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 cafe, 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 controllers 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.
