The Assassin (24 page)

They had counted four men in the village and given each a nickname. There was also one woman and two children. The man they wanted wasn’t there.

“I don’t think the bastard will ever come,” Brown said. “More bum information, and we do the big camp-out. I don’t care what anyone says, at least we can out-camp these bastards.”

“Right.”

“I don’t know how these people stand living in this wasteland. No wonder they’re hot to die and get to Paradise.”

“Next life’s gotta be better than this one.”

“You Jesus freaks keep saying that, and without a shred of evidence,” Gat Brown said, delighted that Longworth had given him this opening. To keep from dying of boredom, they had been debating religion for days. Longworth was a born-again Christian, and Brown was an atheist, or so he said. He wasn’t really, but he wanted to keep the conversation alive, and one way was to never agree with Longworth.

There was a man on the ridge behind them. He had climbed up there at dawn and was hiking along the ridge, looking. He had a rifle of some kind. With his back to the village, Brown tracked his progress with binoculars. “They’re expecting something to happen,” he muttered.

“What?” muttered Longworth.

“Why don’t you admit it?” Brown asked, his eyes glued to the binoculars. “All religion is bunk, theirs and yours and everyone else’s. The whole religious house of cards is built on the premise that man is a special animal, and he isn’t. We’re cousins of the monkey, and he doesn’t fret about getting to heaven or worry about going to hell.”

“You’re an idiot,” Harry Longworth said mildly and closed his eyes, pretending to sleep.

An hour later Longworth said, “Well, look at this. Truck coming.”

Gat Brown checked the sentry on the side of the ridge one more time, got him located on the skyline, then crawled to his hole in the brush for a look. He swung up his binoculars. The vehicle was coming up the canyon, trailing a plume of dust. An old flatbed truck of some kind.

“This might be it,” Harry said.

“That guy up behind us. When we shoot, think you can take him? He’s about three hundred yards away.”

Longworth crawled to a place where he could see the ridgeline. He located the sentry. “Okay,” he said, and checked his M40A3 bolt-action rifle in 7.62 mm NATO, which was lying on a blanket. Then he returned to the spotting scope.

Brown settled himself behind the big Fifty and ensured the safety was on. He swung the scope crosshairs onto the huts, checked that both legs of the bipod were level and the horizontal line in the scope was also level. Beside him was the case that held the .50-caliber Browning machine-gun cartridges. He opened it, pulled four more cartridges out so they lay loose upon the padding.

After a little fidgeting, he settled down to watch the scene through the scope, which had a twenty-six-power magnification.

The range to the huts was 1,639 yards. They had used a laser range finder to establish that, and had lased every path and promontory below them, just in case the people in the huts discovered them and decided to come up here for a look-see. This would be a long shot, but Gat Brown had made shots at this distance before. His longest was almost 1,700 yards.

Shots at these ranges, even with the big Fifty, were difficult. The scope had to have a lot of magnification so that he could actually see what he was aiming at, yet the high magnification made it difficult— actually almost impossible—to hold the crosshairs steady. His breathing, the beating of his heart, the uneven heating of the air—everything made those crosshairs dance nervously even though the thirty-one-pound rifle was on a bipod. Hitting a man-sized target at that range was a job for an expert, which Gat Brown was.

“Wind from your left, maybe eight knots,” Longworth said. He had the binoculars on the truck again. “Three guys in the cab, I think. Hard to say.”

Brown adjusted the rifle to account for the estimated wind. He liked to hold a centered crosshair on his target, but at this distance, there were no guarantees. The wind was just an estimate, and it wouldn’t be uniform over the 4,900 feet the bullet had to travel. He had adjusted the horizontal crosshairs for the trajectory days ago.

“Guy with binoculars beside Hut Two,” Brown murmured. “He’s glassing this slope.”

The village men glassed the slopes every day, and twice in the last ten days they had hiked along the valley floor and ridges with dogs, just looking. Brown and Longworth were well hidden, and the dogs hadn’t gotten a sniff.

“This may be it,” Harry said again, trying to keep the tension out of his voice.

Brown instinctively pulled the rifle tighter into his shoulder, settled himself, forced himself to breathe easily and regularly. He was steady as a rock when the truck rolled to a stop near the huts.

Two men who had been inside came out to greet the new arrivals. Longworth examined each of them carefully through the spotting scope, which had a thirty-six-power magnification. He didn’t touch the scope, which sat on a tripod—merely held his eye as close as possible and looked.

The driver of the truck … his back was to them, and he walked around the front of the truck, disappearing from view. The man getting out on the passenger side . . . Brown got a profile. The other man, who had been riding in the middle of the bench seat, also got out and for a moment stood behind the other passenger. Then he stepped away and Brown got his best look at the first man to exit.

“It’s him,” he said softly and flicked off the safety. “The guy in the brown coat.”

“That’s our man,” Longworth agreed, his eyes glued to the spotting scope. “Any time you’re ready.”

Brown took a deep breath, exhaled, steadied the rifle on that brown coat. The bearded man wearing it was talking to a man from the hut. This would be a quartering shot into his left rear side.

With the reticle in the scope twitchy, yet more or less centered on the target as steady as a trained rifleman could hold it, Brown began squeezing the trigger, which was adjusted for an eighteen-ounce pull. So gently and steadily did he caress it that the shock of the report and recoil took him by surprise. Automatically he worked the bolt, ejecting the empty cartridge as the deep, booming echo of the report rolled back and forth across the valley.

“You got him,” Longworth said, his voice taut. He abandoned the spotting scope and swiftly crawled to his bolt-action. He looked for the sentry on the ridge.

The man wasn’t there.

Terrific!

Gat Brown shoved a fresh round into the chamber and closed the bolt, then settled back into shooting position and again looked through his rifle scope. Two men were kneeling by the man who was down. He steadied the crosshairs on the nearest man and squeezed the trigger again. In front of him the brush quivered from the muzzle blast.

At the second report the ridge sentry’s head popped out from behind a boulder. He looked around, still uncertain of the sniper’s location. Longworth got his rifle on him, settled into a braced position on one knee and brought the crosshairs to rest. Then he squeezed one off. The sentry went down.

“A hit,” he told himself. He didn’t see the bullet strike, but the shot felt good. A good shooter has an instinct about these things. He crawled back to the spotting scope.

When Brown again looked through the scope, he saw two men sprawled beside the flatbed.

“Put a couple in that truck—see if you can disable it—and let’s saddle up,” Harry Longworth said.

The truck was a much easier target than a man. Where do you suppose the designers put the gas tank?

Brown steadied the big Fifty, held the crosshair where he thought the tank should be, and squeezed the trigger ever so gently.

The rifle spoke again, the brush shook, and again the booming echo rolled around the valley.

“You hit it,” Longworth said tightly. “One more.”

Brown fired again, trying to angle a bullet through the truck to hit the engine block.

“That’s shooting!” Longworth exulted. “Now let’s get outta here while we still can.”

“Amen to that,” said Gat Brown. They taped a delayed-fuse bomb containing a half pound of plastique to the rifle. Then they tossed the spotting scope and ammo beside it, triggered the chemical fuse, grabbed their personal weapons and the rucksacks containing the radios and water and boogied. They left the uneaten MREs and the sleeping bags for the holy warriors.

On their way across the ridge they passed the dead sentry. He had taken a bullet in the left chest.

Two hours of running and trotting later, they were on the other side of the ridge and into the valley. Another hour of hard trotting took them to the mouth of a small canyon they had passed through on their way to the village. They went up the canyon almost a mile, then separated, one man taking one side of the defile, one the other. They came back down the canyon to a place about five hundred yards or so from the entrance, a place where the canyon widened out and there was little cover. The likelihood of an ambush was much greater at the mouth of the canyon; when it didn’t happen there, the pursuers would be less wary when they reached this spot, which at first glance didn’t seem to offer much in the way of cover. There wasn’t—for them.

Harry Longworth fired up the satellite telephone and called for the extraction. He used code words. When he got an acknowledgment he turned the telephone off again to save the battery and stowed it in his backpack.

He arranged his M40A3 and ammo so they were handy. In his backpack were two grenades; he placed them beside the ammo. Making himself comfortable, he removed an energy bar from a jacket pocket, tore off the wrapper and munched on it between swigs of water as he scanned the rocks and ridges and stunted vegetation huddled down for the winter.

The village men would probably be along after a while, following the dogs. If they came, when they came, Harry Longworth and Gat Brown would kill them. The dogs, too.

Per Diem was driving, and I was in the right seat. We were following Marisa Petrou’s limo. Actually the car belonged to Isolde. Apparently she had found a new wheelman after I accidentally on purpose terminated the last one. Shit happens, I’m here to tell ya.

Paris is not an easy town to follow a car in because there is too much traffic and too many traffic lights. If you stay back, inevitably someone gets in front of you and you miss a light and the car you are following disappears in the sea of traffic ahead. So we weren’t trying to finesse Marissa’s chauffeur—we were right on his tail. He didn’t seem to notice. Drove the boulevards without a care in the world.

I wondered where Marisa was going. If she was going to meet Abu Qasim . . . well, I should be so lucky. Jake Grafton had given me orders: “If you see him, shoot him. I don’t care where it happens or what else is going down. Shoot him dead. Use the whole magazine if you have time.”

That order certainly seemed clear enough. Of course, my chances of bumping into Abu Qasim were about a zillion to one: I had a better chance of winning a Powerball lottery. Even if I did see him, odds are I wouldn’t recognize him. I certainly didn’t want to pop any bankers or boyfriends or members of the bar, even if they were French. I had made up my mind—no more accidental homicides.

I almost left the gun in my hotel room, then thought better of that impulse. Strangulations are brutal and messy. Bullets would be better.

Diem was a good driver. He seemed aware of all that was happening around him and checked the rearview mirror regularly. I glanced back from time to time, too. When people are too easy to follow, a suspicious fellow might wonder if there is a reason, such as someone trailing you. Not this time.

We drove into the heart of the city, crossed the bridge and pulled up in front of police headquarters. The limo stopped, and Marisa got out. There was a photographer on the sidewalk, and he snapped her picture. She didn’t look at him, just walked past pretending she didn’t see him and went inside.

“Wanta go in and see who she’s talking to?” Diem said.

“Ha, ha, ha.” I opened the door. “Follow the limo. I’ll call you on your cell if she grabs a cab.”

I got out and headed for a vantage point across the street, where I could keep an eye on the front door of the prefecture. Knowing Marisa, I didn’t think there was a chance on earth she would use a side or back door. Found an empty bench in front of Notre Dame, inspected it for pigeon doo and parked my fanny.

Gusty wind, temp in the fifties, gray clouds scudding overhead . . . fortunately I was dressed for the weather. I turned my coat collar up and pulled my hat down tight. Tried to keep the eyes moving and the brain in neutral, which was difficult.

I could see about a thousand possible permutations on how this thing would play out, one of which was that we actually managed to kill Abu Qasim and get him stuffed for display in the CIA museum. One out of a thousand. About six hundred of the possibilities had Grafton winding up in a federal prison. Of course, if that happened, I was probably going to get tossed in an adjacent cell, because I knew all about this vast criminal conspiracy lodged in the rotten heart of the American government and didn’t blow the whistle.

The photographer on the sidewalk across the street made call after call on his cell phone. Before long another photographer arrived. A half hour later a television crew, complete with supporting truck, arrived. After they were set up, the reporter—a woman—talked into a camera for a while, then they waited. Ten minutes later another guy showed up carrying two camera bags, one on each shoulder. They formed a gauntlet that everyone leaving the building had to pass through. Several people did, and the media let them pass unmolested.

Marisa was in there for an hour and a half. The limo appeared at the curb, and the driver got out. Diem in our rental was a hundred feet behind. I walked over and climbed in just as Marisa came out the door and the photographers sprang into action. Inquiring minds want to know. One would think she specialized in hot love scenes for the cinema. She marched determinedly through the crowd, didn’t say boo to the lady with the microphone—which she stuck in Marisa’s face—and climbed aboard the limo. Away we crept, off through traffic, back to the chateau Petrou out in the country.