It wouldn't have been a single attempt. He would run through a whole ammunition-belt if he had to. He wouldn't have to; it would be a question of time, of number, the number of shots required.
He'd be in no hurry; he had from now until dawn. But he wouldn't of course be alone; there'd be others in the environment, stationed strategically so that I couldn't make a headlong run for it and with luck survive. I couldn't see them from where I lay. All I could see were wheels to the right of this position, dark rounded blobs below the vehicle that sheltered me. On my left there were the others in orderly rows, parked for the night. More of them were ahead of me, and beyond them the lights of a street. Behind me there was another street but I was cut off from that; the sniper was in that direction, posted on a height of some sort, in the window of a building or on a fire-escape. He would be comfortable; he would take his time.
And I would take mine.
The air was perfectly still and very cold. Sounds would carry clearly when they came. There'd be no change in the light value unless traffic passed along the street behind me or the street on the far side; the glow of the Wall was constant and so was the intensity of the rotating beam. I suppose it was cheaper than putting up a whole battery of spotlights; and there was a sinister aspect to this constantly moving finger that brought everything it touched into fierce relief. Its purpose was to deter.
Cone:
Yasolev's going to ask you how you'll be planning your access to Volper. Will you tell him?
No.
Do you know?
Yes.
Are you prepared to tell me?
You wouldn't like it.
How much protection are you going to need?
None.
My job is to get you through Quickstep with a whole skin. I'd rather you didn't make it difficult for me.
Look, it's out of our hands. Put it this way: they went for Scarsdale and they got him. They thought it'd warn me off but it didn't, so now they'll go for me. And that's the only access we've got, and I'm going to use it. Don't worry, they won't be long.
That had been four days ago, and this night would be the last.
Impact and I jerked my head and listened to the ricochet as the shell ripped through the metalwork of the vehicle in front of me and skated across the ground under dying momentum. It was a heavy projectile, I would say from a carbine or magnum with anything up to twelve shots in the magazine and fitted with a high-magnification night scope and silencer. It wouldn't be expected to drive a hole in a human skull; it would blow it apart.
There was no smell of the gun. It could be a quarter of a mile away. I closed my eyes and let the scene come in as it would look from the sniper's position: a rectangular area of flat tarmacadam dotted with dominoes, regularly spaced, with the shadows of the swinging light shifting constantly at precise intervals. And within this circumscribed pattern, a man.
A man for the moment motionless. To lie here until dawn was a temptation, to lie here and use the dark hours to review my life so as to leave it with a feeling of something accomplished, not a lot but something. But I would also have to review the mistakes I'd made, the instances of gross incompetence incurred by pride or too much faith in the self's abilities, and the unwitting betrayals, the lapses in manners, in loyalty, in the concession to mercy when its need cried out. And that, my good friend, could not be countenanced; it would not look well in the reckoning. Besides which, I wasn't going to give up after the first two shots, or after the first two hundred if he'd got that many. One must be true to one's principles, so forth, but the terror was on me and I could smell it as the cold sweat broke out: it's not the thought of death that makes us afraid, you know, it's the thought of dying, of reaching the point of no return, of being too late; everything in life has always been reversible, hasn't it, or tolerable, manageable — there's always been time left in which to put one's house in order, to clean up the worst of the mess and say you're sorry; and then suddenly we're caught in the headlights, frozen in mid-stride, and there's nowhere to go any more except there, into the unknown.
Finis.
Exactly, my good friend.
Impact and the breath came out of my body as if the shell had blown it out. But it hadn't; it had crashed into the side window of the vehicle where I was sheltering, and the fragments fluted through the air in a dying chorus of notes as the vehicle moved on its springs by a degree and was still again.
Amusing himself.
The rotating light swung, sending the shadows of the vehicles' shifting from left to right in a circling crossword puzzle. He was amusing himself: I hadn't moved and he knew where I was but he couldn't reach this side of the vehicle unless he changed his position and he didn't want to do that; he was too comfortable, too well-placed. So he'd fired another shot to keep his eye in, to keep his eye in and to put the fear of Christ in me because the impact of a shell that size in the silence of the night is enough to shatter the nerves.
I lay flat, relaxing, trying to shift into alpha waves if only for a few seconds because the sound of the bullet was still reverberating through the system. It hadn't been loud but it had been sudden, and had expressed appalling power, enough power to fell an ox on the hoof. Relax, and let the body sink against the cold tarmac, the cheek resting on the back of the hand, the nose filling with the crude, heavy reek of engine oil. In a moment I would have to move; all through the night I would have to move and go on moving if I could, if one of those shells — the fifth or the tenth or the fifteenth — didn't blow apart the delicate array of intelligence inside the skull.
Alpha, and the sense of letting go, of the slackening of the nerves to the point of ephemeral euphoria, until confidence came back like a lost friend and touched my hand; and then I moved, crawling over the ground and underneath the vehicle, finding the crankcase and wiping my hands across the underside and smearing the blackened oil on my face and the back of my hands, doing it carefully, attending to the eyelids and the lobes of the ears. I couldn't tell if it were going to be enough and I wouldn't be taking it for granted: I'd use more oil from the next vehicle if I ever reached it.
My suit and sweater were dark and my shoes black, but I took off my watch and pushed it into a pocket. Then I began crawling again, pulling my body forward across the ground, flat as a lizard, until I was lying in front of the vehicle on the blind side to the sniper's eye.
And waited.
I couldn't try to go back to the street behind me because it'd mean moving straight into his line of fire. There were buildings on each side of the car-park and they offered no shelter because they were fully exposed. The only place I could try to reach was the street in front of me, more than a hundred yards away, and the only hope I had of doing It was by moving from the shelter of one vehicle to the next and using their moving shadows for visual cover as the rotating light swept the area. It amounted to a suicide run but there was no choice.
I began counting.
The first move was going to be the most difficult to make; not difficult In terms of timing and distance because the vehicles were in orderly rows and equally spaced, but difficult in terms of willpower. Later there'd be the factor of familiarity as an aid, on the principle that the more you do something the easier it gets, but as I lay waiting I couldn't be certain that I wouldn't get halfway to the next vehicle and lose faith and stumble and go down and offer a motionless target that he'd see the moment the light swung across my prone body.