“You said it has to be soon. Why do you think that?”
“Whoever is behind this already has his assassins in place, and obviously has a specific venue in mind. The longer they wait, the greater the risk of the whole operation falling apart. I doubt if they’re planning more than a few months ahead. It may be only a matter of weeks or days.”
“What about targets? Do we issue a warning to the President’s security people?”
Sheldon sat back in his leather chair, his palms face down on his desk like a pianist about to begin a concerto. “I’m sending a memo to the Secret Service’s Intelligence Division in Washington, of course, but at this stage I don’t want to go overboard. As yet we don’t know for certain who the target is, and I don’t want to be caught crying wolf. As soon as we know for sure who the target is we’ll throw a cordon around him, but not until then. And there’s no point in issuing a general warning — that would scare too many people needlessly and we’d run the risk of the snipers going to ground. No, Cole, you tell me for sure that it’s the President and we’ll sound the alarm.”
Sheldon paused for a few seconds as if he was having second thoughts. He tapped his fingers on the desktop. “But I think it would be a good idea if you got hold of the President’s itinerary and see if there are any situations where snipers could get at him.”
Howard left Sheldon’s office with the tape and file. He wasn’t looking forward to asking his father-in-law for help.
Mike Cramer looked at his watch, pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and put his hand on the bottle of Famous Grouse he kept there. He took it out and weighed it in his hand. It was a powerful hand, the fingers strong and the nails neatly clipped. There was scar tissue over the first two knuckles and the skin looked as if it had been out in all weathers. It was the hand of a sailor, a hand used to doing manual work. It was shaking as it held the bottle and the whisky slopped against the glass. Cramer tightened his grip but that just intensified the trembling. He stood the bottle on the desk and looked at the label as he used his foot to close the drawer.
He looked at his watch again. Nine-fifteen. He’d only bought the bottle the previous evening in the off-licence down the road but already it was half empty. Cramer smiled to himself. There had been a time when he might have taken a more positive view and thought that the bottle was half full, but those days were long gone. He unscrewed the cap and lifted the neck of the bottle to his nose. He sniffed gently, the way a dog might test the night air, then he took a mouthful, swallowing almost immediately. Cramer wasn’t drinking for the flavour, he was drinking to stop the shakes. He took another mouthful, then another, and then recapped the bottle and put it back into his desk drawer. He had an open pack of Wrigley’s gum on his desk and he unwrapped a piece and popped it in his mouth.
The office was small and windowless. It took up a corner of a large warehouse and was little more than a plywood box with space for two desks, a photocopier, a filing cabinet, a small fridge and five steel lockers. On the wall above the filing cabinet was a chart and Cramer went over to look at it. Two groups were due to start at nine-thirty so he went to check the battle arena.
The warehouse had been built as a place to store goods before they were loaded on to ships on the Thames, back in the days when the east of London was a thriving docks and not just an offshoot of the City’s financial district. As the shipping companies switched over to containers and the river traffic died off, the best of the warehouses were transformed into Yuppie flats and glitzy winebars, but this one was too run down to be remodelled and it had been left to decay. The two young Greek Cypriot businessmen Cramer worked for had bought the warehouse for a song at a time when property prices were falling, and they had turned it into a successful paintball venue where executives could work off their aggression by pretending to blow each other away with paint pellets instead of bullets. There were five floors in the building, linked by a staircase at each end. The new owners had installed fireman’s poles and ladders then had added wooden walls, chain-link fences and other obstacles to make a battlefield which they illuminated with a computer-controlled light and laser system. The top four floors were used for combat, and on the ground floor was the office, along with a changing room and shower facilities, a shop selling paintballs, equipment and clothing, and a large practice area where the players could fire their guns at targets. Cramer went into the shop and turned on the lights. There were no windows anywhere in the warehouse other than in the roof so everywhere had to be illuminated. Racks of sweatshirts and nylon protective clothing were against one wall with a display of goggles and facemasks lined up above them. In a case by the cash register there was a selection of the latest paintguns and cleaning kits. Cramer checked that there was change in the cash register, then went to turn the lights on in the practice area. As he walked across the concrete floor he heard the main door swing open and turned to see Charlie Preston walk out of the sunlight.
“Yo, Mike, sorry I’m late,” shouted Preston. He was a teenager who’d started working at the arena on a Government-sponsored work experience programme but had stayed on as a full-time employee, more because he loved the sport than because of the money. Preston had once spent four weeks travelling across America in Greyhound buses and during the trip he’d acquired a collection of sweatshirts and an accent which he kept in shape by watching American movies. As he closed the door behind him, Cramer could see that he was wearing his Washington Redskins shirt and knee length Miami Dolphins shorts and had on a blue New York Yankees baseball cap. Cramer smiled. It was barely above freezing outside. The boy had style, all right. “No sweat, Charlie,” he answered. “You see anyone out there?”
“Couple of BMWs just drove up. I guess that’s them.”
Cramer hit the light switches and the fluorescent lights above the practice area flickered into life. “Okay, can you check the arena lights program? We’re going to use number six, we were having trouble with the searchlight on number five yesterday so I want to see if it’s the programming or the light that’s not right.”
“Cool,” said Preston. As he walked over to the computerised console which controlled the lighting system, two men arrived carrying nylon holdalls. They were both in their late twenties, well groomed and tanned as if just back from a Mediterranean holiday. One of them dropped his holdall on the floor.
“You in charge?” he called over to Cramer.
“Sure am,” answered Cramer. “Which team are you?”
“We’re the Bayswater Blasters. Is the other side here yet?”
“You’re the first,” said Cramer. “You’re due to start at nine-thirty, right?”
Five more young men arrived, all dressed casually in jeans and sweatshirts. “They here, Simon?” one of them shouted.
“No, you sure they said they’re still on?” the man in glasses replied.
“Sure. I spoke to their captain on Wednesday.”
“Why don’t you get changed while you’re waiting?” Cramer suggested. “Have you guys played here before?”
They all shook their heads so Cramer showed them where the changing room was and gave them photocopied maps of the arena. When they reappeared ten minutes later there was still no sign of their opponents. Cramer watched them as they waited by the main entrance. They were wearing camouflage outfits and military-style boots and carrying futuristic paintball helmets and facemasks. They were all equipped with neck protectors, padded gloves and special vests to hold extra paintballs and had clearly spent a lot of money on their gear. Their weapons were also expensive. Their leader, the one called Simon, was carrying a Tippmann Pneumatics 68 Special semi-automatic which had been fitted with a twenty-ounce carbon dioxide constant-air cylinder and a large capacity bulk loader which would hold up to two hundred rounds. It would pack a punch, Cramer knew, and the TASO red dot sight meant it would be accurate, too, though he also knew from experience that most players who used semi-automatics just kept firing blindly until they hit something, relying on brute force rather than skill. The ‘spray and pray’ method.