When she entered the park again, she took a circuitous route, approaching the stone building from the rear.
The building where they were to meet was U-shaped, with straight sides that formed an enclosed patio at the rear. There were a few wooden tables concreted into the ground here, just as Mikhail had said. A figure was sitting at the middle table, and she knew it was Mikhail. He wore a long brown coat and a Russian fur hat, and she noticed the smallest detail even at this distance; the mud on the edges of his shoes, the wisp of greyish black hair at the back of his neck, a plaster wrapped around the middle finger of his left hand. It was the plaster that told her for certain it was Mikhail.
She surveyed the route behind her from which she’d come, and swept her gaze around the park. A man was pushing a bike along a path in the distance. She watched him from the corner of her eye. Another man walked his dog a few hundred yards in the other direction. She trusted Mikhail knew his job as well as she knew hers.
Then she walked towards the stone building, indirectly, along a path that bent around solely for aesthetic effect, but which led to the rear of the building. She sat down on a cold wooden bench, attached to the table next to the one where Mikhail sat. They were sheltered on three sides by the U shape of the building.
He didn’t look up.
“There’s something wrong,” he said at last. No agreed greeting, no greeting of any kind.
She was taken aback, uncertain what he meant, speechless.
“With what?” she said finally. She’d expected the formal procedure at least, some preamble.
“There is no such thing as Icarus,” he said. “Icarus doesn’t exist.”
Chapter 34
LARS POSITIONED THE BEER bottle on the red plastic table with the precision he brought to everything. The TV screen in the bar was showing the early preparations for the day ahead, but that didn’t interest him.
He was in Washington, D.C., and was unconcerned with events around the inauguration of the new president, but they still penetrated his consciousness.
The city was full of visitors, but there was one in particular that he—or his controllers, in any case—were interested in.
Two months before this day he’d been training for over three weeks for this one shot. He’d made camp in a lake area of Louisiana, where his controllers assured him he would be alone and uninterrupted. Did they have some kind of control over this huge area of wetland? Did they even own the whole dead place themselves, perhaps? He didn’t know, and he didn’t ask, but he was beginning to suspect the type of Americans his controllers were.
He picked a suitable lake out of the several hundred in the permitted area and set up the tools of his trade. He would need a lot of practice for such a shot, which lobbed in an arc and still struck its target.
He didn’t like the area. Even when it was winter in the north of the country, here it was always hot enough for the mosquitoes to aggravate every waking second of the day down by the lake. At night he slept in a wooden cabin, with screens against the insects, but he still heard sounds. He didn’t like this place or its unearthly noises; he didn’t understand what was out there. It was unfamiliar country.
But in the first few days he’d set up a solid concrete and metal platform on a small hillock by the lake, on which he bolted the machine gun, a replica for the actual place where the shot would be made.
He’d demanded they provide him with only “green spot” ammunition, from the first five thousand rounds that come off the production line. Green spot was the beginning of the batch. It was all that interested him. It had that feather edge of perfection over other ammunition.
But what he used for practice was ex-NATO ammunition, the GMPG, or Gimpy in the parlance. The rounds were large, .762—or 308, as they called them in America—and he was going to need a thousand of them for the hit itself.
But for now, what concerned him was the pattern they formed on the lake, and his task in nearly three weeks of practice had been to tighten the pattern each day until he was sure he had the tightest area of drop to hit the target without causing too much damage over a wider area.
He had no idea of the identity of the target, and he didn’t ask. They would tell him when he needed to know, and perhaps they would not tell him who the target was at all. It didn’t matter to him either way. He was specialist, and his fan club, as he imagined it, was growing with every hit he made.
Besides, at half a million a job, who needed to ask questions?
But even before the practice in this infested hellhole down in Louisiana, he’d needed to inspect the actual location for the shot, and that was up in the capital. For he wouldn’t be aiming the machine gun himself on this job. It would all be done remotely. He needed an exact map of the target area, with contours and a horizon measurement. It was all information that an Ordnance Survey map, or U.S. Geological Survey, as they called it here, as well as a theodolite that measured horizontal and vertical angles, could provide.
He’d done this preparation in the capital, on the roof of the six-storey building from which the furious blast of fire was planned to emanate. The blast would leave the roof of the building, arc over a second, higher building, and descend perfectly on the target.
The building was well away from the centre of the city. If he wondered why it was all to happen from this obscure building so far from the main action, and why it was on the date of the new president’s inauguration, so many miles away—way beyond the range of his weapon—he didn’t ask, even to himself. At any rate, it was nothing to do with the president himself.
Out on the hillock by the lake, he set up the barrel, bolting it to the solid platform just as it would be on the roof for the shot itself.
With each day, the pattern improved, but it was still not good enough even after two weeks, still too widespread, and he gave himself the extra days he needed. The testing was exhaustive, but eventually it came into the tight circle he knew he required.
He changed the barrel on the gun twice when it became shot out with practice, and finally, when he had the pattern that worked, he set up the barrel he would use, inserted some of the green spot ammunition in a belt, and fired off a few rounds, just enough to see the pattern and not to damage the barrel. It was the perfect circle.
And now, sitting in this bar in the northern Washington, D.C., suburb of Bethesda and watching the preliminary preparations for the inauguration, all he needed was an order. The gun was bolted to the roof, the theodolite was bolted to the gun instead of a normal gun sight, and a solenoid was fixed in place, between the trigger and the guard, with a cell phone attached beside it.
All it would take now was for him to dial the number, and a thousand rounds of ammunition would be discharged automatically, with their instant and inevitably destructive force that would destroy the target and everyone within twenty-five yards—and finally destroy even the barrel itself.
Even now, sitting in the bar, minutes perhaps before the action, he didn’t question who the target was. The target was apparently unconnected to the inauguration itself. Maybe it was a figure who had come to Washington just for that day, like so many other big hitters; some businessman who wished to be near the action. The inauguration was, perhaps, simply cover his controllers were using for their own reasons.
On the television, the anchorman was rambling about some minor aspect of the presidential procession later that afternoon, and so it would go on as the day unravelled. He sipped his beer carefully, and waited.
When the call came, it was not what he’d expected. He was told to wait. It was not the order to fire. His contact would be with him shortly, the voice said.