*
Seventy-two hours later, Evan finds himself in the sewer beneath a thoroughfare, stooped in the dripping humidity, Mosin-Nagant in hand. He stands on the concrete platform above a river of sludge, waiting. The eye-level drainage grate set into the curb grants him a good head-on vantage down the length of the boulevard. In the distance, squawks from mounted speakers and the roar of an erupting crowd. The parade drawing nearer.
Various coded dispatches from Jack have filled in some of the blanks. The target: a hawkish foreign minister gaining power by the day, vocal about nuclear development. Breathing the swamplike air, Evan waits. A cheer emanates from the street above him. He lifts the rifle, the tip inches from the mouth of the curb inlet, and clarifies his view, allowing the scope to become his world.
Children held aloft on shoulders laugh and clap. On the banked curve of visible street, sawhorses hold back the masses. Miniature flags flicker before faces like swarming insects.
The front of the processional, a phalanx of armored SUVs, turns into view several hundred meters away. The vehicles head up the stretch of asphalt toward Evan. His view is slightly offset from each windshield as it flashes in the muted midday sun.
Evan aligns himself with the rifle to reduce recoil and allow for quick repeatability if he has to cycle a second shot. He calculates the mechanical offset—the one-and-seven-eighths measurement between the crosshairs and bore axis. Then he adjusts the intersection point for ninety meters, the spot where the vehicle spacing is optimal for the angle he requires. His field of view will diminish the closer the car gets. If his target passes the mark, his shot will grow more difficult by the meter. It must be ninety meters—no more, no less.
He sets himself in position. Aside from the breath cooling his pursed lips, he is still.
At once, looming large in the scope, is the target. A tall, balding man with a dignified bearing, lean in a dark suit, surrounded by various generals in full regalia and his wife in a flowy aubergine dress. Waving to the crowd, they are clustered in an open boat of a vehicle that brings to mind the Popemobile.
One hundred ten meters.
One hundred.
There is a problem.
The foreign minister’s wife turns to face the opposite side of the street, completely blocking Evan’s view. Her head right in front of her husband’s.
Ninety-five meters.
Panic. In a split second, Evan falls apart and regroups.
If he has to go through her, it’s better to penetrate the eye socket so there’s only one chance for the skull to deflect the round. Evan lays the crosshairs directly on her pupil.
Ninety-three.
He takes the slack out of the two-stage trigger, breathes breath number one.
He is looking directly into her eye, into her. Mascara on the curled lashes, joy crinkling the upper lid. She is not part of the mission. Should he disregard her as collateral damage? In the corridors of his mind, Evan listens for Jack but hears nothing aside from the hiss of passing tires and the frenzied stir of the crowd.
Second breath. Exhale. The final half breath before the shot.
If he waits any longer, a host of new problems will present themselves.
A one-millimeter movement of his finger pad gets it done.
Inconveniently, Jack’s voice announces itself now, a whisper in his ear: The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.
The vehicle coasts forward. It is on the X. The dark dot of her pupil, the minister’s head pulling back, aligning perfectly behind her. Now.
And then they are past.
Evan discards the half breath. Sweat stings his eyes. His mind races, recalculating, adjusting intersection points, dialing back the magnification, faces zooming and shrinking as he fights to hold the mission together in the circle of the scope. As he’s feared, his field of view diminishes, complications stacking on top of complications.
He breathes. Focuses.
Slack out of the trigger. Mag dialing back, back. There will be a moment, one moment, to get it done right and clean, and when it presents itself, he will be ready.
The generals shuffle around the wife, smiling beneath mustaches, the minister’s face popping in and out of view, there and then gone. Seventy-five meters now, the preceding vehicle squeezing the angle tighter and tighter, diminishing it to a slice.
The universe is reduced to the tunnel of the scope. There is nothing else, not even breath. The wife turns, her sturdy bosom filling the vantage, the minister drifting again behind her. Evan waits for her arm to rise for another wave to the crowd, and at last it does, a sheet of cloth draped wing-like beneath her arm. The minister is invisible behind it, but Evan has tracked his movement, anticipates how far to lead him.
He exhales slow and steady, then pulls. The bullet punches through the gauzy cloth an inch and a half below the wife’s straightened elbow.
Evan’s hands move of their own volition, manipulating the bolt for a follow-up shot, the shell spinning free and clattering at his feet. But there will be no need for a second bullet. The foreign minister leans propped against two of the generals, his eyes vacant, one cheek dimpled by a hole the size of a thumb. His wife’s mouth is stretched wide and trembling in a scream, but Evan can hear nothing over the eruption of the crowd.
He drops the weapon into the stream of passing waste below. After pocketing the kill brass, he takes out the plastic bag and shakes onto the dank ledge the copper-washed steel shell case with its invisible fingerprint, a fingerprint that he now knows belongs to a Chechen rebel of some reputation.
They will search the crowd, the surrounding buildings, the parked vehicles before they will think to look beneath the earth, but nonetheless Evan runs to his exit point and emerges through a manhole cover into a park five blocks north. He walks three blocks east, away from the quickening commotion, and boards a bus. A few klicks later, he exits, flips his reversible jacket inside out, and zigzags the city, the spreading news on the lips of passersby, wafting in snatches from café tables, blaring from car radios.
Once he’s safely back in his rented room, he logs in to the e-mail account and creates a new saved message consisting of a single word: “Neutralized.”
A moment later the draft updates: “Close the operation.”
Evan stares at the words, feeling the glow of emotion beneath his face. He runs a hand over his short hair, and his palm comes away damp with perspiration. He stands up, walks away from the laptop, walks back. Types: “Request phone contact.”
He hits REFRESH. Hits it again. Nothing.
Jack is thinking it over.
*
Seventeen anxious hours later, Evan finally receives a response, and two hours after that he is standing at the specified cross street, having reached Jack at a pay phone from a pay phone. He’s caught Jack on the front edge of East Coast morning, though he seems as alert as ever, his station-agent’s mind shaping his responses into neat packets of words, articulate silences, loaded intonations.
“All he did is provide a cartridge case,” Evan says.
Jack says, “That’s all he did of which you’re aware.”
“He seems loyal. An asset.”
“Don’t believe everything you think.”
The breeze blows flecks of moisture into Evan’s face, and he hunches into the collar of his jacket, turning this way and that, watching pedestrians, vehicles, the windows of the towering, stone-faced buildings all around.
“He’s not a friend to us,” Jack says. “He’s a friend to everyone. A businessman. He doesn’t just sell cartridge cases with fingerprints. He moves weaponry.”
“Weaponry?”
“Fissile material. Highest bidder. He is a complicating factor in our work there. That has to be enough for you.”
“What about the Sixth Commandment?” Evan says, anger creeping into his voice. “‘Question orders.’”
“You’ve questioned them,” Jack says. “Now execute them. Close the operation. Your friend and anyone else you might have used. This cannot—will not—come back on us.”
The steady hum of a dial tone follows.
Evan wanders the neighborhood until he comes upon a GAZ Volga, a four-door sedan as common on these streets as a Chrysler in Detroit. He hot-wires it and leaves the city, driving into a bruise-colored sunset. He parks several blocks from the apartment with the curved stucco staircase and then closes the distance under cover of the rapidly falling night. Only once he’s reached the blue-and-white Turkish tiles does he remove his pick set. The rusting lock on the arched wooden door gives itself up within seconds.
Evan steals silently across the dark front room with its vaulted ceiling. The Makarov pistol remains in its place, resting atop the antique television. It is loaded.