people to sign and date as they authorized its contents. No one had signed any of them, and there was no yellow card attached to signify it was an accountable document. Things like that always worried me: I knew it meant a shitload of trouble.
As we drove along Chelsea Embankment towards Parliament in the back of a Previa MPV with darkened windows, the Yes Man had pulled two pages of printed A4 from the folder and started to brief me. Annoyingly, I couldn't quite read his notes from where I was sitting.
I didn't like the condescending wanker one bit as he put on his best I-have been-to-university-but-F m-still- working-class voice to tell me I was 'special' and 'the only one capable'. Things didn't improve when he stressed that no one in government knew of this job, and only two in the Firm: 'C', the boss of SIS, and the Director of Security and Public Affairs, effectively his number two.
'And, of course,' he said, with a smile, 'the three of us.'
The driver, whose thick blond side-parted hair made him look like Robert Redford when he was young enough to be the
Sundance Kid, glanced in the rearview mirror and I caught his eye for a second before he concentrated once more on the traffic, fighting for position around Parliament Square. Both of them must have sensed I wasn't the happiest teddy in town. The nicer people were to me, the more suspicious of their motives became.
But, the Yes Man said, I wasn't to worry. SIS could carry out assassinations at the express request of the Foreign Secretary.
'But you just said only five of us know about this. And this is the UK. It's not a Foreign Office matter.'
His smile confirmed what I already knew.
'Ah, Nick, we don't want to bother anyone with minor details. After all, they may not really want to know.'
With an even bigger smile he added that should any part of the operation go wrong, no one would be held ultimately responsible. The Service would, as always, hide behind the Official Secrets Act or, if things got difficult, a Public Interest Immunity Certificate. So everything was quite all right, and I'd be protected. I mustn't forget, he said, that I was part of the team. And that was when I really started to worry.
It was blindingly obvious to me that the reason no one knew about this operation was because no one in their right mind would sanction it, and no one in their right mind would take the job on. Maybe that was why I'd been picked. Then, as now, I comforted myself with the thought that at least the money was good. Well, sort of. But I was desperate for the eighty grand on offer, forty now in two very large brown Jiffy-bags, and the rest afterwards. That was how I justified saying yes to something I just knew was going to be a nightmare.
We were now on the approach road to Westminster Bridge with Big Ben and Parliament to my right. On the other side of the river I could see the County Hall building and to the left of that, the London Eye, the wheel turning so slowly it looked as if it wasn't moving at all.
'You should get out here, Stone. Have a look around.'
With that, the Sundance Kid kerbed the Previa, and irate motorists behind hit their horns as they tried to manoeuvre around us. I slid the door back and stepped out to the deafening sounds of road drills and revving engines. The Yes Man leant forward in his seat and took the door handle.
'Call in for what you need, and where you want the other three to collect their furnishings.'
With that, the door slid shut and Sundance cut up a bus to get back in the traffic stream heading south across the river. A van driver gave me the finger as he put his foot down to make up that forty seconds he'd been delayed.
As I sat at the desk waiting for the other two bulbs to illuminate, I concentrated hard on that eighty grand. I didn't think I'd ever needed it so badly. The snipers were probably getting at least three times as much as I was but, then, I wasn't as good as they were at what they did. These people were as committed to their craft as Olympic athletes. I'd met one or two in the past when I, too, thought of going that route, but decided against it; professional snipers struck me as weird. They lived on a planet where everything was taken seriously, from politics to buying ice cream. They worshipped at the church of one round, one kill. No, sniping might pay well, but I didn't think I belonged there. And, besides, I now found bullet trajectory and the finer points of wind adjustment pretty boring after talking about them for half an hour, let alone my entire life.
From the moment the Yes Man dropped me off with my two Jiffy-bags, I'd started protecting myself far more than I normally would. I knew that if I got caught by Special Branch the Firm would deny me, and that was part and parcel of being a K. But there was more to it this time. The stuff I did normally didn't happen in the UK, and no way would anyone in their right mind give this the go. Everything felt wrong, and the Yes Man would never want to be on the losing side. He'd knife his own grandmother if it meant promotion; in fact, since he took over the Ks Desk from Colonel Lynn, he was so far up C's arse he could have flossed his teeth. If things didn't go to plan, and even if I did evade SB, he wouldn't hesitate to fuck me over if it meant he could take any credit and pass on any blame.
I needed a safety blanket, so I started by noting down the serial numbers of all three snipers' weapons before grinding them out. Then I took Polaroids of all the equipment, plus the three firing positions during the CTRs. I'd given the snipers photographs in their orders, and I kept a set myself. I had a full pictorial story of the job, together with photocopies of each set of sniper's orders. It all went into a bag in Left Luggage at Waterloo station, along with everything else I owned: a pair of jeans, socks, pants, washing kit and two fleece jackets.
After loading the three snipers' DLBs, I should have left them alone but I didn't. Instead I put in an OP (observation post) on Sniper Two's dead letter box, which was just outside the market town of Thetford in Norfolk. There was no particular reason for picking Sniper Two's to OP, except that it was the nearest of the three to London.
The other two were in the Peak District and on Bodmin Moor. All three had been chosen in uninhabited areas so that once they'd got the weapons, they could zero them to make sure that the optic sight was correctly aligned to the barrel so that a round hit the target precisely at a given distance. The rest -judging the wind, taking leads (aiming ahead of moving targets) and working out distance is part of the sniper's art, but first the weapon sight and rounds need to be as one. How they did that, and where they did that within the area, was up to them.
They were getting more than enough cash to make those decisions themselves.
Inside the DLB, a 45-gallon oil drum, was a large black Puma tennis bag that held everything needed for the shoot and was totally sterile of me: no fingerprints, certainly no DNA. Nothing from my body had made contact with this kit. Dressed like a technician in a chemical warfare lab, I had prepared, cleaned and wiped everything down so many times it was a wonder there was any Parkerization (protective paint) left on the barrels.
Jammed into a Gore-Tex bivi bag and dug in amongst the ferns in miserable drizzling rain, I waited for Sniper Two to arrive. I knew that all three would be extremely cautious when they made their approach to lift the DLBs, carrying out their tradecraft to the letter to ensure they weren't followed or walking into a trap. That was why I had to keep my distance: sixty-nine metres to be exact, which in turn had meant choosing a telephoto lens on my Nikon for more photographic evidence of this job, wrapped in a sweatshirt to dampen the rewind noise, and shoved into a bin liner so that just the lens and viewfinder were exposed to the drizzle.
I waited, throwing Mars bars and water down my neck and just hoping Sniper Two didn't choose to unload it at night.
In the end it was just over thirty boring and very wet hours before Sniper Two started to move in on the DLB. At least it was daylight. I watched the hooded figure check the immediate area around a collection of old, rusty farm machinery and oil drums.
It edged forward like a wet and cautious cat. I brought up the telephoto lens.
Tapered blue jeans, brown cross-trainers, three-quarter-length beige waterproof jacket. The hood had a sewn-in peak, and I could see the label on the left breast pocket: LL Bean I'd never seen one of their shops outside the US.
What I'd also never seen outside the US was a woman sniper. She was maybe early thirties, slim, average height, with brown hair poking out of the sides of the hood. She was neither attractive nor unattractive, just normal-looking, more like a young mother than a professional killer. She reached the oil drums, and carefully checked inside hers to make sure it wasn't booby-trapped. I couldn't help wondering why a woman would take up this line of work. What did her kids think she did for a living? Work at the cosmetics counter in Sears, and get dragged away a couple of times a year for week-long eyeliner seminars?
She'd been happy with what she saw inside the drum. Her arms went inside very quickly and lifted out the bag. She turned in my direction, taking the weight of it in both hands, and threw it over her right shoulder. I hit the
