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.”
L
ARS 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.
Lars clicked the phone shut. The shot might be postponed, or it might be cancelled. Not unusual. Sometimes a target didn’t follow the agenda he’d planned to follow. The accuracy of the timing for the shot was absolute, and there might be new arrangements.
He didn’t like it, however. He’d done his work with impeccable care; why couldn’t others do the same? He didn’t like it either that here, in America, his controllers were always hovering nearby, ever-present in the background. He preferred to work alone and far from interference.
But it was their commission, and theirs to proceed with or not. Either way, he’d pick up payment. That’s what they always told him. So he sat tight and drank now more freely from the bottle.
In a little under five minutes—a very short time, he thought dimly—two men entered the bar, one of whom he recognised as his contact, a tall, thin-faced man with a loose flapping coat and big shoes. Lars had met the American three times before, twice in Europe and once over here.
The other man he barely noticed.
They approached his table, sat down, and ordered a beer for each of them and a second one for him.
His contact took the phone from which the trigger call was to be made away from him. “Just to be safe,” the man said. “If we have to abort, we’ll have to dismantle the whole thing fast.”
Lars agreed, without knowing exactly what he was agreeing to. But he knew better than to allow his frustration to distort his mood. There were setbacks, even on a job as precise as this one.
“We’ll drink the beers and then go see the boss,” the thin man said. “Further instructions,” he explained.
Lars finished the first bottle and caught up with them on his second. The TV droned on without release. He was hearing what he’d already heard for the second or third time.
They left the bar after half an hour and headed away from the centre of the capital, into the suburbs, and then joined the Beltway towards the west. There were just the three of them, in a black Mercedes truck that Lars observed was bulletproofed, a special and expensive order. His controllers were, he knew, rich. They’d paid him a million and a half already.
They left the Beltway just before it crossed the Potomac and turned to the right along the riverbank. The waters swirled around a wide bend ahead of them. They pulled off the road again and down a paved road that turned to a track. There was another car parked ahead of them, black also but more like a limousine. Lars saw two figures sitting in the back seat, a chauffeur upfront.
“We may have to get you out of the country,” the thin man said reassuringly. “That’s what we’ll find out.”
But Lars didn’t feel reassured.
They stopped the Mercedes thirty yards from the other car, and the three of them got out and began to walk the intervening distance.
Lars saw the thin man and his colleague walk some way to either side of him, and he began to realise his vulnerability as the space around him widened. By the time the misgivings that had dipped in and out of his consciousness since the job was interrupted had finally surged to the front of his mind, he felt the sharp, stabbing pain below his left shoulder and saw himself, as if separated from his body, falling sideways into the mud at the side of the track.
Maybe he heard the small fizz of air from the silenced gun, or maybe it was his last breath escaping from his lungs, but that was the last thought he may or may not have had.
The thin man bent down and tested Lars’s pulse.
“That’s it,” he said to the two figures approaching from the limousine.
Then he and his colleague turned the body over, searched the pockets, and, finding nothing incriminating, slipped an identity card into Lars’s wallet. It had a Russian name and Russian embassy clearance.
The thin man took the phone he had earlier taken from Lars and slipped that too back into the pocket of Lars’s brown leather jacket.
As he did so, one of the men from the limousine made a call on his cell phone.
“We’ve found him,” he said. “And just in time, by the look of it. It seems he had another terrorist attack planned. We got him at last.”
The man receiving the call sat alone in an office at Langley. The agency was unusually depleted of staff today.
“Good work,” he said. “The nation will be grateful to you and your company.”
There was a pause as he listened to the directions the caller gave him to find the location by the river.
“Is he alive?” he said.
“No,” the caller said. “Terminated. He pulled on my guys. They didn’t have a choice.”
“Pity.”
“We’ve searched him,” the caller said. “The evidence seems clear. It looks like it was the Russians behind him after all.”
“Then it’s a great feather in your cap, and your company will no doubt see the benefits.”
M
IKHAIL GOT UP FROM
his seat at the next picnic table and crossed the few feet to where Anna was sitting. He sat opposite her and looked into her eyes.
“Icarus was disinformation,” he said. “What the CIA calls a canary trap.”
“How can you be sure?” she said, and felt her pulse quickening as the implications began to flood in.
“I’m sure,” he said.
“Then why did you come, Mikhail? Why not use a dead drop?”
But she knew the answer to the question before she asked it.
“The trap springs,” he replied, “as soon as someone mentions Icarus. That was the whole purpose of Icarus. A fake operation set up solely to catch the enquirer.”
“Then why haven’t they arrested you?” she said.
“Simple greed,” he replied. “They want you too, Anna.”
She let the implications of this swirl in her brain and then took out the cell phone from her pack and switched it on.
“Make the call,” Mikhail said. “I can’t go back now. That’s why I didn’t use a drop. I’m coming over.” Mikhail looked up over her shoulder. “Icarus was all about finding me. It’s the end,” he said.
She followed his gaze and recognised, standing in the trees two hundred yards away, the biker she had seen earlier. There he was, a yellow helmet, black Lycra pants, the same cycling sweater . . . but there was no bicycle anymore.
She swivelled her gaze across the sixty degrees or so of her vision from the small portalled sanctuary of the stone building. There were two more men. She recognised the man who she’d seen earlier walking the dog. But there was no dog. The other man she hadn’t seen before.
“We don’t know what’s behind us,” he said. “Behind the building. But there’ll be more. They’ve been waiting for nearly ten years for this. Make the call now. This is what they’ve wanted since Finn was first revealed in Moscow, to have the source Mikhail.”
She began to dial Burt’s number.
“How did you let yourself be followed?” she said to Mikhail.
“I took every precaution. But once they knew it was me, they’ve had all the time in the world.”
The biker moved out of the cover of the trees towards them. The two other men were already walking towards them. And there’d be more, as Mikhail said, behind the building.
“Glencarlyn Park,” she said into the phone. “You’re two miles away. We’re in a stone building to the north of the park. Be fast. We’re under attack.”
One of the two men was talking into a radio. All three men were quickening their pace. They’d seen her use the phone.
She withdrew the Thompson pistol from inside her arm and slotted a rifle round into the single shot chamber.
She and Mikhail withdrew behind the thin cover of the pillars. They were trapped here. It was better to stay in cover than to break around the side of the building.
She saw one of the men, the one she’d seen earlier with the dog, draw a weapon from his coat. She’d take him first, the armed man, take as many of them as she could before any more came at them from the back. She aimed the pistol from a hundred and fifty yards, and the man dropped like snow sliding from a roof.
She reloaded and saw the other two men fan away to the side, weapons drawn now. Then she saw a fourth man, right on the edge of her peripheral vision. He was close up to the right corner wall of the building, where the U extended, and using it as cover. He was only twenty yards from where they stood. The other two men began to run, moving targets, dodging at angles across the park but in the general direction of the cover to the side of the building.
Then a fifth figure appeared just at the corner of the other wall, twenty yards to the left this time.
She aimed at his left shoulder, all that was visible, as the first bullet from his revolver hit the pillar behind which she stood. The pillars were too thin to get right behind.
She thought her shot had grazed the edge of his shoulder, and he spun away, but it might have been just his reaction to her shot, rather than a hit. She reloaded fast. They’d know now she only had a single-shot weapon, and there were five of them, at least. It was just a matter of time—and of which of them was prepared to put himself in the line of fire.
A half-dozen shots rang out against the pillars, and she ducked back away from them. They would bombard her, and under that cover one of them, maybe two, would make a rush.
She glanced at Mikhail, standing six feet away from her behind the next pillar. Why was he unarmed? If he knew the dangers, why had he come without protection?
She fired again. She didn’t see whether the shot had made its target or not.
“Shoot for the man to the left,” Mikhail ordered her.
It was the man she thought she’d hit in the shoulder. She saw the edge of a coat flapping around the wall, and she ran to the right, from pillar to pillar, until she reached the far right edge of the yard, from where she could get a better view of the left wall, and where anyone firing from the right would have to come out and expose themselves in order to get a clear shot.
This time she knew she’d got the man to the left and saw the body fall away from behind the wall, surprised by her new angle of fire. Another volley came from the right-hand wall, as a gun was pointed around the wall and fired blindly.
“They’ll want me, at least, alive,” Mikhail shouted down the row of pillars.
At that moment, as the man to the left fell, she saw that Mikhail was running across the yard towards the left wall, away from the thin protection they enjoyed and into the open. He was taking the chance that there was nobody else to the left, but at the same time he left himself wide open from the right.
And they wanted him alive. That was his gamble, to make time for her.
She simultaneously heard the high-pitched roar of an engine and saw the Humvee swerving across the lawns beyond the trees.
Then she saw Mikhail fall. He was down. In quick succession and under heavy covering fire in her direction, she saw another man run to the fallen body of Mikhail.
It was Vladimir.
The Humvee thumped across a shallow ditch and along the edge of the trees, three or four hundred yards away, its tyres kicking up gouts of wet earth and lawn as it swivelled at them, its engine roaring.
She saw Vladimir look up as he dragged the body of Mikhail by the shoulders towards a van that had pulled up behind him, its back doors flung open. She saw his eyes and felt the ricocheting bullets fly around her head as the men to the right gave him cover while he sought to drag Mikhail’s body, alive or dead.
She saw in his eyes the Vladimir she’d hoped never to see. It wasn’t the Vladimir who had saved her life five years before, nor the Vladimir who had questioned their superiors many years before that, and been sentenced to the Cape Verde Islands for his pains. It wasn’t the Vladimir she’d known since she was ten years old, at School No. 47 on Leninskaya Street, the Vladimir who had loved her from that moment on.
This was a new Vladimir, the one who had chosen, she now saw, to set his career and his life on being the one to track down Mikhail. It was the Vladimir who wanted to be KGB General Vladimir, who had made his final choice; to be inside the regime in Russia Finn had so fatally hated, and the Russia from which she’d escaped.
Careless of exposing herself now to the wild firing from farther up the same wall where she was crouched behind the pillar, she shot this Vladimir between the eyes.
Then she slumped to the ground, aware only that all the shooting had stopped, and she was sinking into her own blood.