Дэвид Балдаччи - The Guilty

Will Robie crouched shadowlike at a window in a deserted building, inside a country that was currently an ally of the United States.

Tomorrow that could change.

Robie had been alone in many vacant buildings in foreign lands over the years, tactically positioned at windows while holding a weapon. One did not normally kill from long distance with a sniper rifle chambered with brain-busting ordnance fired with the aid of world-class optics while people stood around and watched you do it.

Robie was and always would be a tactical weapon. Longer-term strategies were the professional domain of others, mostly political types. These folks made good assassins, too. Only instead of bullets, they were basically bribed to enact laws by other folks with more money than was good for them. And they harmed a lot more people than Robie ever could.

He eyed the street four stories below.

Quiet.

Well, that won’t last. Not after I do what I came here to do.

A voice spoke in his ear mic. It was a slew of last-minute intelligence, and a verification of all details of the “execution plan,” which was quite aptly named. Robie absorbed all of it, just as he had so many times in the past. He processed the information, asked a few pertinent questions, and received a standby command. It was all part of the professional equation, all normal , if such things could be in a situation where the end result was someone’s dying violently.

He had not set out to kill others on the command of an elite few. Yet here he was, part of a false-flag unit loosely attached to a clandestine intelligence agency known by its three-letter acronym that people from Bangor to Bangladesh would instantly recognize.

He had come to it by degrees.

Initially came the training where the targets were first paper, then clay, and finally mannequins that bled surprisingly realistic-looking blood housed in hard paks stuffed in torsos and heads. Where precisely plastic flesh and Hollywood blood had turned to real flesh and real corpuscles he couldn’t say. It might be that he had subconsciously set aside this most transformative of sequences. It was certainly true that he had never looked back and tried to sort out how he had arrived here.

He had pulled triggers and wielded blades and swung fists and fingers, legs and elbows, and even his head in precise motions, and ended the lives of many without questioning the basis for these actions.

Official killers who questioned were not popular. In fact, for the most part, they were unemployed. Or more likely dead.

Lately, though, he had started asking questions. Which was why he wasn’t as popular as he used to be with the acronym agency whose first letter was C and whose last letter was A . The letter in between stood for intelligence , which Robie sometimes thought was seriously lacking there.

He shook off these thoughts, because tonight he had another trigger to pull.

He gripped a pair of night-vision binoculars and took a visual sweep of the narrow building across from him. Unlike his, it was not vacant. It had lots of people inside it. People with more guns than he had. But he only needed one. There were twenty-four windows facing him, four on each of the six floors. He was concerned only about the second window over from the left on the third floor. In his mind it had a bull’s-eye painted right over it.

The curtains were currently drawn over this opening, but that would have to change. As good as he was, Robie couldn’t kill what he couldn’t see. And right now those millimeter-thick cotton drapes might as well be two-inch-thick polycarbonate sheets with a Kevlar-threaded middle.

He looked at his watch.

Five minutes to go.

Four and a half of those minutes would seem like an eternity. The last thirty seconds would seem like drawing a breath — and a quick one at that. Normal people would experience an accompanying adrenaline rush right about now. Robie was not normal. His heartbeat would actually slow, not rise. And his features would relax, not tighten.

His left hand reached over and touched the already assembled long-range, custom-built rifle lying partially inside his duffel. It was relatively lightweight as such weapons went, and the jacketed subsonic round was already chambered. He would only have one chance to fire one round. He had never needed more than that.

His hand went out and lightly rapped the wooden windowsill.

Even state-sanctioned assassins needed a bit of luck every now and then.

He knew the background of the man he was going to kill tonight. It was like so many of the others whose lives he had terminated. The target’s interests and goals were not in alignment with the United States, which had allied itself with competing — if similarly barbaric — factions that were demanding the removal of this person. Why they didn’t simply do it themselves was a good question that Robie had never bothered to ask for one simple reason.

He wouldn’t have gotten an answer.

Thus, he and his gun had been sent to do the deed, in the interests of national security, which seemed to be a catchall to justify any death, anywhere, any time.

The clipped voice came back in his ear.

“Target alone in the space other than the two bodyguards and the domestic. The curtains will be opened in three minutes.”

“Confirmed on all counts?” Robie asked, because he wanted no surprises.

“Confirmed on all counts.”

He looked over his shoulder at the window behind him. That was to be his escape route. It didn’t look like much of an escape route, and the truth was, it wasn’t. But he’d survived worse ones. He was simply a shadow tonight. Shadows were hard to catch. And harder still to kill.

He looked at his watch, synchronizing it in his head with the countdown point he’d just been given. Countdown to calm, he told himself. Countdown to the kill, he added.

The window he was kneeling in front of had already been raised two inches. The windowsill would be his rough fulcrum point. He lifted the rifle out of the duffel and slid the barrel through this opening until the muzzle cleared the glass by three inches and no more. He had drawn a thick bright red line on his barrel that constituted his stop point.

The night was black, and the ambient light meager. The attack was, hopefully, unexpected. Anyone spotting the dark metal barrel would have to be exceptionally good, and the fact was the other side didn’t have anyone of that caliber. That was the reason Robie had been able to gain access to a vacant building with a sight line directly into the target’s home. That would never have happened with the Russians. Or the Iranians.

Right on schedule the curtains parted. It was a simple movement replicated millions of times a day all over the world. However, people usually opened the curtains when it was daytime to let in natural light. At night they usually closed them to gain privacy.

That was always the hitch in this plan. And Robie would know nearly immediately if that hitch turned into total disaster.

The maid stepped back from the window.

Robie thought the woman’s gaze lifted just a bit to the building across the street. And she seemed to linger too long in front of the glass.

Move , Robie thought to himself, trying to will this message across the width of the street and into her head. It had taken considerable effort, money, and skill to place her right where she was, where she had to be for all this to work.

But if she froze now, none of that would happen. She would die and the man she worked for would not. Robie being here would all be for naught. He might die, too, since the U.S. would disavow any connection to him whatsoever. That was just how this worked.