‘You live and learn.’
‘Look, if you miss…’
‘I don’t miss.’
‘… she’ll run like a jack rabbit. You’ll only get one shot.’
‘Shut up.’
‘I can’t stand much more of this cold.’
The rifle, on a little tripod, was a precision instrument. It had been custom-built by the Tanyard Springs gunsmiths in Texas. From its origins in their Honey Grove factory, it had travelled in the boot of a car to Colombia, for service with one of the major drug families who had been having trouble with a judge. From there it had crossed water to Kingston, Jamaica, where it had seen action from the roof of a Trench Town slum. Then it had travelled back to the States where, for a few hours, it had lived in a large South Carolina mansion. In an attic of this house a fine lasergrip sight, product of the Crimson Trace Corporation, had been added to the barrel. Having been fired just once — its owner regarded repetition as bad business practice — the rifle crossed the Atlantic in a private yacht to Northern Ireland, part of a large consignment of rifles and pistols. Its trail then led to a flat in the Fifth arrondissement in Paris and at last, by train and car, to seventy degrees north, inside the Arctic Circle.
The rifle was loaded with a single bullet, reflecting the marksman’s confidence. While the 300 FAB Magnum was a popular choice amongst his peers, the rifleman preferred a 173 grain HV. This was purchased from a source in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. It was a 30-calibre bullet, with an exit speed of 3650 feet per second, quite capable of stopping an elephant or piercing body armour. In a few minutes, if all went well, the powder in the bullet would be detonated and the shocked vapour would propel the soft-nosed head through the cold, dense air on a precise trajectory to the target’s skull, spreading brain and bone fragments across the gritted road.
‘Switch off the laser, you fool. You want someone to see it?’ The man stopped flapping his arms and picked up his night-vision binoculars. A thin road, already gritted, led into the town below from the left. At the town’s entrance was an open yard. In it, half a dozen big diesel trucks were throbbing, the noise drifting faintly up to them. Steam from their exhausts rose up to roof height and disappeared into the blackness. Over the door of a single-storeyed building in the yard, harsh lights illuminated the words Henrik Hedstrom.
There was nothing to say what business Henrik Hedstrom was in. For all the waiting assassins cared, Henry Headstrong was Santa Claus. What mattered was that the target had hitched a lift in a Hedstrom truck and was heading this way; that she would get off either in the street or the yard; and that for a few moments, while she was saying her farewells to the driver, she would be a static target.
The man said again, ‘I’m going to die of fucking cold.’ He swung his binoculars to the right. Next to the yard was a post office, and then a two-storeyed timber house, glowing yellow in the streetlights. Pastel-coloured wooden houses lined the road, which hugged the fiord to the point where a massive rocky outcrop hid the view. At intervals there were boat-houses, and a mile away a pier jutted into the dark water. Smoke from overnight fires curled into the sky. In a few houses, chinks of light filtered through shuttered windows. One room had its shutters open and lights on, and it blazed into the darkness like a searchlight. The man peered into it, hoping to see something interesting like a woman undressing, but there was only shabby green wallpaper and a wooden dressing-table to be seen.
Somewhere below, a dog howled, wolf-like; answering howls came from around the little town. The noise died down. ‘What if he takes her past the yard?’
The corpse grunted. ‘Will you shut up? You want me to miss?’
‘Not with what we’re paying you.’
The marksman said, ‘It’s not enough. I’m losing my nuts.’
His nervous companion had no time to wonder if the statement was intended literally. His binoculars were picking up headlights, far to the left, where the road appeared round the edge of a mountain. His mouth was dry with fear and he could hardly get the words out: ‘Here she comes.’
49
Endgame
The cabin steward shook him awake and Petrie was hit by his third surge of terror in twelve hours.
The first had been in Warsaw. At the check-in he withered under the steady gaze of hard-eyed officials. And again at Heathrow, the Special Branch officers seemed to have X-ray eyes which penetrated his mind. Petrie knew that a mistake at either of these key points, a tremor of nerves attracting attention, would have been fatal.
And now, on the screen showing the transatlantic progress of the jumbo, the aircraft was pointing south and practically touching Washington. He looked down, and glimpsed snow-covered ground through clear patches of cloud.
The endgame. A good one won’t save you. It needs to be devastating.
In the Dulles terminal Petrie defiantly pulled off the wig and sideburns and the heavy spectacles, eased the plastic padding out of his mouth and the stupid little moustache from under his nose, and tossed the lot into a litter bin. He put on his usual round-framed spectacles from a case. Amos and Obadiah escorted him to the sidewalk at the front of the airport, where a stretch limousine was waiting, with another large black car behind it. Amos opened the door for Petrie and said, ‘So long, Tom.’
In the back of the limousine, three people. Eau de cologne lingering in the air. He sank into leather opulence next to a strikingly beautiful young woman who gave him an open, almost naive smile. Her voice was melodious and tinged with a Scandinavian accent: ‘What took you so long?’
For the first time in his life Petrie was out of words. He squeezed her hand.
The driver merged smoothly into the flow of airport traffic. A middle-aged woman sat across from Petrie, on the luxurious backwards-facing long seat. She pressed a button on the arm rest and a glass partition slid up between the uniformed driver and the passengers. She extended a hand. ‘I’m Hazel Baxendale, the President’s Science Adviser. On behalf of President Bull I’d like to welcome you to the States. Don’t let Dr Størmer kid you. She arrived only a few hours ago.’
Her companion, elderly and white-haired, nodded at Petrie but didn’t extend his hand. ‘And I’m Al Sullivan. I run the CIA, for my sins. Glad we got you out okay.’
Heady company for a junior post-doc. Petrie said, ‘I feel as if I’m inside a Bond movie or something.’
Sullivan managed a near-smile. ‘We have a few guys like that on the payroll.’
The limo was now moving smartly along the freeway, the heavily tinted glass protecting them from the curious stares of other drivers. The CIA Director leaned forward. ‘The deal is this. You give us the password to the DVD. In return we go public with the ET signal. We put everything into the public domain, all the new knowledge and all the material still to be decrypted. But all of us agree to keep one thing back.’
Petrie waited.
‘The celestial coordinates of the signal, pending a decision from the United Nations. If they decide on a reply, we release that information too.’
Freya said, ‘It’s everything we’ve asked for, Tom.’
‘But the moment I give them the password,’ he warned her, ‘they can do anything they like.’ He looked across at Sullivan. ‘You have the DVD, then.’
‘Came in the pouch weeks ago. But we can’t bust it. Neither us nor the NSA.’
‘If I give you the password you could decrypt the message, use the knowledge for your own national advantage and keep the knowledge of the signallers to yourselves.’
‘But if they did that they’d have to silence us, Tom,’ Freya said.