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
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
