and may make the house sooner, but he will have no time to set up. He’ll be entirely exposed. And he has no idea who this is.
And then there descends a small gift. From the edges of Lapland comes a breeze, carrying with it with the scents of juniper and snow. The breeze rustles the trees surrounding Sheldon in a whirl of protective movement and hum.
At only fifty metres from the house, the ground cover begins to thin, and he knows this is it. He drops to his belly and slithers off the path to the left, where the ground has eroded a few inches because the earth is less densely packed here than the dirt on the footpath. He lies low and adjusts his Ghillie suit.
Checking the wind and the angle of the light, he takes his position.
Donny brings the rifle into play and checks his sight.
It would be good to have a spotter now. Hank never did cut it as a shooter, but they moved him off the rifle to the scope, and found him unexpectedly effective. Partly this was because he was well meaning and gullible and so did what he was told, but in part because — unlike Mario — he wasn’t smart enough to question what he was doing. He was good at finding the range and making helpful suggestions about where to set up the shot. And despite being a goofball, he was eerily silent when they were working.
But Hank is not here now, and Donny has to select the shot himself.
The tall one is an unremarkable man in a black-leather jacket carrying a lever-action rifle by its balance point just in front of the receiver.
And the small one is Paul.
Sheldon closes his eyes tightly. So tightly that the grid of cones and rods casts a mosaic against his retinas and resets his mind.
He blinks and then blinks again, to be sure. But, yes, the boy is still there.
So there is now a choice, and either choice is a failure. If he shoots the stranger with Paul he might, just might, be able to pull the boy into the thicket and hide him under the Ghillie suit long enough for the police to arrive. But if he does, he sacrifices his granddaughter and Lars to whoever is in the house. They will hear the shot. They will find the body. They will take their revenge.
Sheldon takes aim at Paul, and studies his face through the scope. He has been crying, and his face is red and puffy. The wellingtons are bright blue against the cool yellow of the mews’ summer grass. Paul no longer has his hat and horns. His Star of David is less like a comical act of defiance now, and more like a target or provocation. There is resistance in his steps and emotion on his face, where before there had been none. The boy has been pushed to his limit. And still he doesn’t know that his mother is dead.
Sheldon can only wonder what has happened to the hunters.
The shot is getting easier to take. They are walking towards him. Towards the house. Donny eases off the safety and places the crosshairs between the man’s eyes. There is no venom in his look. He is not speaking, and doesn’t appear at all frustrated over Paul’s resistance. He is much larger, and drags the boy where he wants to take him.
Donny lowers the sights to the centre of the man’s chest. It is an unfamiliar weapon. He does not know how the ammunition responds, how well the scope is aligned, and whether the barrel has been cleaned. The best he can do is shoot for the centre of mass and hope that his hands do not twitch, that the gun reacts, and that Paul will come when he is called.
Or, to be more precise, he hopes that Paul will come into the woods when a name that is not his is called out in a language he does not speak by a man holding a rifle and dressed like a bush.
He breathes. He takes the air into his lungs deeply and lets it out slowly. Then he takes a second breath, more shallow than the first, and lets it out halfway. Without Hank, he checks the wind one last time. He measures the gait of his mark, and judges the distance to the target and the time it will take for the bullet to travel that distance so that the round can penetrate his heart at the correct moment of the step.
It has been fifty-eight years since Sheldon Horowitz has taken aim against an enemy.
With Sheldon balanced and in position, time is replaced by eternity.
In finding his form, he gains composure.
There is a moment of calm.
In that moment of calm, Donny pulls the trigger.
Chapter 22
‘You drive like an old woman,’ says Sigrid to Petter as he passes the Esso station in the middle of Kongsvinger. Her hand is on her forehead, and she stares at the road as though willing it to slide faster beneath the wheels of their Volvo.
They have already heard the radio announcement: shots have been fired on a small side-road near the petrol station.
‘I’m driving as fast as I can. I don’t usually do this.’
‘You had to pass a test.’
‘They don’t retest us.’
‘That’s going in my report.’
‘There’s no need to be rude.’
‘I’m anxious.’
‘At least you were right,’ Petter says.
It is an odd comment, and offers no comfort. The cruisers only arrived on location five minutes ago. There was one survivor with a bullet wound in his back who is now in a critical condition and being airlifted to Oslo. A passing motorist stopped, and once the terror passed she called the local police station. It took only moments for Sigrid to be notified.
Sigrid takes a blue-tinted bottle of Farris water from under her seat, and has a long drink as Petter weaves and bobs through small streets and small-town traffic. She imagines the summer house and its surrounding land — the dirt road that leads to the small path up to the house, and the long field stretched in front of it.
‘How are they coming?’ she asks Petter.
‘The troops?’
‘Are they coming by air?’
‘They’ve come by helicopter as close as they can get without being heard. They’re doing the rest by foot.’
‘Where are they now?’
Petter does not look at her. His eyes are scanning the road for errant balls chased by children, and for cars passing through T-intersections while their drivers stare like idiots at their text messages.
‘Close,’ he says.
There is a click — a distant but familiar click. It is the sound of a rifle being dry-fired. The Black has heard this sound before. Many times. Done repeatedly, it can cause damage to the firing pin, so he does not do it often. But over so many years, and with so many weapons around so many inexperienced young men playing with their guns like toys, he has heard this sound many times.
The sound has come from the woods. It is not the crisp snap of a twig. It is different from the long crunch of a leaf or the muffled bunt of a bone. It is distinct. Metallic. Sharp.
It is a sound of war.
He stops and holds the boy firmly in place. He is not scared. He is not paralysed by fright. He is trying to get a bearing on the sound. He would like to hear it again, to know where it came from.
He is only twenty metres from the two steps leading up to the bright red house that rises incongruously from the dusty tones of the late-summer earth.
When he stops, the boy also stops. He is sullen and pulls against his captor, but only as a form of protest —
