the rear annex.
The small square in the double-hung window that was cleaner than the rest of it:
a sniper would be there.
He had to use the thick wooden door as a movable shield. He jumped up, turned
the knob, and opened it a crack.
Two thuds: bullets that dug into the thick wood. Bullets that would have struck
him had he continued out the door.
The door was now ajar, just eighteen inches, but it should suffice for a
well-targeted shot. That grimeless, sparkling square of glass—with luck, he
could hit it from here, even with a mere handgun.
His enemies would be scoped; he would not be. But scopes had their limitations,
too. The greater the magnification, the more restricted the field of vision. And
it took perhaps ten or twenty seconds to reposition the scope and adjust its
optics when the target position changed abruptly.
He crawled to where the security guard lay slain on a pale blue carpet now
darkening with his blood and dragged the body toward the foyer, knowing that he
would be shielded by the four-foot wall of brick beneath the window. He pulled
out a handkerchief and hurriedly wiped the blood from the man’s face. He draped
his suit jacket on the man’s upper body and jammed his felt-brimmed hat on the
corpse’s head. Firmly grasping the hair on the nape, he positioned the head
precisely. In a darting gesture, he pushed the head toward the gap left by the
cracked-open door, and swiveled it, emulating the movements of a man cautiously
craning to see.
The head would be glimpsed fleetingly, in profile, and from a distance.
A pair of sickening spits confirmed his worst suspicions. The dead man’s head
absorbed heavy-caliber bullets from two different directions.
Another second or so would pass before the bolt-action rifles would permit a
second tap. Now Janson sprang up, to his full height. The snipers’ scopes would
be trained on the spot where the guard’s head had appeared. Janson would expose
himself several feet higher. He had to make his sighting and shoot nearly
instantaneously.
Time turned to syrup.
He peered out, identified the small, gleaming square of glass, and squeezed out
a burst of three shots into it. With luck, he would at least damage the sniper’s
equipment. The gun bucked in his hand as it sent out its blast, and Janson
retreated behind the heavy door. A guttural spray of curses was audible through
the broken glass, telling him that he had scored some kind of hit.
One perch may have been deactivated. But how many more remained? He studied the
two additional bullet wounds on the guard’s head. One projectile had traveled
from a steep downward trajectory, evidently from the house opposite. The other,
which entered high on a cheek, came at a sharp angle, indicating a sniper from a
neighbor to the right.
He could have Cooper pull up in the armored limo, but just the few feet of
exposure would, with an active sniper in the vicinity, prove deadly. At least
one person would have his rifle aimed directly on the stoop.
Janson heaved the corpse upward in a vaulting movement across the main front
room, and studied the reaction.
An unsilenced blast shattered what remained of the window, followed by a cluster
of spits, shots that were sound-suppressed but no less deadly. How many? How
many guns were trained on this house; how many riflemen were awaiting a clean
shot? At least five, and the real number could be much higher.
Oh, dear God. An all-out assault on Peter Novak’s headquarters was in progress.
Had he brought this about by his presence? It strained belief, but then little
made sense any longer.
All he was certain of was that he had to get out of the house and that he could
not use the doors. He charged up the stairs. Another flight up, narrower,
brought him to the third floor, where he found himself looking at a closed door.
Was there time? He had to check it out—had to make time. He tried the handle; it
was locked. Janson broke it open with a forceful kick and found himself in a
private office.
A desk. A credenza, stacked with cardboard mailers from the ultra-secure,
ultra-expensive express-delivery service Caslon Couriers. Beside it, a black
metal filing cabinet. Locked, too, but easily forced. Inside was an array of
reports about nongovernmental organizations and lending libraries in Slovenia
and Romania. And correspondence from Unitech Ltd., content seemingly
unexceptionable. Unitech: yes, it meant something—but he had no time to think
now. Survival was his one goal, and his thoughts had to be directed toward that
singular imperative. It had been a thirty-second detour; now he charged up the
two remaining flights and clambered up a crude wooden ladder that led to the
loft, beneath the roof. It was stifling there, but under the rafters there had
to be an opening to a part of the roof that would be hidden by the gables. It
was his only chance. A minute later, he had found it and arrived stumbling on
the roof. It was steeper than he expected, and he clung to the nearby chimney,
as if it were a great tree offering protection in the jungle. It was, of course,
nothing of the kind. He scanned the adjoining rooftops, looking for his
executioners.
Being at roof level would take him out of range of most of their fixed
positions.
But not all.
Perched on a higher rooftop, diagonally opposite to his right, he could make out
the deadly brunette from Regent’s Park. There she had narrowly missed him from
an enormous distance. Now she was a hundred feet away. She could not fail to hit
her target. She had not missed when she hit the grotesque puppet he had made of
the dead security guard, for he knew now that the diagonal shot was hers.
He turned his head and saw, to his dismay, that there was another rifleman on
the adjoining roof, just thirty-five feet to his left.
The rifleman had heard his feet scrambling on the slate roof and was now
swiveling his weapon toward him.
Alerted by the drab-suited rifleman, the deadly brunette raised her scope to
roof level. His bruised temple flared once again, with almost incapacitating
pain.
He was pinned between two sharpshooters, with only a handgun for protection. He
saw the woman squinting through her scope, saw the utter blackness of the
rifle’s bore hole. He was staring at his own death.
It was a shot she could not miss.
CHAPTER TWENTY
He forced himself to focus on the countenance of his executioner: he would look
death in the face.
What he saw was a play of confusion on her face as she swiveled her rifle a few
degrees to the left and squeezed off a shot.
The rifleman on the next roof over arced his back and tumbled off the roof like
a falling gargoyle.
What the hell was going on?
The noisy chatter of a nearby automatic weapon immediately followed—aimed not at
him but at her. A piece of the ornate cornice behind which she was stationed
broke off, leaving a cloud of dust.
Was somebody rescuing him, saving him from the Regent’s Park executioner?
He tried to puzzle out the complex geometry. Two teams, as he supposed. One
using American-issue sniper equipment, the sniper team from Consular Operations.
And the other? An odd assortment of weaponry. Irregulars. Hirelings. To judge
from the fabric and hardware, Eastern Europeans.
In whose employ?
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If the old saw was true in this case, he was
far from friendless. But was it true?
The man with the automatic gun, a Russian-made AKS-74, now stood above the
parapet, trying to get a better angle on the woman sniper.
“Hey,” Janson called out to him.
The man—Janson was near enough to see his coarse features, close-set eyes, and
two days’ growth of beard—grinned at Janson, and turned toward him.
With his gun set at full fire.
As a raking blast hit the roof, Janson dove into a roll, hurtling down the tiled
incline. A fragment of stone whipped past his ear as a noisy fusillade swept the
area where he had been moments before. His forehead scraped against another
piece of masonry, the palm of his hand stung as it pressed against jagged roof
tile. Finally, his body slammed against the balustrade. The impact was jarring,
debilitating, yet the alternative would have been worse—a plumb drop from the
high roof to the pavement.
He heard shouts, from there, and there. His dazed brain strove to process the
sounds as they raced and echoed and faded.
What had just happened? The woman had him within her sights. She had him.
Why didn’t she take the shot?
And the other team—who were they? Angus Fielding had mentioned the shadowy
enemies Novak had made among corrupt Eastern European oligarchs. Were they a