by Alex Dryden
“Kind of a grim place to start the day,” was Burt’s comment.
It was dark as they left, but the day seemed to be dawning without rain or snow for the new president.
At her direction, they halted the Humvee—another in Burt’s stable of outsized American vehicles—about half a mile from the main gates of the cemetery. Burt laid his hand on her arm and told her they would be in the vicinity whenever she called.
He’d insisted she take a cell phone, which she didn’t trust, but she acquiesced in the knowledge that she could check it for bugs before she went anywhere near the rendezvous.
Then she began the long walk away from the vehicle, feeling the eyes of all four of them boring into her back, like dogs left behind on a promised walk.
After a few minutes she disappeared around a bend in the road.
She was carrying a small backpack over her shoulders and wore a long coat, boots, and a felt hat. The pistol was wrapped in clothing inside the pack.
When she’d walked for a mile, past the main entrance to the cemetery, she found the kind of place she was looking for. Everything now had to be improvised until she reached the rendezvous.
It was a small, neat mall, which would be closed for the national holiday. She skirted across the front of it and made her way around to the rear, watching for cameras, until she was out of sight from the road.
Behind the mall there was a delivery yard, and behind that, a high wall against theft.
She kept to the outside of the wall, where the dulled winter grey of grass offered a slice of neat wasteland, until she found a niche where the wall doglegged to the left; from here there was no view apart from straight out.
Checking that there was nobody on this piece of ground, she then dismantled the phone, examined it for a positioning device, and, when she was satisfied there was none, reassembled it. As long as she left it switched off, she’d be untraceable.
She then stripped off her coat, trousers, boots, and jacket until she stood in just her jogging clothes. She took jogging shoes from the pack and then unwrapped the gun from a fleece jacket and removed the firing pin for safety. She slung it under her armpit with a sling they’d concocted the night before that gave it an easy draw, and strapped it again around her body. She wore the baggy fleece over the top.
Then she turned the backpack inside out, so that it became the orange colour of the inside, instead of grey. She refilled it with the clothes she’d removed, put it on her back again, and pulled a woollen hat over her head, tucking her hair away completely. When she was satisfied that she was a different person from the one who had stepped out of the car, she checked the ground ahead from the niche in the wall. Content that she was alone, she began to run, away from the rear of the mall, across a small park, and into a residential street that ended in a cul de sac on the far side of the wasteland.
She checked her watch as she ran and saw that it was coming up to seven in the morning. It was about two miles to the rendezvous, she reckoned. She’d be there with plenty of time to spare, but it was necessary to obscure the time of her meeting with Mikhail from Burt and the others as much as possible.
She ran along neat streets in the grey morning and guessed that the people in cars, mostly families, were driving into the capital early to get the best view of the new president and settle in for a long wait. The presidential procession wasn’t taking place until after lunch.
And the further she ran away from the great events of the day, the more she appreciated Mikhail’s rendezvous. Everyone who wasn’t in front of their television sets was heading away from here, in the opposite direction, towards the city.
The Glencarlyn Park was an area of clumps of trees and broad lawns of about a hundred acres. There was a one-storey stone replica building at the north side of the park, which had pillars along the front of it, in some kind of antebellum style. It was the type of folly you might find in the grounds of an English stately home. The gardens, grey and brown in the colourless January light, were laid out in a piece of gentle landscaping that spoke of informality. Couples might stroll here on summer evenings, families sit on the grass and picnic. It was a small, unnoticed place, close enough to the city without having to make an expedition.
She stopped at a wooden sign that spelled out the park’s rules, but without really seeing them. Her eyes were alert to the area around her—movements, any figures who appeared, then reappeared. But she saw nobody. Even the joggers were taking it easy this early in the morning on a national holiday.
She ran once around the park, checking on the position of the pillared stone building and leaving it well to the north of her path. Then she exited at the eastern entrance and sat on a bench in the street, seeing the cars that passed without looking at them, noting their number plates and colours and brands.
She held a good two dozen of them in her mind before she got up and walked into a small coffee shop on the far side of the street that had decided to remain open for the day.
After buying a coffee, she picked up a daily paper from a shelf and leafed through it, glancing up from time to time at the television high up in the corner of the wall, where CNN was already beginning its coverage of the day, and already trying to string out information that would be repeated a dozen times. Sipping the coffee, Anna watched the street and checked her watch for the final time.
In the bathroom, she fixed the firing pin of the pistol into its position, checked the ease of draw, and zipped the baggy fleece jacket over it once again. She put the pack back on her shoulders and left the café, deciding to walk now. She saw her breath in the cold air and felt the damp on her skin, but it was going to be a day without rain.
When she entered the park again, she took a circuitous route, approaching the stone building from the rear.
The building where they were to meet was U-shaped, with straight sides that formed an enclosed patio at the rear. There were a few wooden tables concreted into the ground here, just as Mikhail had said. A figure was sitting at the middle table, and she knew it was Mikhail. He wore a long brown coat and a Russian fur hat, and she noticed the smallest detail even at this distance; the mud on the edges of his shoes, the wisp of greyish black hair at the back of his neck, a plaster wrapped around the middle finger of his left hand. It was the plaster that told her for certain it was Mikhail.
She surveyed the route behind her from which she’d come, and swept her gaze around the park. A man was pushing a bike along a path in the distance. She watched him from the corner of her eye. Another man walked his dog a few hundred yards in the other direction. She trusted Mikhail knew his job as well as she knew hers.
Then she walked towards the stone building, indirectly, along a path that bent around solely for aesthetic effect, but which led to the rear of the building. She sat down on a cold wooden bench, attached to the table next to the one where Mikhail sat. They were sheltered on three sides by the U shape of the building.
He didn’t look up.
“There’s something wrong,” he said at last. No agreed greeting, no greeting of any kind.
She was taken aback, uncertain what he meant, speechless.
“With what?” she said finally. She’d expected the formal procedure at least, some preamble.
“There is no such thing as Icarus,” he said. “Icarus doesn’t exist.”
Chapter 34
LARS POSITIONED THE BEER bottle on the red plastic table with the precision he brought to everything. The TV screen in the bar was showing the early preparations for the day ahead, but that didn’t interest him.
He was in Washington, D.C., and was unconcerned with events around the inauguration of the new president, but they still penetrated his consciousness.
The city was full of visitors, but there was one in particular that he—or his controllers, in any case—were interested in.
Two months before this day he’d been training for over three weeks for this one shot. He’d made camp in a lake area of Louisiana, where his control
lers assured him he would be alone and uninterrupted. Did they have some kind of control over this huge area of wetland? Did they even own the whole dead place themselves, perhaps? He didn’t know, and he didn’t ask, but he was beginning to suspect the type of Americans his controllers were.
He picked a suitable lake out of the several hundred in the permitted area and set up the tools of his trade. He would need a lot of practice for such a shot, which lobbed in an arc and still struck its target.
He didn’t like the area. Even when it was winter in the north of the country, here it was always hot enough for the mosquitoes to aggravate every waking second of the day down by the lake. At night he slept in a wooden cabin, with screens against the insects, but he still heard sounds. He didn’t like this place or its unearthly noises; he didn’t understand what was out there. It was unfamiliar country.
But in the first few days he’d set up a solid concrete and metal platform on a small hillock by the lake, on which he bolted the machine gun, a replica for the actual place where the shot would be made.
He’d demanded they provide him with only “green spot” ammunition, from the first five thousand rounds that come off the production line. Green spot was the beginning of the batch. It was all that interested him. It had that feather edge of perfection over other ammunition.
But what he used for practice was ex-NATO ammunition, the GMPG, or Gimpy in the parlance. The rounds were large, .762—or 308, as they called them in America—and he was going to need a thousand of them for the hit itself.
But for now, what concerned him was the pattern they formed on the lake, and his task in nearly three weeks of practice had been to tighten the pattern each day until he was sure he had the tightest area of drop to hit the target without causing too much damage over a wider area.
He had no idea of the identity of the target, and he didn’t ask. They would tell him when he needed to know, and perhaps they would not tell him who the target was at all. It didn’t matter to him either way. He was specialist, and his fan club, as he imagined it, was growing with every hit he made.
Besides, at half a million a job, who needed to ask questions?
But even before the practice in this infested hellhole down in Louisiana, he’d needed to inspect the actual location for the shot, and that was up in the capital. For he wouldn’t be aiming the machine gun himself on this job. It would all be done remotely. He needed an exact map of the target area, with contours and a horizon measurement. It was all information that an Ordnance Survey map, or U.S. Geological Survey, as they called it here, as well as a theodolite that measured horizontal and vertical angles, could provide.
He’d done this preparation in the capital, on the roof of the six-storey building from which the furious blast of fire was planned to emanate. The blast would leave the roof of the building, arc over a second, higher building, and descend perfectly on the target.
The building was well away from the centre of the city. If he wondered why it was all to happen from this obscure building so far from the main action, and why it was on the date of the new president’s inauguration, so many miles away—way beyond the range of his weapon—he didn’t ask, even to himself. At any rate, it was nothing to do with the president himself.
Out on the hillock by the lake, he set up the barrel, bolting it to the solid platform just as it would be on the roof for the shot itself.
With each day, the pattern improved, but it was still not good enough even after two weeks, still too widespread, and he gave himself the extra days he needed. The testing was exhaustive, but eventually it came into the tight circle he knew he required.
He changed the barrel on the gun twice when it became shot out with practice, and finally, when he had the pattern that worked, he set up the barrel he would use, inserted some of the green spot ammunition in a belt, and fired off a few rounds, just enough to see the pattern and not to damage the barrel. It was the perfect circle.
And now, sitting in this bar in the northern Washington, D.C., suburb of Bethesda and watching the preliminary preparations for the inauguration, all he needed was an order. The gun was bolted to the roof, the theodolite was bolted to the gun instead of a normal gun sight, and a solenoid was fixed in place, between the trigger and the guard, with a cell phone attached beside it.
All it would take now was for him to dial the number, and a thousand rounds of ammunition would be discharged automatically, with their instant and inevitably destructive force that would destroy the target and everyone within twenty-five yards—and finally destroy even the barrel itself.
Even now, sitting in the bar, minutes perhaps before the action, he didn’t question who the target was. The target was apparently unconnected to the inauguration itself. Maybe it was a figure who had come to Washington just for that day, like so many other big hitters; some businessman who wished to be near the action. The inauguration was, perhaps, simply cover his controllers were using for their own reasons.
On the television, the anchorman was rambling about some minor aspect of the presidential procession later that afternoon, and so it would go on as the day unravelled. He sipped his beer carefully, and waited.
When the call came, it was not what he’d expected. He was told to wait. It was not the order to fire. His contact would be with him shortly, the voice said.
Lars clicked the phone shut. The shot might be postponed, or it might be cancelled. Not unusual. Sometimes a target didn’t follow the agenda he’d planned to follow. The accuracy of the timing for the shot was absolute, and there might be new arrangements.
He didn’t like it, however. He’d done his work with impeccable care; why couldn’t others do the same? He didn’t like it either that here, in America, his controllers were always hovering nearby, ever-present in the background. He preferred to work alone and far from interference.
But it was their commission, and theirs to proceed with or not. Either way, he’d pick up payment. That’s what they always told him. So he sat tight and drank now more freely from the bottle.
In a little under five minutes—a very short time, he thought dimly—two men entered the bar, one of whom he recognised as his contact, a tall, thin-faced man with a loose flapping coat and big shoes. Lars had met the American three times before, twice in Europe and once over here.
The other man he barely noticed.
They approached his table, sat down, and ordered a beer for each of them and a second one for him.
His contact took the phone from which the trigger call was to be made away from him. “Just to be safe,” the man said. “If we have to abort, we’ll have to dismantle the whole thing fast.”
Lars agreed, without knowing exactly what he was agreeing to. But he knew better than to allow his frustration to distort his mood. There were setbacks, even on a job as precise as this one.
“We’ll drink the beers and then go see the boss,” the thin man said. “Further instructions,” he explained.
Lars finished the first bottle and caught up with them on his second. The TV droned on without release. He was hearing what he’d already heard for the second or third time.
They left the bar after half an hour and headed away from the centre of the capital, into the suburbs, and then joined the Beltway towards the west. There were just the three of them, in a black Mercedes truck that Lars observed was bulletproofed, a special and expensive order. His controllers were, he knew, rich. They’d paid him a million and a half already.
They left the Beltway just before it crossed the Potomac and turned to the right along the riverbank. The waters swirled around a wide bend ahead of them. They pulled off the road again and down a paved road that turned to a track. There was another car parked ahead of them, black also but more like a limousine. Lars saw two figures sitting in the back seat, a chauffeur upfront.
“We may have to get you out of the country,” the thin man said reassuringly. “That’s what we’ll find out.”
But Lars didn’t feel reassured.
They stopped the Mercedes thirty yards from the other car, and the three of them got out and began to walk the intervening distance.
Lars saw the thin man and his colleague walk some way to either side of him, and he began to realise his vulnerability as the space around him widened. By the time the misgivings that had dipped in and out of his consciousness since the job was interrupted had finally surged to the front of his mind, he felt the sharp, stabbing pain below his left shoulder and saw himself, as if separated from his body, falling sideways into the mud at the side of the track.
Maybe he heard the small fizz of air from the silenced gun, or maybe it was his last breath escaping from his lungs, but that was the last thought he may or may not have had.
The thin man bent down and tested Lars’s pulse.
“That’s it,” he said to the two figures approaching from the limousine.
Then he and his colleague turned the body over, searched the pockets, and, finding nothing incriminating, slipped an identity card into Lars’s wallet. It had a Russian name and Russian embassy clearance.
The thin man took the phone he had earlier taken from Lars and slipped that too back into the pocket of Lars’s brown leather jacket.
As he did so, one of the men from the limousine made a call on his cell phone.
“We’ve found him,” he said. “And just in time, by the look of it. It seems he had another terrorist attack planned. We got him at last.”
The man receiving the call sat alone in an office at Langley. The agency was unusually depleted of staff today.
“Good work,” he said. “The nation will be grateful to you and your company.”
There was a pause as he listened to the directions the caller gave him to find the location by the river.
“Is he alive?” he said.
“No,” the caller said. “Terminated. He pulled on my guys. They didn’t have a choice.”
“Pity.”
“We’ve searched him,” the caller said. “The evidence seems clear. It looks like it was the Russians behind him after all.”