Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

Below him there was chaos. Word had spread. Drivers were leaping out of their cars to crouch behind them. Two at least were shouting into their cell phones.

On the bridge, two women back down the line were screaming. The roof of the 23C service bus was being torn apart. The interior was becoming a charnel house of blood, bodies and hysterical humanity. Then the second magazine ran out.

It was not the rifleman in the helicopter who brought closure but an off-duty patrolman ten cars down the line on Route 29 behind the stalled car. He had his window open to let the cigarette smoke out lest his wife later detected the odor. He heard the shots and recognized the crack of a high-powered rifle. He got out, unholstered his service automatic and started running, not away from the shots but toward them.

The first Tariq Hussein knew of him was when the window of the open door beside him shattered. He turned, saw the running man and raised his rifle. It was empty. The running officer could not know that. At twenty feet, he stopped, crouched, took the double-handed position and emptied his magazine into the door and the man behind it.

It was later established that three rounds hit the gunman and they were enough. When the officer reached the car, the gunman was on the verge of the road, gasping feebly. He died thirty seconds later.

For most of that day, there was chaos on Route 29, closed as forensic teams took away the body, the gun and finally the car. But it was nothing as to what was happening on the GW Memorial Parkway beneath.

The interior of the Rosslyn-to-Langley commuter coach was a butcher’s shop. Later, figures released to the public told of seven dead, nine critically injured, with five major amputations and twenty flesh wounds, all inside the bus, there had simply been no cover from above.

At Langley, the shock among the thousands of staffers when the news came through was like a declaration of war — but from an enemy already dead.

The Virginia state police and the FBI wasted no time. The killer’s car was easily traced through the vehicle-licensing bureau. SWAT teams raided the house outside Fairfax. It was empty, but forensic teams, muffled in their overalls, stripped it to the plasterwork — and then to the foundations.

Within twenty-four hours, the net of interrogators had spread far and wide. Counterterrorism experts pored over the laptop and the diary. The death declaration was played to rooms of silent men and women in the FBI’s Hoover Building, with copies to the CIA.

Not everyone on the stricken bus worked for the Agency, since the bus served other stops. But most went to the end of the line — Langley/McLean.

Before sundown, the Director of the CIA exercised his prerogative and secured a private interview with the President in the Oval Office. Staffers in the corridors said he was still pale with anger.

It is very rare for spymasters in one country to have any regard for their opponents among the enemy, but it happens. During the Cold War, many in the West had a grudging regard for the man who ran East Germany’s spy service.

Markus “Misha” Wolf had a small budget and a big enemy — Germany and NATO. He did not even bother trying to traduce the cabinet ministers in the service of Bonn. He targeted those dowdy, scuttling, invisible mice in the offices of the high and mighty without whom no office can run: the confidential private secretaries to the ministers.

He studied their drab, spinsterly and often lonely private lives and targeted them with young, handsome lovers. These Romeos would start slow and patient, moving to warm embraces in chilly lives, promises of companionship for life in sunny places after retirement, and all just for a glance at those silly papers forever passing across the minister’s desk.

And they did, those Ingrids and Waltrauds. They passed over the copies of everything confidential and classified that were left unattended when the minister stalked out to his four-course lunch. It reached a point where the Bonn government was so penetrated that the NATO allies did not dare tell Bonn what day of the week it was because within a day the information would go to East Berlin and then Moscow.

Eventually, the police would come, the Romeo would vanish and the office mouse, shrunken and in tears, would appear fleetingly between two hulking cops. Then she would exchange a lonely little flat for a lonely little cell in prison.

He was a ruthless bastard, was Misha Wolf, but after the collapse of East Germany, he retired in obscurity, never charged with anything, and died in his bed of natural causes.

Forty years later, the British SIS would have loved to eavesdrop on what was said and done in the offices of Chauncey Reynolds, but Julian Reynolds regularly had his entire suite swept by a high-grade team of electronic wizards, some of them actually retired from government service.

So the Firm did not have state-of-the-art technology secreted in the private office of Gareth Evans that summer, but they did have Emily Bulstrode. She saw everything, read everything and heard everything, and no one noticed her with her tray of cups.

The day Harry Andersson screamed into the face of Gareth Evans, Mrs. Bulstrode bought her usual sandwich at the deli on the corner and went to her favorite telephone booth. She did not like those modern things that people kept in their pockets, always going off in conferences. She preferred to visit one of the few remaining red-painted, cast-iron kiosks where you put coins in a meter. She asked for a connection, spoke a few words and went back to her desk.

After work, she went on foot to St. James’s Park, sat on the assigned bench and fed the ducks some crusts she had saved from her sandwich as she waited for her contact. Back in the day, she mused, her beloved Charlie had been the man in Moscow who every day went to Gorki Park and picked up top secret microfilm from the Soviet traitor Oleg Penkovsky. These state secrets, relayed to the desk of President Kennedy, enabled him to outwit Nikita Khrushchev and get those damn rockets removed from Cuba in the autumn of 1962.

A young man approached and sat down beside her. The usual exchange of harmless chitchat assured true identity. She glanced at him and smiled. A youngster, she thought, probably a probationer, not even born when she used to slip through the Iron Curtain into East Germany for the Firm.

The young man pretended to read the Evening Standard . He took no notes because he had a recorder active but silent in his jacket pocket. Emily Bulstrode also had no notes; she had her two assets, a totally harmless air and a steel-trap memory.

So she told the probationer everything that had happened that morning in the law offices, detail by detail and word for word. Verbatim. Then she rose and walked to the station to catch her commuter train for her little house in Coulsdon. She sat alone, watching the southern suburbs drift by. Once she had dodged the dreadful Stasis; now she was seventy-five and made coffee for lawyers.

The young man from Vauxhall Cross went back in the dusk and filed his report. He noticed there was a flag attached, to the effect that the Chief had agreed that news concerning Somalia should be shared with the Cousins up at the U.S. embassy. He could not see what a brutal warlord in Garacad could have to do with a hunt for the Preacher, but a standing order is still a standing order, so he filed a copy for the CIA.

In his safe house half a mile from the embassy, the Tracker was almost finished packing when his BlackBerry throbbed discreetly. He looked at the message, scrolled down until the end, switched off and thought for a while. Then he unpacked. A benign deity had just given him his bait.

Gareth Evans called a conference with Mr. Ali Abdi the next morning. The Somali, when he came on, was subdued.