She saw and understood. Where others saw quaint and architecturally fascinating old buildings, a professional bodyguard saw only the potential for trouble. Every angle for attack had to be blocked, every window closed, every rooftop covered, every manhole bolted down.
As they stood in the square together, savoring their few moments, Robert put an arm around Alex and held her tightly.
Martin was still looking around at the buildings again.
“With modern weaponry,” he said slowly, “the official Secret Service Red Zone is four fifths of a mile. That’s fourteen hundred yards, fourteen football fields lined up back to back. Sounds like a long way, but it isn’t. A bullet from a modern high-velocity rifle can travel that distance in less than a second. That means, if the target is stationery, with a head bowed in prayer. Giving a speech, shaking a hand…”
His voice trailed off.
“God protect us,” he said. “We need all the help we can get.”
“We’re going to need to have our own people on every rooftop,” Robert said. “Helicopters overhead, security checkpoints, not a single window open anywhere that you can see from here.”
“Almost impossible,” said Martin.
“Think the president will cancel the appearance?” Alex asked.
Martin and Robert shook their heads.
“Einstein, that’s the president,” Martin said, “hasn’t come this far just to have a couple of lousy pictures taken with a bunch of Bulgarian farmers and washerwomen. No way there’s a cancellation now.”
“We’re not in Bulgaria. We’re in Ukraine,” Robert said, holding back his amusement.
“Yeah, right. You can tell the difference?” he asked.
“Not from the inside of a hotel,” Robert allowed.
“We’ve tried to talk Einstein into wearing a bulletproof vest,” Martin said, “but the boss won’t listen. Like Kennedy ordering that the bulletproof bubble not be used on his limousine. Stubborn and egotistical. They all are, but I knew that already.”
“And Reagan, Truman, and Ford,” Robert continued. “The joker in the deck is always the president’s desire, any politician’s desire, to be in the center of all the attention.”
Alex stifled a shiver. Martin caught it.
“The weather helps,” Martin said. “Frigid weather makes a gun stock more rigid. The cold changes the vibratory patterns of the wood, the stock, the metal, and the finger on the trigger. Makes it more difficult.”
“But who wants to even risk a lucky shot with a subsonic round?” Robert mused. “Two thousand feet per second at a weight of maybe 175 grains. Location, time, distance, temperature, weapon, mental stability of the shooter. Everything factors in.”
“Someone could use a.50-caliber sniping rifle,” Martin said. “Those are coin of the realm around here. Same type of weaponry the Soviets used in Afghanistan and the Americans used in Iraq.”
“Actually, this country isn’t as bad as a lot of them,” Robert allowed.
Martin lit a cigarette and shivered.
“Did I ever tell you?” Martin asked, looking at both of them. “Two years ago I was on a special assignment with the Bureau of ATF. We were tracking some Serbs from New York City who were shipping rifles from the United States to the Balkans,” he said. “They were buying the weapons in Ohio. I was undercover, and I went with one of their guys named Milo to a gun show in suburban Cincinnati. Milo had this Ford Explorer with a Sportsmen for Bush bumper sticker, and he could barely speak English. Of course I worked for Bush, and Bush couldn’t speak English either,” Martin said.
Robert grinned. He had worked for the last three presidents too but was always too politic to criticize any of them, even when they deserved it.
“Anyway, inside this auditorium in Covington, Kentucky, jeez, they had everything. AK-47s, M-16 assault rifles, sniper rifles, handguns, flat and round bullets, silencers, night scopes, knives, Japanese swords, muskets. Totally illegal but right out there in the open. Daggers, even a couple of antiaircraft guns, and some old junk from World War II. The most impressive gun, however, was the.50-caliber high-powered Barrett sniper rifle. That’s the one the Serbs wanted.”
“Did they get them?” Alex asked.
“The Barretts were going for six grand each,” Martin said, “and Milo said this was just what his pals needed to take potshots at the Croatians and Albanians in Kosovo. But there’s this other stand where a guy in a wheelchair and Cincinnati Bengals jersey was selling Chinese-made Barrett knock-offs for just $2,200. Milo asks how many he could get. The guys says, ‘As long as you don’t have a criminal record or live in the People’s Republic of New York City, I can sell you as many as you can carry away.’ Well, Milo did have a criminal record. Double homicide. But it was in Spain. So he was ‘clean’ in the US. He takes out thirty thousand dollars in cash and buys twenty rifles. He drives away and ships them out from Detroit by private courier the next day.”
“You couldn’t arrest him?” Alex asked.
“For what? It was all legal. We were just keeping an eye on it, figuring out their routes, who their players were. With those knock-off Barrettsan amateur could probably hit a target from a mile away. He said he had armor-piercing, tracer, and incendiary.50-caliber bullets available too. So Milo buys a few boxes of those as well.”
“That stuff could bring down a helicopter,” Robert said.
“The weapons got shipped to Macedonia,” Martin said. “But here’s the wicked part. Know where three of those rifles eventually turned up? At an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan. Those rag-head terrorists are going to shoot at our marines, and it was a guy with a Carson Palmer jersey who helped get the firepower to them. What a world!”
Robert shook his head.
“Shows you what we got to look out for in this square tomorrow,” Martin said. “Everything coming from everywhere. There’s no way to handle an exposure like this perfectly; there’s always something that can go wrong.”
“We just try to get in and out fast,” Robert said. “We can’t be perfect but we can be speedy.”
“Good luck,” Alex said with a sigh.
She embraced Robert. They exchanged a long meaningful kiss, one she would remember for a long time.
Robert and his partner returned to the Sebastopol a few minutes later. His schedule called for him to remain on duty throughout the visit.
She had dinner with a few new friends from the embassy that night. Federov joined them but was remarkably tight lipped, unlike the previous evening, almost jittery. He did, however, renew his promise to attend the cathedral ceremony with Alex. She requested that he arrive at the embassy at 10:00 a.m., and they would proceed in an American vehicle. He agreed.
Back at her hotel at the end of the evening, for some reason, she slept better than she had in weeks.
FORTY-ONE
Rome, Friday morning, the sixteenth. Gian Antonio Rizzo was sizzling.
“Nessuna cosa,” said Gina Adriotti, the fourth of Lt. Rizzo’s expert homicide investigators. Nothing.
She closed the file she had been allowed to read. She raised her eyes to her superior and waited for the explosion. His three colleagues had done the same. But the explosion, for whatever reason, was not forthcoming. Not yet.
Instead, Lt. Rizzo walked to the window. He stood with his back to the room, surveying the morning traffic that connected onto the via Condotti and which would lead past the plush shopping distracts and the Italian parliament.
Rizzo felt like death warmed over. He was losing sleep and felt as if he was coming down with the flu. He was of two minds. On one hand, the four detectives in this room were the best that his department had to offer. On the other hand, they were overpaid thumb-sucking idiots who couldn’t find the ocean from the end of the pier.