Page 48 (1/2)

Chapter 1

Friday Five o'clock in the afternoon Maybe the hardest tih a city Or maybe the easiest Because at five o'clock on a Friday nobody pays attention to anything Except the road ahead

The man with the rifle drove north Not fast, not slow Not drawing attention Not standing out He was in a light-colored minivan that had seen better days He was alone behind the wheel He earing a light-colored raincoat and the kind of shapeless light-colored beanie hat that old guys wear on the golf course when the sun is out or the rain is falling The hat had a two-tone red band all around it It was pulled do The coat was buttoned up high The h the van had dark s and the sky was cloudy And he earing gloves, even though winter was three months away and the weather wasn't cold

Traffic slowed to a crahere First Street started up a hill Then it stopped completely where two lanes became one because the blacktop was torn up for construction There was construction all over town Driving had been a nightravel trucks, concrete trucks, blacktop spreaders The man with the rifle lifted his hand off the wheel Pulled back his cuff Checked his watch

Eleven minutes

Be patient

He took his foot off the brake and crawled ahead Then he stopped again where the roadway narrowed and the sidewalks widened where the don shopping district started There were big stores to the left and the right, each one set a little higher than the last, because of the hill The wide sidewalks gave plenty of space for shoppers to stroll There were cast-iron flagpoles and cast-iron lamp posts all lined up like sentries between the people and the cars The people had more space than the cars Traffic was very slow He checked his watch again

Eight minutes

Be patient

A hundred yards later the prosperity faded a little The congestion eased First Street opened out and becaain There were bars and dollar stores Then a parking garage on the left Then yetextended Then, farther ahead, the street was blocked by a loall Behind it was a windy pedestrian plaza with an ornamental pool and a fountain On the plaza's left, the old city library On its right, a new office building Behind it, a black glass tower First Street turned an abrupt right angle in front of the plaza's boundary wall and ran aest, past untidy rear entrances and loading docks and then on under the raised state highway

But the man in the minivan slowed before he hit the turn in front of the plaza and ht up the ramp There was no barrier, because each slot had its own parking meter Therefore there was no cashier, no witness, no ticket, no paper trail The man in the minivan knew all that He wound around the ramps to the second level and headed for the far back corner of the structure Left the van idling in the aisle for a e traffic cone from the slot he wanted It was the last one in the old part of the building, right next to where the new part was being added on

He drove the van into the slot and shut it down Sat still for a e was quiet It was completely full with silent cars The slot he had protected with the traffic cone had been the last one available The garage was always packed He knew that That hy they were extending it They were doubling its size It was used by shoppers That hy it was quiet Nobody in their right mind would try to leave at five o'clock Not into the rush hour traffic Not with the construction delays Either they would get out by four or wait until six

The man in the minivan checked his watch

Four minutes

Easy

He opened the driver's door and slid out Took a quarter from his pocket and put it in the meter Twisted the handle hard and heard the coin fall and saw the clockwork give hi in the air except the smell of parked automobiles Gasoline, rubber, cold exhaust

He stood still next to the van On his feet he had a pair of old desert boots Khaki suede, single eyelets, white crepe soles, land, n, unchanged in maybe sixty years

He glanced back at the parking meter Fifty-nine minutes He wouldn't need fifty-ninerear door and leaned inside and unfolded a blanket and revealed the rifle It was a Springfield M1A Super Match autoloader, Aazine, chambered for the 308 It was the exact co sniper rifle that the Ao years in the service It was a fine weapon Maybe not quite as accurate with the first cold shot as a top-of-the-line bolt gun, but it would do It would do just fine He wasn't going to be looking at extraordinary distances It was loaded with Lake City M852s His favorite custoes Special Lake City Match brass, Federal powder, Sierra Matchking 168-grain hollow point boat tail bullets The load was better than the gun, probably A slight mismatch

He listened to the silence and lifted the rifle off the rear bench Carried it aith hie finished and the new part began There was a half-inch trench between the old concrete and the new Like a deuessed it was an expansion joint For the su to fill it with soft tar Directly above it there was yellow-and-black Caution Do Not Enter tape strung between two pillars He dropped to one knee and slid under it Stood up again and walked on into the ra construction

Parts of the new concrete floor were troweled s for a final surface There ooden planks laid here and there as ays There were haphazard piles of paper cement sacks, some full, some es of bare lightbulbs, turned off Empty wheelbarrows, crushed soda cans, spools of cable, unexplained lengths of lumber, piles of crushed stone, silent concrete ray cement dust everywhere, as fine as talc, and the smell of damp lime

The man with the rifle walked on in the darkness until he came close to the new northeast corner Then he stopped and put his back tight against a raw concrete pillar and stood still Inched to his right with his head turned until he could see where he was He was about eight feet fro due north The as about waist-high It was unfinished It had bolts cast into it to take lengths ofthe concrete There were receptacles cast into the floor to take the new parking meter posts

The man with the rifle inched forward and turned a little until he felt the corner of the pillar between his shoulder blades He turned his head again Noas looking north and east Directly into the public plaza The orna away froe tank of water, just sitting there Like a big aboveground lap pool It was bounded by four waist-high brick walls The water lapped against their inner faces His line of sight ran on an exact diagonal from its near front corner to its far back corner The water looked to be about three feet deep The fountain splashed right in the center of the pool He could hear it, and he could hear slow traffic on the street, and the shuffle of feet below him The front wall of the pool was about three feet behind the wall that separated the plaza froether and parallel for twenty feet, east to west, with just the width of a narroay between them

He was on the garage's second floor, but the way First Street ran uphill meant the plaza was much less than one story below hile, but it was

shallow On the right of the plaza he could see the new office building's door It was a shabby place It had been built and it hadn't been rented He knew that So to preserve some kind of credibility for the nen, the state had filled it with government offices The Department of Motor Vehicles was in there, and a joint Ar office Maybe Social Security was in there Maybe the Internal Revenue Service The man with the rifle wasn't really sure And he didn't really care

He dropped to his knees and then to his stomach The loas a sniper's principal mode of movement In his years in the service he had loled a million miles Knees and elbows and belly Standard tactical doctrine was for the sniper and his spotter to detach from the company a thousand yards out and crawl into position In training he had sometimes taken many hours to do it, to avoid the observer's binoculars But this tiht feet to cover And as far as he knew there were no binoculars on him

He reached the base of the wall and lay flat on the ground, pressed up tight against the raw concrete Then he squir position Then he knelt He folded his right leg tight underneath him He planted his left foot flat and his left shin vertical He propped his left elbow on his left knee Raised the rifle Rested the end of the forestock on the top of the low concrete wall Sawed it gently back and forth until it felt good and solid Supported kneeling, the trainingprone with a bipod, in his experience He breathed in, breathed out One shot, one kill That was the sniper's credo To succeed required control and stillness and calm He breathed in, breathed out Felt himself relax Felt himself come home

Ready

Infiltration successful

Noait until the tiht

He waited about sevenhis mind He looked at the library on his left Above it and behind it the raised highway curled in on stilts, like it was e it, protecting it frohtened a little and passed behind the black glass tower It was about level with the fourth story back there The tower itself had the NBC peacock on a monolith near its main entrance, but the man with the rifle was sure that a s Probably not le floor The rest of the space was probably one-man law firms or CPAs or real estate offices or insurance brokers or investers Or empty

People were coht People who had been getting new licenses or turning in old plates or joining the ar with federal bureaucracy There were a lot of people The govern Five o'clock on a Friday The people caht-to-left directly in front of hile file as they entered the narrow space and passed the short end of the ornamental pool between the talls Like ducks in a shooting gallery One after the other A target-rich environe was about a hundred feet Approximately Certainly less than thirty-five yards Very close

He waited

Soers in the water as they walked The walls were just the right height for that The ht copper pennies on the black tile under the water They swam and rippled where the fountain disturbed the surface

He watched He waited

The stream of people thickened up Now there were so roup and shuffle and wait to get into single file to pass between the talls Just like the traffic had snarled at the bottom of First Street A bottleneck After you No, after you It allery

The man with the rifle breathed in, and breathed out, and waited

Then he stopped waiting

He pulled the trigger, and kept on pulling

His first shot hit a unshot was loud and there was a supersonic crack frouy went straight down like a puppet with the strings cut

A kill with the first cold shot

Excellent

He worked fast, left to right The second shot hit the next man in the head Same result as the first, exactly The third shot hit a woman in the head Saets down Absolute surprise No reaction for a split second Then chaos broke out Pandeht in the narrow space between the plaza wall and the pool wall Three were already down The re nine ran Four ran forward and five spun away from the corpses and ran back Those five collided with the press of people stilltheir way There were sudden loud screaht in front of the e, less than thirty-five yards Very close

His fourth head shot killed a man in a suit His fifthpassed close to a woht into the ornanored it and field's uy on the bridge of his nose and blew his head apart

The

He ducked low behind the garage wall and crawled backward three feet He could s in his ears he could hear wo and the crunch of panicked fender benders on the street below Don't worry, little people, he thought It's over now I'm out of here He lay on his stoht Lake City brass shone right there in front of hiloved hands but the sixth rolled away and fell into an unfinished expansion joint Just dropped right down into the tiny nine-inch-deep, half-inch-wide trench He heard a quiet metallic sound as it hit bottom