“In that case, you personally could be better protected,” he said. “What about a weapon?”
“Why? Against what? ” she asked surprised.
“I don’t know. But we’re reaching the apex of the pyramid now, and any trouble will occur around this moment.”
Was he being his usual prescient self, she wondered, or was it just nerves?
“If you’re going unprotected by my watchers, as we all agree you should, I’d like you to be armed, that’s all,” he said. “Let me have that, Anna.”
He was behaving like a father on his daughter’s wedding day, she thought. Giving her away to Mikhail.
“It’s not a great day to be armed,” she said. “On a presidential inauguration.”
“Well, you tell me. Are you going to be anywhere near the main event?” he said. “What are the chances of a routine search?”
“No,” she admitted. “I want to be dropped out of the city, away from everything. Around Arlington.”
“Across the river?” Burt said. “In Virginia?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t reply, but she could see his mind trying to follow Mikhail’s logic, and that it finally approved.
“So what kind of weapon would you like?” he said.
“Are you sure, Burt? This ups the risks in all kinds of ways.”
“Not so much. And I’d be happier. If there’s any trouble from regular law enforcement, you’d have clearance after the event.”
“Then I’ll take a Thompson Contender,” she said, believing that this might deter him.
Burt smiled.
“Not the carbine, I trust.”
“No. The pistol. I can still shoot a man at two hundred yards.”
“Then that’s what you’ll have. And the rounds?”
“Standard NATO issue. Point two two three. Two dozen.”
“Okay.”
And there it was, by the end of the day, delivered personally to her by Burt.
At six o’clock the next morning, Burt, Anna, Larry, and two guards drove the few miles from Georgetown across the Potomac to Arlington Cemetery.
“Kind of a grim place to start the day,” was Burt’s comment.
It was dark as they left, but the day seemed to be dawning without rain or snow for the new president.
At her direction, they halted the Humvee—another in Burt’s stable of outsized American vehicles—about half a mile from the main gates of the cemetery. Burt laid his hand on her arm and told her they would be in the vicinity whenever she called.
He’d insisted she take a cell phone, which she didn’t trust, but she acquiesced in the knowledge that she could check it for bugs before she went anywhere near the rendezvous.
Then she began the long walk away from the vehicle, feeling the eyes of all four of them boring into her back, like dogs left behind on a promised walk.
After a few minutes she disappeared around a bend in the road.
She was carrying a small backpack over her shoulders and wore a long coat, boots, and a felt hat. The pistol was wrapped in clothing inside the pack.
When she’d walked for a mile, past the main entrance to the cemetery, she found the kind of place she was looking for. Everything now had to be improvised until she reached the rendezvous.
It was a small, neat mall, which would be closed for the national holiday. She skirted across the front of it and made her way around to the rear, watching for cameras, until she was out of sight from the road.
Behind the mall there was a delivery yard, and behind that, a high wall against theft.
She kept to the outside of the wall, where the dulled winter grey of grass offered a slice of neat wasteland, until she found a niche where the wall doglegged to the left; from here there was no view apart from straight out.
Checking that there was nobody on this piece of ground, she then dismantled the phone, examined it for a positioning device, and, when she was satisfied there was none, reassembled it. As long as she left it switched off, she’d be untraceable.
She then stripped off her coat, trousers, boots, and jacket until she stood in just her jogging clothes. She took jogging shoes from the pack and then unwrapped the gun from a fleece jacket and removed the firing pin for safety. 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 café, 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.