thirty practice bullets in here,” he said. “You will want to adjust the sights for perfect vision from the precise distance of your target. It may take a while, of trial and error, so I have given you plenty of ammunition. Here also are three targets that may be useful.”
General Rashood smiled and thanked him. He offered his hand and said quietly, “Mr. Kumar, there are only five people in the world who know that you have made this rifle for me. Two of them you know, and all of them I know. Should anyone discover our secret, all four of us will know that you have been indiscreet. I am sure you understand what the penalty would be.”
“Mr. Spencer,” he replied, “my own risk is equally great. There will be no indiscretions, I assure you.”
Before he led Ravi up the green-carpeted stairs to the front door, he presented him with one further item, wrapped in a black velvet bag. “This is the pistol you requested. It’s a new Austrian Glock 17 9mm. The safety catch comes off when the trigger is pressed. It will not discharge if you drop it. And it will not let you down.”
Once more they shook hands, and the master terrorist softly said good-bye to the gunsmith from Bengal.
He drove back to the embassy in a thoughtful mood, aware that this was Saturday and of how much he longed to take Shakira out for the evening, perhaps the theatre, and then dinner at the Ivy where the “stars” are apt to gather after a show. Ravi did not have a shred of time for self-obsessed play-actors or any other kind of celebrities, but Shakira would have loved it. Anyway, he doubted that he could have secured a table.
And a much bigger “anyway” was that the entire thing was out of the question. One recognition, by anyone from his former life, and he’d either have to kill them or flee the country. So once more he faced up to a long waiting day at the embassy. Aside from the boredom, he was, however, eternally grateful for the perfection of the cover he enjoyed behind the ramparts of No. 8 Belgrave Square.
Up in their bedroom, he presented Shakira with the pistol, which Kumar had thoughtfully loaded, and Shakira did precisely as she was told and placed it in her large handbag. “You will carry that wherever you go,” he told her. “We have many enemies.”
They had lunch at the embassy, where the cooks were under orders always to produce food that reminded the ambassador of the desert and the culture of the northern end of the Arabian Peninsula. Thus lunch when it arrived was chicken kebabs, rice, houmus, and salad.
They sipped fruit juice and then sat in the opulent rear drawing room. They read the newspapers, and Ravi watched the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot, won for the umpteenth time by the Irish with a superb dark bay colt sired by the Coolmore-based champion stallion, Galileo.
Shakira, who had been paying scant attention, suddenly heard the word “Coolmore” and almost jumped out of her chair. “I’ve been there!” she exclaimed.
“Where? Ascot?” asked Ravi.
“No, Coolmore,” she said. “I visited it while I was waiting for you in Ireland.”
“Did you see the great Galileo? That horse who just won was his son.”
“Well, I didn’t actually go in, but I saw the big iron gates, and I saw all the green countryside where the horses live. It’s in Tipperary.”
Ravi, of course, like anyone with the remotest knowledge of horse racing, knew all about Coolmore. He grinned at Shakira and asked, “How on earth did you find your way down there?”
“I met a man in the hotel in Dublin who owned a filly foal. I think she was born there,” she replied, accurately. “And it was very important to him that her brother, called Easter Rebel, would win the Irish Stakes or something.”
“The what?”
“The Irish something. I can’t remember. But it mattered to him.”
“That would have been the first week in July. It was probably the Irish Derby.”
“Derby, that’s it. He wanted Easter Rebel to win the Irish Derby.”
“And did he?”
“I forgot to find out.”
Ravi laughed. “I’m not sure you’ve mastered an in-depth appreciation of horse racing,” he said. “Otherwise, you’d have remembered to find out what happened to Easter Rebel.”
“I’ll tell you what I do remember,” she retorted. “Easter Rebel was also the son of that telescope man — what’s his name, Galileo.”
“Was he? Well, you ought to know whether the Rebel won and made your new friend rich.”
“How can I find out?”
“I’ll do that for you. If I can use that laptop computer over there on the sideboard.”
Ravi walked over and opened it. He searched with Google and found a site for the
“Just lost,” he told Shakira. And he made a signal with his right hand, placing his index finger about a quarter of an inch above his thumb. “That much,” he added.
“Poor Mr. O’Donnell will be very sad,” she said.
“I assure you he won’t,” said Ravi. “I expect he’s going to sell his filly, and most breeders would be happy going through the ring with a sister to a colt beaten by a head in the Irish Derby. Don’t feel sorry for him.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
“Was his filly also by Galileo?”
“Can’t remember,” she said absently, leafing through her fashion magazine.
Life and death for Mr. O’Donnell, total lack of interest by Shakira. Ravi smiled and thought of his father, the man the newspapers always referred to as the
He missed seeing his family but was certain that they now knew what he had done and what disgrace he had brought upon them all. Treason, mutiny, murder. My God! He hardly dared to think about it.
Toward the end of the afternoon, Ravi retired to his embassy suite, leaving Shakira to watch a sitcom on the television. He opened the leather case and started counting. Carefully he took out the sections of the rifle, assembling them into the finely engineered finished product.
Then he started his count again, disassembled the weapon, and placed the pieces back in the case. It had taken him twenty-eight seconds to put it together and twenty-four seconds to take it apart. The twenty-eight did not matter, but the twenty-four was critical and it was too long. From the moment he fired that lethal 7.62mm shell at the admiral’s unprotected head, every second counted. Because right then he would be in the critical part of the operation, the getaway.
Twenty-four seconds was almost a half minute. There would be, he knew, American Secret Service agents, London police security, and possibly military personnel swarming outside the Ritz. If they had even an inkling of where the bullet had come from, they would be across Piccadilly in fifteen seconds and into the building where his office was situated. If they were through those glass doors before he was out, he’d be trapped, overwhelmed, and headed for the gallows on charges of murder and high treason against Her Majesty’s forces.
That twenty-four seconds had to be reduced, and if it couldn’t, he might have to abort the mission. But Ravi knew it could. Over and over, he assembled the rifle and then disassembled it. For almost two hours he practiced, finally realizing that the principal solutions to the operation were the swift removal of the telescopic sight and the level of tightness on the wide silver-plated finger screw which attached the stock to the neck.
After another hour, he could disassemble that sniper rifle in eighteen seconds. Within two hours, he had it down to twelve, and those twelve seconds would be all he could afford while packing the rifle away and bolting down the stairs to the freedom of Dover Street.
Early that evening, before dinner with the ambassador, Ravi went shopping alone. He walked through to Knightsbridge and wandered into Harrods, to the busy ground-floor men’s department where once he had shopped with his mother, purchasing a new tweed jacket for school. Today he wanted a new dark gray suit, a blazer, a few shirts, a couple of ties, boxer shorts, socks, and shoes.
It took him forty-five minutes to punch a serious hole in ?2,500, and he paid with his Amex card, which would eventually be billed to the government of Jordan via the Paris embassy. He then made his way to men’s sporting goods and purchased a loose-fitting tracksuit and a medium-sized athlete’s duffel bag.
Casting aside the green Harrods plastic shopping bags, he folded his purchases neatly into the sports bag and
