12:40 P.M.
Igor Zanonovich burned all the notes and hand-drawn maps, flushing the ashes down the toilet in his Brighton Beach safe apartment.
He opened the bathroom window to let out the smell of fire.
The view from here was remarkable: beach, boardwalk, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Zanonovich marveled at such splendid vistas wasted on a proletarian neighborhood. This would never happen at home, not now, not after all the new changes.
His Chechens were wiping the apartment clean, no prints, no half-eaten food, empty bottles dumped, bed linen and towels folded and packed to go.
It was almost like moving house. Except for every surface Cloroxed. Cops would have a hell of a time finding DNA traces.
This was infinitely more energizing than moving house. This was God’s work, even if the Chechens weren’t much more than paid hands. Professional, highly experienced, utterly reliable hands but hardly full members in the organization. The education, culture, traditions simply weren’t theirs. Not the Chechens’ fault, centuries of colonial status, doffing caps and forelock tugging, drinking to forget humiliations, a few hundred years of subservience like that exhausts any civilization.
So his Chechens took up the gun, for excellent pay and for Russia. At this, they proved themselves among the best.
When hit men excelled at their craft, they operated quietly and without incident, other than the kill. They held their whispered meetings in secret, executed jobs with precision and grace, and no one ever witnessed their escape. A clandestine world to which few had access, although this, unfortunately, didn’t stifle police ambitions in that direction.
1:06 P.M.
The Chechens locked up their safe apartment.
Their lease had three more months to run, but they had no plans to return.
Zanonovich and his driver, known to him only as Ben, exited the neighborhood first, cruising Brooklyn streets in a twelve-year-old black Mercedes, its engine meticulously restored in a rented garage on a dead-end street between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk.
They were killing time before their two o’clock rendezvous with the others on Fourteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. On a mid-afternoon in November, pretty much a lifeless block.
The three other Chechens—Ivan, Vlad, and Lenny—walked to the same rented garage, formerly a stable and more recently an illegal live-poultry market.
Each took a different route.
Each carried a gym bag.
Vlad’s bag contained the mortar firing tube and two rounds.
Ivan would drive the dark green van with a roll-back sunroof, the vehicle bought for this mission months before by someone he’d never met, the van left in the garage for his expert use only.
Lenny would spot for the shooter and give the order to fire as soon as the target stepped into range.
Separately that morning they’d walked the streets surrounding the school and knew exactly what route they’d take immediately after firing the round.
They rode these streets only once now.
And then they circled Prospect Park, marking time before the rendezvous.