A few yards beyond the little white church was the monastery, built a few centuries later.
He looked up from the guidebook. It had been a month since his first visit, and he knew the layout from memory. The key element for his second visit was the tall bell tower that protruded above the monastery on the side of the island facing the open sea. Once again, he studied the height and position of the tower carefully. The tower had once doubled as a lighthouse for sailors from Venetian trading fleets, Levantine merchant vessels, Arab dhows, and Turkish gulets, sent out to engage the West in commerce, when there was no war, from the Port of the Sultan. It had been built for the view.
Lars waited in the hot sun at the edge of the group of tourists.
There was an American couple, the woman with frizzy hair and a pinched, nervous face, the man taller by a head, with a flabby grin. He looked bulky in huge shorts and an open shirt. The others were local, Montenegrins or citizens from the surrounding Balkan countries; an old woman dressed in black; a young couple who couldn’t stop touching each other; two women who might have been academics—they looked like they’d be at home in a library, he thought—and an old man with grizzled white stubble and intensely green eyes. He supported himself on a gnarled stick.
Finally the shabby tourist bus was almost full, and Lars stepped inside last of all, paying the return fare for the monastery visit. He placed his backpack carefully on the rack. It was heavier than last time, and he didn’t want the canister inside it clanking against the metal of the rack.
The bus set off almost at once across the rock isthmus that, according to the guidebook, was built as a later addition to the monastery, when convenience overcame isolated seclusion on the monks’ wish list.
He studied the tourists on the bus again. He needed to be sure that, unlike him, they were what they seemed. Most were apparently day trippers from the capital city, Podgorica, while others had come from abroad and wore backpacks, shorts, sandals, and caps against the intense heat. One or two of the older local people also wore an Orthodox cross around their necks.
He sat next to the old lady in black and nodded a greeting. She crossed herself, and he returned her pious gesture. He was praying too, in his way, but not for something that she would understand.
The bus crossed noisily between the perfectly calm stretches of turquoise water on either side of the isthmus, belching exhaust fumes into the clear air.
They disembarked on the far side, in the shade of the massive cypress tree. A few scrawny chickens pecked at the bare grass and the scraps of potato chips and snacks previous visitors had dropped. The air was still, dead. The tree above him could have been painted against the sky. The dark green, almost black cypress stood like a shadow against the shattering blue.
Lars took a drink from a plastic water bottle and waited for the others to shuffle towards the monastery in that soporific, almost dutiful way adopted by visitors to sacred places. He didn’t follow them on the unguided tour but looked around, from time to time checking carefully where they’d stopped. Their first pause was at the tiny chapel to pay a preliminary homage to Saint Sava, and then on to the main attraction, the monastery itself.
He set off at an angle, away from them. Before he entered the monastery, he wanted to take a walk around the small island. He felt exposed here, at the end of the isthmus on a small outcrop of piled rocks. There was only one way out. He’d told them he wouldn’t do the job if there was only one exit, and they’d had to make a complicated plan so that he could extricate himself if things went wrong.
He hoisted the backpack over his shoulders. It was heavy. It was not just the rifle this time, but a small air tank with five litres in it that would, he hoped, get him out of danger if that proved necessary. He’d almost decided to use it anyway.
He stood on the shore facing north first of all, balancing himself on a huge stone that was part of the breakwater of tumbled rocks scattered all around the island. Straight ahead of him, the coast curled round to the right, five miles away, before reaching another high cliff promontory where it presumably curved back northwards again.
To his left, at the head of the bay, was the small town and its tourist beach. The absence of any sand visible on the beach at this distance was explained by the inseparable mass of humanity that had camped on it for the day in rows of beach chairs.
Directly to the right, out to sea, were four or five large yachts, some of them more like ships. He passed his eyes over them, resting briefly on the one that interested him, the Aurora. She’d finally arrived. He’d been right, at least he was sure about that. The island was the only place to get a shot.
Then he walked around the island, which took only a few minutes, until he faced south. From there, the rocky cliff coastline to the left and ahead of him dodged in and out of bays and estuaries. On each promontory stood some human mark—a lookout post, a lighthouse, the religious motif of a cross or small chapel—each in its own way reaching out to the calm blue Adriatic Sea with a hand to welcome or repel, and an eye to observe.
Lars put down the pack and took out a small telescope. He looked across the southern waters, empty except for a few small yachts with their sails furled in the dead air. He studied the farthest visible promontory and read the distance; just over three and a half miles. It might take an hour and a half, he thought, depending on the currents. Too far for the small air tank. If he took that exit, he would have to come in to shore earlier than he’d have liked.
Then he carefully replaced the scope in the pack, strapped it up, and walked back to the cypresses, across the flagstones and past the church of Saint Sava, into the cool darkness of the monastery itself.
There were still some stragglers from his party, admiring the painting of the Virgin painted onto the old pink plaster.
He joined them and looked up at the crumbling, sad-eyed figure of the Madonna. She was a figure that expressed life, not the death he had come to give. He exchanged a curt nod with the two remaining tourists, the bulky American man and his frizzy-haired woman—foreigners like himself, visiting another country. He saw them watch him take out a sketchbook and begin to make some outlines. He was drawn to the eyes of the Virgin, big, dark, and almond-shaped, which seemed to contain a message of vulnerability and peace.
Lars felt the power of his anonymity amongst these tourists, but he didn’t feel anonymous before the Virgin, and this unnerved him. He turned away, not wanting her gaze on him any longer.
He admired the paradoxical privacy of his own fame; he was concealed within his complete disconnection from the world around him. Soon—after this second hit perhaps, and with the invaluable help of the media—he would begin the transformation into myth. He was what myths were made of. That’s what he believed. The myth of the assassin meant a lot to him. Even the word—assassin—was common to over fifty languages.
The man and the woman finally walked away from the painting, and he waited until they’d disappeared into a side room. He put the sketchbook away and, on the far side of the vaulted room, found the door to the steps that led up to the bell tower. It was locked, as it had been a month before. That was good. A newer piece of plastic tape explained in Montenegrin, Serbian, English, and French that the stairs were dangerous and undergoing repair work.