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After he locked the scaffold’s wheels in place, he went into the bedroom. A moment later, he returned with a comforter and laid it on the plywood platform and climbed up and lay prone.
He smiled as he faced the curtained window with an imaginary rifle in front of him. The apartment was warm. Clean. Comfortable. In other words, about as far from his usual blind setups as you could possibly get.
As he lay there, he recalled a particularly nasty blind he’d been in in Syria six months prior. In a downtown section of a small city he’d already forgotten the name of, he had lain in the deep interior recesses of a shattered shopping mall. For three days, in the stench of an open sewer, from a hole in the structure’s wall, he watched the sepia desert light on the mall’s ruined plaza as the government forces drove their dirt-caked, chirping, clanking Russian T-80 tanks around, playing cat and mouse with the jihadi rebels who had hired him.
On the third morning, as one of the tank’s 125mm rounds punched yet another hole in the already chewed-up building’s northern end, he finally laid eyes on his target with his hunting scope. The Russian tank adviser’s name was Alexandrov, and through the blackened, jagged stumps of some palm trees beyond the plaza, he could see him sitting in a white Ford pickup truck, coordinating maneuvers from just under two thousand yards away.
Even through the 10x Unertl scope of the KSVK Russian anti-matériel rifle, his target was not very big. No matter. He calculated calmly, made his clicks on the scope for distance and wind. Then he resighted the reticle and calmly let loose with a massive 12.7mm round.
He would have missed by a hair if Alexandrov hadn’t leaned forward at the exact right moment. Had he been about to open the truck’s glove compartment? the British assassin wondered, not for the first time. Was he moving to answer his phone on the dash? To tie his shoe?
The British assassin tsked. He would never know, and for a man of precision such as himself, to never know stung.
Oh well. Enough strolling down memory lane. Back to work, he thought as he pushed himself up off the platform and climbed down the scaffold.
He walked to the window, where his hunting scope was already set up on its tripod, and parted the curtains.
There was a blur in the eyepiece as he tilted and panned and zoomed the scope over the city buildings and cell sites and water towers. When he was done, a sidewalk-level doorway was directly centered in the viewfinder.
The door was a much-scuffed black steel one outlined by blocks of pale dressed granite, set in a building wall of dull red brick. Lacking a handle or knob, it looked like the back egress door one might see at a theater.
The British assassin smiled again as his mind made the obvious associations.
Presidents and theaters and assassins, oh my! he thought.
Chapter 59
At five minutes after four o’clock, Mary Catherine put on the water for the ziti and then took out the mix for the cupcakes that Bridget and Fiona needed for their class trip bake sale fund-raiser. A Blake Shelton song came on the country-western station as she was getting out the eggs, and she turned it up and began humming along as she stood at the island cracking the eggs into a mixing bowl.
From the dining room, Eddie Bennett watched all this in his peripheral vision as he pretended to do his homework.
“How is it going in there, Eddie?” Mary Catherine called out as she chucked the eggshells into the can behind her without looking.
“Never better,” Eddie lied.
Eddie had been relegated to the dining room table, under Mary Catherine’s watchful eye, until further notice because he’d come home with another C in math.
Quite unfairly, in his opinion. To his thinking, a C was actually more than acceptable because, as everyone knew, math was idiotic and pointless. What the heck was algebra for, anyway? Would he one day find himself pinned in a car wreck, struggling for his life, and at the last second save himself by remembering that x = 7 + y (5r)? The answer to that one was no. Numbers and equations were inherently evil, as was his cruel and unusual imprisonment here at the table of pain.
No doubt about it, instead of doing extra math problems, what he really needed at this juncture was the iPad that Mary Catherine had hidden on him. Or, more specifically, he needed what was on the tablet. The utterly amazing and cool Zombie Highway Squish, his new favorite video game.
That’s why when the whir of Mary Catherine’s mixer started up a minute later, he made his move. Tiptoeing into the living room as stealthily as the ninja he one day hoped to become, he quickly searched all of Mary Catherine’s favorite hiding spots for banned items. On top of the bookshelf, under the couch, behind Dad’s chair.
“What are you up to now, you little sneak?” Brian said around the yellow highlighter jutting from his mouth as he sat on the couch, squinting at some paperback Shakespeare. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing your homework?”
“Looking for my, eh, workbook,” Eddie said innocently.
Now where would she hide it? Eddie thought. He snapped his fingers. Precisely. The last place it was allowed to be. In the boys’ room!
He hurried into their darkened room and had just peeked in the closet when he saw the sheets hanging loose at the side of Marvin’s bunk.
Eddie went over immediately and lifted the mattress.
And just stood there staring.
And staring.
At the gun sitting there on the box spring.
