Moscow Sting (8 page)

“What did he look like?” she asked.

“He was slim, about your age I should think. White jacket. I didn’t see him close to. He looked like an athlete, perhaps.”

“A car? Did he have a car?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Monsieur Barry. I appreciate it.”

He tipped his cap and gave her a broad, confident smile.

“I’ll have plenty of wood for you when winter comes, don’t you worry,” he said, and began to crank the handle again.

She walked around to the side of the house. She had the numbers to call in an emergency, but what could she say?

A man had come to the house. White jacket.

She paused and seemed to remember a man in Uzès on Saturday. He wore a white jacket, she remembered. It was certainly enough of a reason to call Paris, but she was reluctant. She didn’t want to shatter the illusion she’d enjoyed moments before that her life had become safe. She decided to mention it to Willy first.

On entering the house, she took a gun from the locked drawer in the kitchen. It was a Thompson Contender pistol, a handgun that was unique for its range. With just a twelve-inch barrel, it could hit a target at over two hundred yards if you were good enough. And she was good enough. She realised she hadn’t taken it out of the drawer for over a month.

She put her cell phone in the pocket of a jacket and took the car keys from the table by the door. She looked around finally, expecting to see something out of the ordinary, but the old farmhouse seemed calm. It had been built in the year of the French Revolution. There was a stone engraved with the date by the front gate. Maybe down here, in the small places, even great events like revolutions went unnoticed.

Locking the door behind her, she opened the big metal gates and drove the Mercedes out. She placed the gun under the driver’s seat. Then she closed the gates behind her.

There was a pile of sand by the wall of the next house, left there after some building job had been completed. She was suddenly alert, her trained instincts activated. She stepped out of the car and sprinkled a little sand around the gates, not so much as would be noticed, but enough if you were looking for the faintest sign of a footprint later.

Chapter 8

L
ARS SHADED HIS EYES
against the high sun. Then he cast his gaze down again towards the monastery. It was tucked away in a grove of cypresses and pines, across an isthmus on a flat, man-made island out in the bay. Flipping the pages of a tourist guide, he pretended to study what he already knew. The monastery had been built in the eleventh century as a sanctuary for Orthodox Christians fleeing the Turkish invasion of Serbia. Inside its weathered, arched dark wood gates was a courtyard of rough flagstones in the cypress shade, and then a tiny church dedicated to Saint Sava of Serbia.

A few yards beyond the little white church was the monastery, built a few centuries later.

He looked up from the guidebook. It had been a month since his first visit, and he knew the layout from memory. The key element for his second visit was the tall bell tower that protruded above the monastery on the side of the island facing the open sea. Once again, he studied the height and position of the tower carefully. The tower had once doubled as a lighthouse for sailors from Venetian trading fleets, Levantine merchant vessels, Arab dhows, and Turkish
gulets
, sent out to engage the West in commerce, when there was no war, from the Port of the Sultan. It had been built for the view.

Lars waited in the hot sun at the edge of the group of tourists.

There was an American couple, the woman with frizzy hair and a pinched, nervous face, the man taller by a head, with a flabby grin. He looked bulky in huge shorts and an open shirt. The others were local, Montenegrins or citizens from the surrounding Balkan countries; an old woman dressed in black; a young couple who couldn’t stop touching each other; two women who might have been academics—they looked like they’d be at home in a library, he thought—and an old man with grizzled white stubble and intensely green eyes. He supported himself on a gnarled stick.

Finally the shabby tourist bus was almost full, and Lars stepped inside last of all, paying the return fare for the monastery visit. He placed his backpack carefully on the rack. It was heavier than last time, and he didn’t want the canister inside it clanking against the metal of the rack.

The bus set off almost at once across the rock isthmus that, according to the guidebook, was built as a later addition to the monastery, when convenience overcame isolated seclusion on the monks’ wish list.

He studied the tourists on the bus again. He needed to be sure that, unlike him, they were what they seemed. Most were apparently day trippers from the capital city, Podgorica, while others had come from abroad and wore backpacks, shorts, sandals, and caps against the intense heat. One or two of the older local people also wore an Orthodox cross around their necks.

He sat next to the old lady in black and nodded a greeting. She crossed herself, and he returned her pious gesture. He was praying too, in his way, but not for something that she would understand.

The bus crossed noisily between the perfectly calm stretches of turquoise water on either side of the isthmus, belching exhaust fumes into the clear air.

They disembarked on the far side, in the shade of the massive cypress tree. A few scrawny chickens pecked at the bare grass and the scraps of potato chips and snacks previous visitors had dropped. The air was still, dead. The tree above him could have been painted against the sky. The dark green, almost black cypress stood like a shadow against the shattering blue.

Lars took a drink from a plastic water bottle and waited for the others to shuffle towards the monastery in that soporific, almost dutiful way adopted by visitors to sacred places. He didn’t follow them on the unguided tour but looked around, from time to time checking carefully where they’d stopped. Their first pause was at the tiny chapel to pay a preliminary homage to Saint Sava, and then on to the main attraction, the monastery itself.

He set off at an angle, away from them. Before he entered the monastery, he wanted to take a walk around the small island. He felt exposed here, at the end of the isthmus on a small outcrop of piled rocks. There was only one way out. He’d told them he wouldn’t do the job if there was only one exit, and they’d had to make a complicated plan so that he could extricate himself if things went wrong.

He hoisted the backpack over his shoulders. It was heavy. It was not just the rifle this time, but a small air tank with five litres in it that would, he hoped, get him out of danger if that proved necessary. He’d almost decided to use it anyway.

He stood on the shore facing north first of all, balancing himself on a huge stone that was part of the breakwater of tumbled rocks scattered all around the island. Straight ahead of him, the coast curled round to the right, five miles away, before reaching another high cliff promontory where it presumably curved back northwards again.

To his left, at the head of the bay, was the small town and its tourist beach. The absence of any sand visible on the beach at this distance was explained by the inseparable mass of humanity that had camped on it for the day in rows of beach chairs.

Directly to the right, out to sea, were four or five large yachts, some of them more like ships. He passed his eyes over them, resting briefly on the one that interested him, the
Aurora
. She’d finally arrived. He’d been right, at least he was sure about that. The island was the only place to get a shot.

Then he walked around the island, which took only a few minutes, until he faced south. From there, the rocky cliff coastline to the left and ahead of him dodged in and out of bays and estuaries. On each promontory stood some human mark—a lookout post, a lighthouse, the religious motif of a cross or small chapel—each in its own way reaching out to the calm blue Adriatic Sea with a hand to welcome or repel, and an eye to observe.

Lars put down the pack and took out a small telescope. He looked across the southern waters, empty except for a few small yachts with their sails furled in the dead air. He studied the farthest visible promontory and read the distance; just over three and a half miles. It might take an hour and a half, he thought, depending on the currents. Too far for the small air tank. If he took that exit, he would have to come in to shore earlier than he’d have liked.

Then he carefully replaced the scope in the pack, strapped it up, and walked back to the cypresses, across the flagstones and past the church of Saint Sava, into the cool darkness of the monastery itself.

There were still some stragglers from his party, admiring the painting of the Virgin painted onto the old pink plaster.

He joined them and looked up at the crumbling, sad-eyed figure of the Madonna. She was a figure that expressed life, not the death he had come to give. He exchanged a curt nod with the two remaining tourists, the bulky American man and his frizzy-haired woman—foreigners like himself, visiting another country. He saw them watch him take out a sketchbook and begin to make some outlines. He was drawn to the eyes of the Virgin, big, dark, and almond-shaped, which seemed to contain a message of vulnerability and peace.

Lars felt the power of his anonymity amongst these tourists, but he didn’t feel anonymous before the Virgin, and this unnerved him. He turned away, not wanting her gaze on him any longer.

He admired the paradoxical privacy of his own fame; he was concealed within his complete disconnection from the world around him. Soon—after this second hit perhaps, and with the invaluable help of the media—he would begin the transformation into myth. He was what myths were made of. That’s what he believed. The myth of the assassin meant a lot to him. Even the word—
assassin
—was common to over fifty languages.

The man and the woman finally walked away from the painting, and he waited until they’d disappeared into a side room. He put the sketchbook away and, on the far side of the vaulted room, found the door to the steps that led up to the bell tower. It was locked, as it had been a month before. That was good. A newer piece of plastic tape explained in Montenegrin, Serbian, English, and French that the stairs were dangerous and undergoing repair work.

When he was sure that the last of his party had walked out of range and were looking at a collection of zinc cannonballs around the corner at the far end of the central chamber, he swiftly picked the ancient lock and entered the narrow stairway. The stairs began immediately inside the door, and with just enough room to turn with his backpack in the small space, he relocked the door and shot a bolt across from the inside to make sure.

Standing at the bottom of the narrow stairs, he looked up at a bright shaft of sunlight that came down in a diagonal stripe from the very top. It amused him for a moment that the monastery had once been engaged in the manufacture of cannonballs. War and the church had always been bedfellows.

Then he walked slowly up the winding stone staircase, until he reached the top, and through another door that led out into the bell tower.

The top of the tower was as far again above the roof of the monastery as the roof was above the ground. There was a fine, sweeping view, with a high balustrade for protection. The sea was blazing with the high light of the sun at midday, but the reflection wouldn’t affect his aim from this height.

The target was on the yacht lying at anchor farthest out at sea, the
Aurora
, just beyond the rocky claws of the huge sweeping bay. The twin promontories of the bay enclosed it, nearly three miles apart. The yacht was right in the middle; a safe distance, one would have thought, if you didn’t factor in the island with the monastery.

Lars undid the straps of the backpack and took out the barrel, casing, bipods, and lens. He fitted the barrel and screwed on the lens. The space in the bell tower was too small for lying flat. He would have to crouch, jacking up the rifle as far as the forward bipod would go and dispensing with the rear bipod altogether. It would be a sitting shot, knees drawn up, too much tension in the body, but that was all the space allowed. He kept below the balustrade all the time.

Now he looked again through the scope between the columns of the balustrade and towards the target, the lens in the shade of the tower’s roof and away from the sun’s glare.

The yacht
Aurora
was more like a ship, 235 feet long, rising 30 feet out of the water at the bow. Built in Sweden just the year before, it looked futuristic, something out of a science-fiction film. Its arrow-curved bow, indented halfway down with an aerodynamic wing, seemed to shoot the ship’s lines of design around the sides to the stern, as if it were in motion even when at anchor. There was a bridge, with a sheer, almost flattened glass curve that extended above and around the foredeck, slightly forward of midships; a helicopter pad behind it, and behind that a swimming pool surrounded by umbrellas and deck chairs and a long, curved bar that stretched almost to each side of the ship. Uniformed waiters attended to several slim topless girls and fat topless men. The target himself was nowhere to be seen.

Lars checked his watch: 12:20 p.m. The target’s visitor was late.

Then he checked the scene again through the rifle scope, which was more powerful, and read the distance: 2,401 yards—a greater distance than before, but still not the record.

He noted, however, that if he made this shot, he would have the two longest shots for a single sniper. Nobody would ever know it except him. But to Lars, this was like owning a stolen Picasso, kept hidden in the secret room of a collector’s home. His knowledge of his own achievement alone would be enough for him.

He saw two members of the crew, wearing white uniforms with white caps, begin to descend the ladder to the starboard side of the ship and step onto a wooden motor launch that gleamed with bright varnish. They started the engines and immediately cast off, heading towards the beach.

Lars picked up the scope and trained it on the town. The road along the front, above the beach, was crowded with cars and buses as before. But there was a dark blue custom Bentley parked at the top of an old stone causeway now. He saw a short man wearing a cream seersucker jacket step out of the back seat of the Bentley, the door held open by a uniformed chauffeur. It was the American.

A few onlookers tried to get a closer look at who was in the car, but they were kept at bay. Nearly a dozen bodyguards were in evidence, as far as Lars could count. Someone tried to take a picture of the Bentley. They had their camera snatched by a bodyguard, smashed on the ground, and then returned with a wad of cash wrapped around it.

The short American put on a wide straw hat and pulled it over his eyes. In his attempt to dress in the understated fashion of the rich, he looked immediately noticeable.

Then the American walked down the causeway, flanked by four bodyguards, and onto some old stone steps, green with dried seaweed, at the bottom of which the launch had tied up. Two of the bodyguards came with the short man onto the launch; the rest returned to a pair of Hummers that were parked, Lars now saw, on the far side of the street from the Bentley. How these Russians flaunted their wealth in front of the American!

Turning his scope back to the launch, he watched it as it cut across the glassy bay to the yacht at a more sedate pace now that it had the visitor on board.

The five figures walked up the steps and onto the yacht. The short American was met by two other men who wore dark glasses and matching khaki shorts.

One of them shook the American’s hand, the other guided him to a colourful striped armchair; there was a small debate on whether he wished to be in the sun or shade, and he chose the shade.

When the American took his hat off, Lars recognised the face. He had seen it before in pictures, a necessary part of his preparation, and he already knew the identity of the American visitor; Richard Rivera, PR guru, general fixer, and networker, with clearance from the CIA. He was one of three senior advisers to the Republican candidate in the American elections in just under three months’ time.

The target didn’t seem to be on deck.

Lars waited. The sun began its slow descent from the meridian. It was nearly an hour before the target appeared.