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 resistance. 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 Nimes 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 Ales 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 Cevennes 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.
The shifty-eyed owner in this one-man operation had just withdrawn on a wheeled trolley from beneath a car and was cleaning his hands on a rag before returning home to lunch. He waved Logan away, but the American persisted.
The clutch was giving him trouble, he said, and he couldn’t go any farther. Without examining anything, the man shook his head, telling him he was shut, and nothing was possible until Monday. Logan asked whether he could leave the Peugeot there until Monday, then, and whether the man had another car he could hire for the weekend. He had money, he explained. It was urgent; he was desperate. This arrangement finally suited the man, and Logan headed eastwards in an old red Renault van with the side panel advertising a local baker’s shop in chipped and fading cream lettering.
He parked at the edge of the market town of Uzes, on a piece of waste ground that doubled as a car park on Saturday market day, and walked into the medieval square for a beer and a ham and cheese baguette. He watched the stalls being dismantled and the crowds of shoppers thinning away. After lunch, he strolled around the outside of the square and found a digital electronic announcement board near the main entrance to the square, which had no announcements written in its dotted yellow writing, other than “Samedi, 16 aout 2008.”
He bought a local map and found Fougieres a little to the north of town, up on the high plateau of the
When he felt relaxed and ready, he walked back to the van and checked his camera and film for the second or third time that morning. Then he headed out of town along a plane-tree-lined road that climbed up onto the plateau in a series of curves and switchbacks. He smelled the wild rosemary growing along the side of the road and saw the scrawny vines of the region that produced much of France’s undrinkable—and heavily subsidized—wine.
The little village was very ancient and partly walled—where the stones hadn’t been dismantled for building houses. A small square at the centre contained the mayor’s office, with a tricolour above the entrance, hanging flatly in the windless air. A manor house that had seen better days and was now a bed and breakfast stood opposite the mayor’s office, and various other less seigneurial habitations with wrought iron gates, with views that stretched for fifty miles to the high mountains of the Cevennes, randomly dotted the open space.
Logan parked behind a stone barn, which housed the office and weighbridge used for the grape harvest. It was after three o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a sleepiness about the village that perhaps, he thought, never left it.
He walked back up into the square. He caught the sound of splashing and noticed the unnatural blue of a swimming pool behind the hedge of the bed-and-breakfast manor house. He would ask there.
There were two men sunbathing beside the pool, and the door to the house was wide open. He walked up the path between shocking pink bougainvilleas and called down a dark, flagstoned corridor until a man wearing an unconvincing wig appeared.
He was a visitor, Logan explained, come to see the new resident in the village, the foreign lady.
“Avec l’enfant?” the man enquired.
Yes, the one with a child, he agreed, though Plismy hadn’t mentioned that.
The man with the wig gestured generally up a small lane and mentioned a house with a palm tree in the
