If you looked at the side of the building, you’d see nothing at all. If you squinted hard, perhaps you’d discern the faintest bulge at the fifth floor, the sandstone façade curving outward.
What you wouldn’t detect was the semi-stable folding platform, two feet wide and five feet long, cantilevered out from the ledge of the open bathroom window. You wouldn’t see the mechanical bracketry rigged to the mouth of the sill and braced against the wall outside because it was all—the platform, the bracketry—painted the precise color of the sandstone.
Nor would you see the man atop the shooting platform, literally suspended in midair in a supported prone position sixty-four yards above the sidewalk.
He wore a Crye sand-tan pullover combat shirt, matching cargo pants, and a matching pair of Kevlar-and-leather aviator gloves. Cammy paint on his face and wrists, also the shade of a desert dune, further blended him into the backdrop.
For the short time before engagement, Evan Smoak was nothing more than a slight disruption of the visual field, a tiger standing in tall savanna grass.
Spray paint had worked fine on the Remington 700. There was no need for any intricate design, just enough shading to break up the outline of the rifle. To further ensure his invisibility, he used a killFLASH honeycomb, a metallic anti-reflection device clamped over the scope to dampen any glint or glare.
He’d required a vantage into the courtyard of the Three Monkeys Café that didn’t exist, a shooting position floating in space. A seemingly unsolvable problem that he had, with a little help from his friends, solved.
His toes hooked over the sill behind him, protruding into the room above the row of urinals. The bathroom door was locked, a cleaning cart positioned in the hall outside, accessorized with a mop tilting from a yellow bucket and a RESTROOM BEING SERVICED A-frame sign. The cart featured a canvas basket nicely sized for carrying industrial laundry loads or a portable sniper hide.
A 607-yard shot from a sixty-four-foot elevation wasn’t a hard shot. It wasn’t an easy one either. Especially not with a head sporadically swimmy from a concussion.
The built-up Remington had been modified to accommodate a detachable mag that took ten rounds, which were all Evan would require. The rifle was set up on a bipod, the Manners stock resting against his left shoulder. He was so still that he might have been statuary carved into the building itself, a gargoyle with a sniper habit.
Getting the measurements from Trevon in advance was enormously helpful. Evan had already checked the range card taped to the stock, so he knew how much holdover he needed for the distance and how much cosign compensation the downhill angle required. The combination baseline for scope and rifle was zeroed at four hundred yards, and he’d already ascertained his hold for the round he was using, a 168-grain Federal Gold Medal Match. Knowing ahead of time where to hold on the optic meant that there was no need to mess with the scope.
There Alexan Petro was, tucked into his café table in the restaurant courtyard, sipping espresso and talking on his Turing Phone. He sat alone, which seemed only to enhance his status: Important Man Conducting Virtual Business. Five of his bodyguards were spread around the courtyard and restaurant. Nineteen minutes ago Evan had watched them enter, counting them off like cattle headed to the abattoir. Only two of the men inside were visible at the moment.
That would change quickly.
The sixth member of Petro’s core team waited outside by the armored Town Cars, leaning against a fender and thumbing at his phone.
But Evan wasn’t focused on the bodyguards now. He was focused on Petro.
A handsome man by any standards. That rich mane of silver hair. A certain grace of movement. The overcompensatory noblesse oblige of the newly affluent.
Evan’s world narrowed to a circle marked by stadia reticle increments. He felt his vision get loose, verging on blurry, but he squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them again, everything he saw obeyed the normal rules of physics. He was a left-eye-dominant shooter, a stroke of luck since the dilated right pupil was harder to coerce into cooperating at the moment.
His earpiece activated on voice command, sparing him the slightest movement. “Dial.”
The RoamZone in his cargo pocket complied.
Through the scope he saw Petro pull the Turing Phone away from his cheek to check caller ID. His features set in a show of amusement. He clicked over, and a moment later his voice spoke in Evan’s ear. “Hello, boy.”
“Petro.”
The man’s face, magnified in the scope, tightened. “So you found a name. Am I supposed to be scared?”
“Not by that.” Evan kept gentle, steady pressure against the comb of the stock and gauged the come-up, adding the superelevation below the horizontal line.
Petro smirked. “Then by what?”
“By the fact that you had Grant Merriweather killed. And a doctor and two nurses. And Lorraine Lennox. And that you tried to take out Max Merriweather.”
“You think those names mean something to me?”
“No,” Evan said. “I think they mean nothing to you. Or to your men.”
A low ticking laugh came across the line and then the purr of that ten-grit voice. “The world, my world, is a much bigger place than you think. Expand your perspective, boy. At least for the few remaining days you have on this earth. My men have done things for me you can’t even imagine. I’ve watched them take people apart piece by piece while keeping the heart beating until the very end. Do you have any idea how much skill that requires?”
“Anything you’d like to say?”
“Before?”
“I mean, any last words?”
Petro’s eyes darted around. Then he relaxed back in his seat, smoothed the lapel of his suit, and grinned. “If you expect to scare me, you don’t know me at all.”
“How about your men? You want to ask them if they’re scared?” Evan made a microscopic adjustment, dropping the crosshairs to the spot where Petro’s arm met his trunk. The Timney trigger split the pad of Evan’s index finger. “At least the five within earshot right now?”
It took a quarter second for the words to clear the Turing Phone’s encryption. Another quarter second for Petro to register their meaning. His neck corded, a sheet of muscle as his flesh tightened with panic.
Evan applied 3.5 pounds of trigger pressure, and a crimson rose bloomed on Petro’s shoulder. He toppled back in his chair, landing splayed in clear view on the stone of the courtyard.
The platform gave the faintest wobble from the recoil but held firm.
Through the earpiece Evan heard the clatter of the Turing as it struck ground. He cycled the bolt, the expended case spinning in a lazy arc past his temple, and buried the next round in the meat above Petro’s left thigh. Petro gave a pained animal howl, bellowing for help.
The next two bullets knocked out the visible bodyguards.
Evan swept the Remington across the restaurant rooftop until he saw the bodyguard standing rigidly before the Town Car, one finger pressed to his earpiece. He found the man’s sweaty forehead, badly bruised from its encounter with the bathroom sink. The instant before he squeezed off another round, his vision streaked and then doubled, the glare of the windshield turning into a comet of light.
The shot sailed past the bodyguard’s ear, shattering the polished windshield.
The bodyguard turned to stare at the Town Car in disbelief. By the time he tensed to run, Evan had partially regained his focus. He squinted to bring the two images of the bodyguard into one and found the forehead once again. The next round splattered the hood.
Gritting his teeth, Evan rotated to the courtyard again. An ache started up at the back of his head where he’d cracked it on the asphalt.
Pandemonium had erupted in the restaurant, the patrons pouring out. He’d counted on the crowd response, bystanders going one way, bodyguards the other.
Each party ran the pattern as predicted, but to Evan’s view they looked like smudges of color. Sweat trickled down his forehead; he armed it away before it could reach his eyes.
Slowing his breaths and trying to fight off his nausea, Evan locked the sights on a single point of entry for the courtyard. From here there were no tricky adjustments; if he could manage to hold position, he’d be able to get it done. As he’d anticipated, Petro’s cries drew his remaining men in neat succession, Evan head-shotting them in order. The men piled across the courtyard, heaped on top of one another, the last falling across Petro and pinning him to the ground.
Petro’s face had turned to a blurry oval. Then it floated apart like a cell dividing. A ghost image of Petro hovered above the man himself, a spirit debating whether to depart. Sweat stung Evan’s eyes. He laid the crosshairs on the nose of what he took to be the real Petro, blew out a breath, squeezed off his final round.
And missed.
A spray of chips flew up from the flagstones, shredding Petro’s ear. He twisted around and dug at the ground with his fingernails, trying to worm his way out from beneath the bodies.
Aggravated, Evan reached back to the rope bag on his right thigh and freed a lengthy two-inch-thick hawser rope. It unfurled to the side of the platform, feeding out until the bottom whip-snapped up and then settled to sway a foot above the sidewalk.
Nice to see that even Trevon could make a twelve-inch miscalculation.
Evan had already set the anchor in the platform, so he simply rolled off the side, leaving the rifle behind as he fell. Cinching the rope between his gloves and the insteps of his boots, he fast-roped down. The sandstone whirred by as he kissed thirty miles per hour, a firehouse-pole slide. The pavement flew up and caught him, a healthy jolt to the ankles and knees, and he flung the gloves from his hands with a single violent shake. They lay on the sidewalk, steaming with friction heat.
Roughly a half second had elapsed since he’d un-assed from the platform.
He took an instant for the pavement to stop spinning from the sudden exertion. The headache expanded, a pressure at the temples.
Finish it, he thought. Then you can rest all you want.
Despite the steel shanks, warmth rose through the soles of his Original S.W.A.T.s. His hands gleamed white from the latex gloves he’d worn beneath the aviators.
As part of his prep, he’d sliced and restitched his sand-tan combat shirt and cargo pants to make them tearaway, and he ripped them off now, a quick snap of his fists that left the fabric pooled on the ground. Beneath he wore a gray V-neck and jeans.
No passersby. No rubberneckers in the cars drifting past. The few people across the street remained distracted by the commotion over at the Three Monkeys Café.
Evan dug a Baggie out of the front pocket of his jeans. A wad of moist baby wipes waited inside. He freed a few and swiped at his face, brisk scrubs that cleared the cammy paint.
As he stepped off the curb, crossing the street to the restaurant, he looked like an ordinary pedestrian. His gait was unsteady, so he took great care to even it out.
He entered the side door to the kitchen. After the gunfire it had been abandoned hastily. Plates of lavash basked on the counters beneath heating lamps. Pans remained on the burners, hissing garlic steam. A pot boiled over, sizzling on orange coils. He felt the glare of the overheads in his spinal cord.
As Evan passed through, he turned the oven knobs off.
He emerged onto the main floor. Chairs knocked over, tables shoved clear, a high heel on its side.
Through the French doors, he could see the heap of bodies he’d left. The remains of Petro’s men.
Evan unholstered his ARES and stepped into the courtyard. The air felt humid, trapped sweat and spilled blood heated by the midday sun. The nausea swelled. His stomach thought about lurching, but he did not allow it.
Petro faced away, still clawing at the flagstones, trying to pull himself out from beneath the last of his fallen bodyguards. Given the destruction of his right arm, he was making little headway. One of his buffed fingernails had snapped off and lay shimmering on the ground, an ivory curl.
He was moaning repetitively. A fine mist of blood speckled the side of that glorious silver hair.
In Terzian the Terror, Max had thought he was facing one problem. It had led to a second problem in Petro.
Soon there would be no problems.
Evan was close enough now to offset the effects of the concussion. He raised the 1911, thumbed off the safety.
At the click Petro froze.
Then he rolled onto his side, regarding Evan over his shoulder. None of that well-cultivated confidence was on display, not anymore. Above Petro’s biceps tattered cashmere fluttered at the edges of the wound. A pair of reading glasses had spilled from his breast pocket and lay shattered on the ground beside him. The bent wire frames lent a small touch of humanity to the gruesome tableau.
At the end Petro was just a man, like so many Evan had walked past on the street or ridden next to on the subway or put in the earth.
The wail of sirens reached him now, still miles out. They both knew that help would not arrive in time.
Petro’s face trembled. “Who is Max Merriweather to you?” His voice held something more than fear. Something like outrage.
Evan said, “Someone who needed my help.”
Petro stared at him, his forehead twisted in disbelief. Spilled espresso snaked between the flagstones, joining a rivulet of crimson. The dead air smelled of dark roast and iron.
“Who are you to him?” Petro asked.
Evan said, “Nobody.”
Petro’s dark beard bristled around a wavering mouth. No words emerged.
Evan said, “But now it’s over for him.”
Petro coughed, and blood speckled his lips. He smiled a wobbly smile that put a twist in Evan’s gut.
The sirens notched up, ever louder, ever closer.
Evan sighted on his forehead.
A final round ended the mission.