Jake drove. The traffic was terrible and so were his nerves as he tried to steer the big green land yacht in concentric circles around Dealey Plaza while passing by Dallas cops and state troopers at every turn. Favreau sat in the passenger seat with the Dallas Morning News in his lap, folded so that just the graphic of downtown showed. He would look down at the newspaper graphic, then scan the skyline, focusing on one tall building after another.
Jake glanced at the Frenchman. "When we first met, you said you had a photographic memory."
Favreau answered without looking at Jake. "I have an excellent memory."
"Then why can't you find the building?"
"Perhaps I exaggerated," Favreau said. "I meant it's photographic some of the time."
"Now needs to be one of those times."
"It's been three months since I saw those photographs."
"Think," Jake said.
"Son?" Gordon said from the back seat.
Jake eyed him in the rearview mirror.
"Jake," Gordon corrected himself. "He's trying as hard as he can. Extra pressure is not going to help."
Jake opened his mouth to reply, intending to remind everyone that they were all federal fugitives, driving in circles through an army of cops in downtown Dallas, barely three hours before a presidential speech, in a stolen car, when Favreau pointed out the window and said, "There it is!"
Jake followed Favreau's finger. There was more than one building. "Which one?"
"The tall one," Favreau said.
"They're all tall."
"The gray one."
The building was smoked glass with white trim running up the sides, probably stucco. "The one with the white..." Jake wasn't sure what to call them. "The white lines?"
"Yes."
It was at least ten blocks away. And in this traffic, who knew how long that would take. They couldn't afford to be wrong. "Are you sure?" Jake asked.
The Frenchman hesitated for just a second, then said, "Yes, that's the building I saw in the photograph. I'd stake my life on it."
"Good, because you're staking the president's life on it," Jake said as he spun the wheel and turned down a side street that was only backed up about halfway with traffic.
***
Fluker lay in a heap on the hardwood floor. Gertz kneeled beside him and jabbed a syringe into his neck and shot five milliliters of Propofol into his bloodstream. Fluker twitched a few times then dropped into an even deeper level of unconsciousness.
Rising, Gertz laid the stun gun and the empty syringe on the narrow console table behind the sofa. Then he picked up the plastic case Fluker had hauled upstairs for him.
The five-foot long, rugged, hard-sided case was made by a company called Pelican, which specialized in manufacturing waterproof and shockproof containers for all sorts of sensitive equipment in a variety of sizes. Gertz laid the case in front of the fireplace and popped open the four latches, then raised the hinged lid. The inside of the case was filled with dense foam, part of which had been carefully carved out to form an inset in the shape and size of a large scoped rifle, complete with room for a folded bipod under the forend. But there was no rifle inside the case. Just eight common masonry bricks wedged into the rifle's inset.
Gertz looked at Fluker and saw his chest rising and falling in shallow breaths. Getting the correct dosage of Propofol had been important. Gertz didn't want Fluker to die. Not yet. And not of an overdose. Fluker needed to keep breathing until the very end. His autopsy needed to show searing and scorching in his lungs and the presence of white phosphorous.
If Gertz had been a different kind of man, he might have felt sorry for the poor dumb bastard. But he wasn't that kind of man, and he didn't feel sorry for Fluker. He merely thought of the mentally damaged US military veteran as a tool. Just like the Mercedes, the Steiners, and the Barrett were all tools to help Gertz accomplish his mission, Ray Fluker was a tool, an easily duped tool who had thought he was doing his new friend "George" a favor.
There had been no new washer and dryer to haul up. Only a rifle case, empty except for the bricks to give it some weight. And the only reason Gertz had had to go to so much trouble to arrange for Fluker to bring the case up in the service elevator was so the security camera could record him doing it.
Gertz removed the bricks from the rifle case and stacked them on the hearth beside the fireplace. He set a potted peace lily on top of the pile. Then he closed the case and carried it into the bedroom, to the tightly made up queen-sized bed. His training in the Deutsches Heer, the post-Cold War German Army, had not left him, and he always made up whatever bed he slept in as soon as he got up, even in hotels.
He laid the empty Pelican case on the bed beside the gun it was meant to carry, a Barrett M-82 .50-caliber semiautomatic rifle, equipped with a sixteen-power Leupold scope. The rifle's nylon stock had a bipod attached beneath the forend, but Gertz would not need the bipod today. He picked up the heavy rifle and walked back into the den.
The sliding glass door leading from the den to the balcony was open, and just inside the door stood the round breakfast table. Piled in the center of the table were five sacks of dry beans, each weighing 2.3 kilograms, five pounds in the American system. Two of the sacks lay side by side, with two more on top of them, and the fifth sack centered on top of the other four. Gertz laid the rifle's forend across the stack.
What he had discovered while trying to line up his shot was that with the rifle positioned on the table and braced on its attached bipod, the downward angle of the barrel he needed to use to align the muzzle with the target would not clear the balcony railing. The railing was several inches too high to shoot over. So he had bought sacks of beans to build up his shooting platform. First he tried three, but the rifle still wasn't quite high enough to shoot over the railing. So he bought two more. Now the angle was perfect.
There were several other important tools on the table: his Steiner 15x80 binoculars, now mounted on a small tripod with telescoping legs and adjusted to hold the binoculars at the approximate height and angle of the rifle's scope; a digital stopwatch; a walkie-talkie, the kind you could pick up in a double-pack at Radio Shack; and a Heckler & Koch USP 9mm pistol.
Gertz pulled a chair over to the table and stacked two sofa pillows on the seat. Yet another thing he had discovered about his shooting position was that with the rifle resting on the sacks of beans and elevated a foot above the table, even at six feet tall he could not comfortably raise his eye to the scope while seated in one of the chairs.
For any precision shot, and particularly one at extreme range, like the one he was about to make, his body and the rifle had to work as one. Every muscle needed to be relaxed. He had to mold his body around the rifle. Tension anywhere, in his back, his neck, his arms, even his fingers, could move the muzzle a millimeter off its true aim, and even a single millimeter off at the muzzle equated to being off target several feet once the bullet traveled fifteen hundred meters downrange. That was why preparation was so important. There was no such thing as luck. There was only prepared and unprepared.
Gertz sat on top of the pillows in the chair and pressed his eyes to the binoculars. He moved them slightly, then adjusted the focus ring to bring into clear relief his target area, which was only three hundred feet short of a mile away. A long shot even with this amazing rifle. And under difficult conditions. He took a deep breath, held it, then let half of it out. He felt a calmness seep over him. Then he let his eyes fix on the double glass doors at the back of the Dallas County Administration Building, the same building that had once been known as the Texas School Book Depository.