Was it safe?
There were no guarantees—except that it was the only place to which he dared
retreat. A sniper on the minaret could easily target anyone emerging from the
other exits of Berthwick House. The perch would not afford a sight line to most
areas of the park itself.
Besides, Janson knew this area; when he was at Cambridge, he’d had a friend who
lived in the Marylebone neighborhood, and they had taken long strolls through
the great verdant expanse, three times the size of New York’s Central Park. Some
of it was overlooked by the neoclassical grandeur of Hanover Terrace, with its
noble Georgian exteriors and creamy hues, the white and blue friezes adorning
its architrave. But the park was a world unto itself. The waterways bustled with
swans and odd, imported fowl; they were banked with concrete in some stretches
while in others they lapped onto stands of marshy reeds. On the concrete walkway
along the embankment, pigeons competed for crumbs with swans. Farther out,
trimmed rows of boxwood provided a dense green border. A red lifesaver was
mounted on a small wooden kiosk.
To him, it had always felt like a refuge, this vast campus of trees and grass,
playing fields and tennis courts. The boating lake stretched like an amoeba,
narrowing to a stream that, edged by flower beds, ran under York Bridge in the
southern part of the park. And in the inner circle was Queen Mary’s Garden,
filled with exotic flora and rare fowl, discreetly penned: a sanctuary for wild
birds and lonely, fragile people. Regent’s Park, a legacy of the crown architect
John Nash, represented an Arcadian vision of an England that, perhaps, never
was—the Windermere in the middle of the metropole, at once artfully rusticated
and carefully manicured.
Janson jogged toward the boating lake, past the trees, trying to clear his head
and make sense of the astounding assault. Even as he ran, though, he was
intensely alert to his surroundings, his nerves jangling.
Was it safe?
Was he dealing with a single sniper? It seemed unlikely. With such exhaustive
preparation, there must have been flanking gunmen in place, covering different
wings of the house, different exposures. No doubt, perimeter security was as
exacting as Thwaite had indicated. But there were few local defenses against
such long-distance marksmanship.
And if other snipers were in the area, where were they?
And who were they?
The intrusion of menace in this pastoral redoubt struck Janson as itself an
obscenity. He slowed down and looked at the great willow tree in front of him,
its branches drooping into the boating lake. A tree like that might be a century
old; his eyes must have fallen on it when he visited the park twenty-five years
ago. It had survived Labour governments and Tory governments alike. It had
survived Lloyd George and Margaret Thatcher, the Blitz and rationing, eras of
fear and of boisterous self-confidence.
As Janson approached it, the thick trunk suddenly revealed a rude patch of
white. A soft, tapping noise: lead hitting puckered bark.
A shot that had missed him, again, by a matter of inches. The uncanny accuracy
of a bolt-action sniper rifle.
He craned his neck around as he ran, but could see nothing. The only sound he
had heard was that of the projectile slamming into the tree: there was no sound
of the detonation within a rifle chamber. Sound-suppression gear was quite
possibly in use. But even with a silenced rifle, a supersonic round produced a
noise as it emerged from the muzzle—not necessarily a conspicuous one, but a
noise all the same, like the crack of a whip. Janson knew that noise well. The
fact that he had not heard it suggested something else: it was another
long-distance shot. If the gunman were a hundred yards away, the noise would be
lost amid the baffling provided by the tree leaves and the park’s ambient
sounds. Conclusion: an extremely skilled marksman was in pursuit.
Or a team of them.
Where was safety? It was impossible to say. Worms of apprehension writhed in his
belly.
Dirt kicked up a couple of feet from him. Another near miss. The shot had been
taken from a very great distance, and the subject had been in motion: for a shot
to have come within ten yards of him would have represented impressive
technique. Yet this shot had come within a couple of feet. It was astounding.
And terrifying.
Keep moving: confronted with unseen pursuers, it was the one thing he could do
to make himself a more difficult target. But movement itself was not sufficient.
He had to keep his speed irregular, for otherwise a trained sniper could
calculate the “lead” in his sighting. It was a straightforward exercise to fire
at a target who was moving at a fixed speed in a fixed direction: taking into
account distance and target speed, you measured out a few degrees to the left of
the figure in your scope, firing at where the target would be when the bullet
arrived, not where it had been when the bullet was fired.
Then there was the crucial matter of the sniper grid. Lateral
movement—transverse velocity—was one thing. But movement that took the
pedestrian target toward or away from the sniper was of almost negligible
importance: it would not prevent the bullet from reaching its target.
Janson had not determined how many marksmen were in position, or where those
positions were. Because he did not know the grid, he did not know which
movements were transverse, which not. The rules of flanking and enfilading would
stipulate an axial array; marksmen as accomplished as these would be conscious
of the peril of bullet “overtravel,” which could be fatal to a member of the
team or a bystander.
The snipers—where were they? The last two shots came from the southwest, where
he could see nothing but, a few hundred yards away, a stand of oak trees.
He starting running, his gaze roaming around him. The very normalcy was what was
so eerie. The park was not crowded, but it was far from vacant. Here was a young
man swaying to whatever was pulsing through his Walkman. There was a young woman
with a stroller, talking to another woman, a close friend, from the looks of it.
He could hear the distant cries of young children in paddleboats, frolicking in
a shallow, fenced-off area of the boating pond. And, as always, lovers walked
hand in hand between the copses of oak and white willow and beech trees. They
were in their own world. He was in his. They shared a terrain, blithely unaware
that anything was amiss. How could there be?
That was the genius of the operation. The sniping was virtually soundless. The
tiny explosions of bark or turf or water were too fleeting and inconspicuous to
be noticed by anybody who was not primed for such evidence.
Regent’s Park—that serene glade—had been converted into a killing field, with
nobody the wiser.
Except, of course, the prospective victim.
Where was safety? The interrogative rose in Janson’s head, rose with screechy,
needful urgency.
He had the sole advantage of action over reaction: he alone knew his next move;
they would have to respond to what he did. But if they could condition his
actions, make him act according to a curtailed number of options in reaction to
their own actions, that edge would be lost.
He darted this way and that, along what he estimated as a line transverse to the
axial array of the sniper team.
“Practicing your footwork?” remarked an amused older man, his white hair combed
forward and trimmed, Caesar-style. “Looking good. You’ll be playing for
Manchester United one of these days!” It was the sort of jibe reserved for
somebody one took to be insane. What else made sense of Janson’s strange,
darting movements, his dashes right and left, seemingly random, seemingly
pointless? It was the zigzagging of a wingless hummingbird.
He put on a sudden burst of speed and plunged through a crowd of pedestrians
toward York Bridge. The bandstand beckoned: it would shelter him from the
snipers.
He ran along the banks of the boating lake and past an elderly woman who was
throwing bread crumbs to ravenous pigeons. An enormous flock of the birds took
flight as he pounded through their midst, like an exploding cloud of feathers.
One of them, batting its wings just a few yards ahead, suddenly dropped like a
stone, landing near his feet. The smudge of red on the pigeon’s breast told him
that it had caught a stray bullet intended for him.
And still nobody noticed. For everyone but him, it was a perfect day in the
park.
A small burst of wooden splinters erupted at waist level, as another shot
flicked off the rail of the wooden bridge and into the water. The quality of the
shooting was remarkable: it was only a matter of time before one reached the