But it didn’t.’
‘So they beat feet and get the hell out of Dodge. But Kott stays in Paris. He’d prefer to stop the investigation right there. He camps out and watches that balcony, day after day. Or maybe he’s tipped off by the French. You should check. But whichever, finally he gets his chance. Three investigators show up. When he saw me in his scope he must have thought he’d won the lottery. His little heart must have gone pit-a-pat. Then he calmed down and pulled the trigger.’
‘And hit Khenkin by mistake?’
‘Not by mistake. He got me centre mass, a dead-on bull’s-eye, a no-doubter, an Olympic gold medal right there. I was a dead man from the moment he pulled the trigger. But the bullet was in the air nearly four seconds. And there was a gust of wind. I remember seeing it. I remember the muzzle flash, and then the snap of a flag, and then Khenkin got hit. Because the wind moved the bullet. Only about a foot and a half, over sixteen hundred yards. It nudged it just a little, right to left as it flew, from my chest to his head.’
‘You can’t prove that.’
‘I can,’ I said. ‘If it was Datsev aiming at Khenkin, then Bennett would have been killed. He was next in line. You can’t argue with the wind. It was right there. The flags went crazy, and then stopped just as fast. It was gusty all morning. Check it out.’
O’Day was quiet for a spell. Then he said, ‘Two shooters. Jesus.’ Then he said, ‘We have to give this theory to London and Moscow. If we’re all behind it, that is. Rick?’
Shoemaker paused a beat, and nodded.
‘I’m in,’ he said.
‘Joan?’
Scarangello said, ‘Better to think two if it’s really one, than one if it’s really two. We should err on the side of caution.’
O’Day didn’t ask Casey Nice.
I said, ‘I’m going to London now.’
O’Day said, ‘Now?’
‘I don’t mind about the picture in his bedroom. I don’t even mind that the little runt just took a shot at me. That’s an occupational hazard, for a cop. But he was careless and he missed. He shouldn’t have tried on a windy day. He killed an innocent man. That’s different. That was a mistake. And like you said, I caught him once. I can catch him again.’
‘And then what?’
‘I’m going to twist his arm out of his shoulder socket and beat him to death with his own right hand.’
‘Negative,’ O’Day said. ‘You’ll go to London when I tell you to. This is a complex business. Preparations must be made.’
‘You can’t give me orders. I’m a civilian.’
‘Helping his country. Let’s do it right.’
I said nothing.
He said, ‘Khenkin wasn’t an innocent man. He was KGB. He did bad things.’
I said nothing.
He said, ‘I told you so.’
‘Told me what?’
‘It’s not the same with a sniper out there.’
Scarangello asked, ‘Will they work together in London too?’
‘Probably,’ I said. ‘It’s a target-rich environment. It would double their firepower.’
‘So who’s in the frame for the second spot? Carson or Datsev?’
‘I’m not a gambling man.’
‘If you were?’
‘Then Carson. Khenkin said Datsev wouldn’t audition. I didn’t read that as hype. It felt authentic to me.’
‘Wait until we’re ready,’ O’Day said. ‘Then you ca
n go to London.’
TWENTY-ONE
THE CONFERENCE ENDED and I headed downstairs and out the red door, aiming for my corrugated quarters, but Casey Nice caught up to me steps later and said, ‘You want to go get some dinner?’ Which sounded like a fine idea to me. The last hot food I had eaten was the croque madame, in Paris, paid for by Yevgeniy Khenkin himself.
I said, ‘Where?’
‘Off post,’ she said. ‘Barbecue or something.’
‘You have a car?’
‘More or less.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Deal,’ I said.
‘I should change,’ she said. She was in a black skirt suit. Dark nylons, good shoes. Perfect for D.C. or Virginia, maybe not so much in a country shack outside of Fayetteville.
I said, ‘I’m happy to wait.’
‘Five minutes,’ she said.
Which turned out closer to ten. But it was worth the delay. She knocked on my door and I opened up and found her in a ponytail and a version of her Arkansas outfit. The same brown leather jacket, over a white T-shirt, with different jeans. Same colour, but lower cut. And all scraped and sanded and beat up. Distressed, I believed they called it, which to me meant upset, which just didn’t compute. Was there a finer place to be, than where those jeans were?
She had car keys dangling from her finger, and she held them up to show me, and she said, ‘I apologize in advance.’
‘For what?’
‘You’ll see.’
And I did, about two hundred yards later, in a fenced lot near Pope Field’s perimeter road. The lot was full of everything I had expected to see, which was pick-up trucks and domestic muscle cars about twenty years old, and beat-up Mercedes and BMWs brought home from deployments in Germany. I kept my eye out for anomalies, and I saw a tiny Mini Cooper the colour of lavender, and then further on a VW new-style Beetle, yellow, half hidden behind some hideous old farm vehicle. I figured hers was the Beetle, if she was already apologizing. Maybe it was a graduation present. Maybe she had a daisy in the vase on the dash, to match the paint.