To the Death am-10

by Patrick Robinson

  For Shakira, the presence of her husband was the only solace for the long lonely hours she spent in the gilded splendor of the embassy. Occasionally she would be offered lunch or perhaps tea with a visiting Arab sheik, and they would speak politely about the political situation in the Middle East. But on each of the next two days, Ravi would leave in the morning and go to his office, always acquainting himself with fellow tenants if possible, and especially with Don and Reggie the doormen.

  He normally lunched at the embassy, but in the afternoons he made another visit to Dover Street, and on Friday evening he was there yet again at 8 P.M., leaving at 9:30, carrying his briefcase, still dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, still wearing his blond wig, moustache, and goatee. Still speaking in what he guessed, wrongly, was a Finnish accent, but in truth sounded more like Trinidad than Helsinki.

  Nonetheless, the farm marketing executive from Northern Europe, Haakon Fretheim, quickly became a familiar figure in the building, perceived as a busy, industrious, and courteous gentleman who worked erratic hours for an accountant.

  0900 Saturday 28 July Southall, West London

  Ravi drove out to the workshops of Prenjit Kumar alone. He parked the car in the same spot and was led down to the basement by the gunsmith himself. And there, lying open on the red baize beneath the light, was a hand-tooled brown leather case containing all the parts of an Austrian SSG 69 sniper rifle, each one set into precision grooves carved into a black velvet interior.

  The barrel rested in its own groove, above the main firing section, which contained the bolt and the magazine, plus the trigger and guard. The silencer also had its own section, around which were set the light metal components which would form the newly designed stock, made specifically to fit General Rashood’s shoulder and arm length. Along the bottom part of the interior were spaces for six of the exploding bullets, and the gunsights.

  “Problems?” asked Ravi.

  “None,” replied Kumar, “except that I have had no sleep for a week.”

  “Then you have earned your money,” he said. “Perhaps you would assemble the rifle and then I’ll dismantle it and put it together myself.”

  “Of course,” replied the Bengali gunsmith. “And I hope you agree, this is the most beautiful object, a work of art. Very light and very deadly.”

  He removed the main firing section from the case and picked up the barrel carefully, as if he were handling precious gems. Expertly he screwed the barrel into place, and then clipped in the sights.

  He took out the metal plate that screwed into the neck behind the trigger guard, and then took two silver struts for the stock and screwed each one into place, using just his fingers. The top one went out straight, perpendicular. The second was set at more of an angle, but finished level at the end. Then he took the cast-bronze base of the stock, made to fit Ravi’s shoulder precisely, and clipped it onto the struts, forming the outline shape of a rifle stock, but without the bulk. Ravi looked on approvingly.

  Above the magazine there were two clips, set five inches apart. To these Kumar attached the telescopic sight, sliding it into place and locking it securely. Finally he screwed the silencer into the barrel. And then he held the rifle at arm’s length and said, admiringly, “Magnificent, hah?”

  Ravi took it from him and held it against his shoulder, staring into the telescopic sight, straight at the crosshairs. Then he relaxed and held the rifle in the palms of both hands, away from his body, as if weighing it, balancing it. During his years in the SAS, this weapon, or one precisely like it, had been like an old friend — super accurate, super quiet, and super reliable, all the qualities a professional sniper requires.

  This SSG looked different now. But it felt the same, a little lighter, but with the same familiar well-balanced deadliness about it.

  “Can we try it?” he asked.

  “Certainly,” said Kumar. “Follow me. I’ll bring a half dozen practice bullets.” He walked to a door set halfway along the exterior wall, opened it, and beckoned Ravi through. The corridor was well lit, and they walked maybe twenty yards to an indoor shooting range — a long dark tunnel, lit only at the far end, where a large target had been set on an easel. There were wires attached to the target, which was a twelve-inch-wide bull’s-eye. In front of Ravi just below shoulder level was a countertop on which to lean.

  “You have five bullets,” said Kumar. “Let’s see how the rifle suits you.”

  Ravi leaned forward and, pushing the specially designed safety catch, freed up the rifle to fire. He aimed carefully, placing the crosshairs right across the red heart of the target. He squeezed the trigger, but the target was fifty yards away and it was difficult to see the result of his marksmanship.

  In fact, Ravi took no notice of his success or failure. He just fired all five, and then signaled for Mr. Kumar to pull up the target for inspection. The Indian wound it in with a small wheel, exactly the same as in a fairground, but he raised his eyebrows when he checked the piece of cardboard.

  All five bullets had gone through virtually the same hole. To the left, there was a very slight bulge, maybe an eighth of an inch, and at the bottom there was another minuscule variance. None of the five shots had strayed beyond the basic red circle of the bull.

  “Very nice, Mr. Spencer. Very nice indeed. It’s a privilege to be in the company of a master.”

  “Sentiments I share,” replied Ravi. “This is an outstanding rifle, and I thank you.”

  Together they walked back into the main workshop, and Ravi carefully dismantled the weapon, placing each piece into its allotted slot in the new case. He took his time and then clipped the case shut. He handed over a large brown envelope that contained the balance of the money, again two hundred £50 notes. And again, Prenjit Kumar did not count it.

  This omission was noted by Ravi, who perfectly understood that there had been no necessity to check the cash for the down payment last week, since he was scheduled to return. This, however, was different. After today, Ravi would probably never see the gunsmith again, and he looked up and said, “You don’t want to count it?”

  The Bengali smiled. “Of course not,” he replied. “I know when I am in the presence of a gentleman.”

  And then he presented Ravi with a heavy cardboard box, around five inches square and three deep. “There’s thirty practice bullets in here,” he said. “You will want to adjust the sights for perfect vision from the precise distance of your target. It may take a while, of trial and error, so I have given you plenty of ammunition. Here also are three targets that may be useful.”

  General Rashood smiled and thanked him. He offered his hand and said quietly, “Mr. Kumar, there are only five people in the world who know that you have made this rifle for me. Two of them you know, and all of them I know. Should anyone discover our secret, all four of us will know that you have been indiscreet. I am sure you understand what the penalty would be.”

  “Mr. Spencer,” he replied, “my own risk is equally great. There will be no indiscretions, I assure you.”

  Before he led Ravi up the green-carpeted stairs to the front door, he presented him with one further item, wrapped in a black velvet bag. “This is the pistol you requested. It’s a new Austrian Glock 17 9mm. The safety catch comes off when the trigger is pressed. It will not discharge if you drop it. And it will not let you down.”

  Once more they shook hands, and the master terrorist softly said good-bye to the gunsmith from Bengal.

  He drove back to the embassy in a thoughtful mood, aware that this was Saturday and of how much he longed to take Shakira out for the evening, perhaps the theatre, and then dinner at the Ivy where the “stars” are apt to gather after a show. Ravi did not have a shred of time for self-obsessed play-actors or any other kind of celebrities, but Shakira would have loved it. Anyway, he doubted that he could have secured a table.

  And a much bigger “anyway” was that the entire thing was out of the question. One recognition, by anyone from his former life, and he’
d either have to kill them or flee the country. So once more he faced up to a long waiting day at the embassy. Aside from the boredom, he was, however, eternally grateful for the perfection of the cover he enjoyed behind the ramparts of No. 8 Belgrave Square.

  Up in their bedroom, he presented Shakira with the pistol, which Kumar had thoughtfully loaded, and Shakira did precisely as she was told and placed it in her large handbag. “You will carry that wherever you go,” he told her. “We have many enemies.”

  They had lunch at the embassy, where the cooks were under orders always to produce food that reminded the ambassador of the desert and the culture of the northern end of the Arabian Peninsula. Thus lunch when it arrived was chicken kebabs, rice, houmus, and salad.

  They sipped fruit juice and then sat in the opulent rear drawing room. They read the newspapers, and Ravi watched the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot, won for the umpteenth time by the Irish with a superb dark bay colt sired by the Coolmore-based champion stallion, Galileo.

  Shakira, who had been paying scant attention, suddenly heard the word “Coolmore” and almost jumped out of her chair. “I’ve been there!” she exclaimed.

  “Where? Ascot?” asked Ravi.

  “No, Coolmore,” she said. “I visited it while I was waiting for you in Ireland.”

  “Did you see the great Galileo? That horse who just won was his son.”

  “Well, I didn’t actually go in, but I saw the big iron gates, and I saw all the green countryside where the horses live. It’s in Tipperary.”

  Ravi, of course, like anyone with the remotest knowledge of horse racing, knew all about Coolmore. He grinned at Shakira and asked, “How on earth did you find your way down there?”

  “I met a man in the hotel in Dublin who owned a filly foal. I think she was born there,” she replied, accurately. “And it was very important to him that her brother, called Easter Rebel, would win the Irish Stakes or something.”

  “The what?”

  “The Irish something. I can’t remember. But it mattered to him.”

  “That would have been the first week in July. It was probably the Irish Derby.”

  “Derby, that’s it. He wanted Easter Rebel to win the Irish Derby.”

  “And did he?”

  “I forgot to find out.”

  Ravi laughed. “I’m not sure you’ve mastered an in-depth appreciation of horse racing,” he said. “Otherwise, you’d have remembered to find out what happened to Easter Rebel.”

  “I’ll tell you what I do remember,” she retorted. “Easter Rebel was also the son of that telescope man — what’s his name, Galileo.”

  “Was he? Well, you ought to know whether the Rebel won and made your new friend rich.”

  “How can I find out?”

  “I’ll do that for you. If I can use that laptop computer over there on the sideboard.”

  Ravi walked over and opened it. He searched with Google and found a site for the Racing Post. Then he tapped in the name “Easter Rebel” and, nine seconds later, learned that the colt had not won the Irish Derby, but had been beaten by a head in a photo finish.

  “Just lost,” he told Shakira. And he made a signal with his right hand, placing his index finger about a quarter of an inch above his thumb. “That much,” he added.

  “Poor Mr. O’Donnell will be very sad,” she said.

  “I assure you he won’t,” said Ravi. “I expect he’s going to sell his filly, and most breeders would be happy going through the ring with a sister to a colt beaten by a head in the Irish Derby. Don’t feel sorry for him.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “Was his filly also by Galileo?”

  “Can’t remember,” she said absently, leafing through her fashion magazine.

  Life and death for Mr. O’Donnell, total lack of interest by Shakira. Ravi smiled and thought of his father, the man the newspapers always referred to as the “shipping tycoon and racehorse breeder.”

  He missed seeing his family but was certain that they now knew what he had done and what disgrace he had brought upon them all. Treason, mutiny, murder. My God! He hardly dared to think about it.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, Ravi retired to his embassy suite, leaving Shakira to watch a sitcom on the television. He opened the leather case and started counting. Carefully he took out the sections of the rifle, assembling them into the finely engineered finished product.

  Then he started his count again, disassembled the weapon, and placed the pieces back in the case. It had taken him twenty-eight seconds to put it together and twenty-four seconds to take it apart. The twenty-eight did not matter, but the twenty-four was critical and it was too long. From the moment he fired that lethal 7.62mm shell at the admiral’s unprotected head, every second counted. Because right then he would be in the critical part of the operation, the getaway.

  Twenty-four seconds was almost a half minute. There would be, he knew, American Secret Service agents, London police security, and possibly military personnel swarming outside the Ritz. If they had even an inkling of where the bullet had come from, they would be across Piccadilly in fifteen seconds and into the building where his office was situated. If they were through those glass doors before he was out, he’d be trapped, overwhelmed, and headed for the gallows on charges of murder and high treason against Her Majesty’s forces.

  That twenty-four seconds had to be reduced, and if it couldn’t, he might have to abort the mission. But Ravi knew it could. Over and over, he assembled the rifle and then disassembled it. For almost two hours he practiced, finally realizing that the principal solutions to the operation were the swift removal of the telescopic sight and the level of tightness on the wide silver-plated finger screw which attached the stock to the neck.

  After another hour, he could disassemble that sniper rifle in eighteen seconds. Within two hours, he had it down to twelve, and those twelve seconds would be all he could afford while packing the rifle away and bolting down the stairs to the freedom of Dover Street.

  Early that evening, before dinner with the ambassador, Ravi went shopping alone. He walked through to Knightsbridge and wandered into Harrods, to the busy ground-floor men’s department where once he had shopped with his mother, purchasing a new tweed jacket for school. Today he wanted a new dark gray suit, a blazer, a few shirts, a couple of ties, boxer shorts, socks, and shoes.

  It took him forty-five minutes to punch a serious hole in £2,500, and he paid with his Amex card, which would eventually be billed to the government of Jordan via the Paris embassy. He then made his way to men’s sporting goods and purchased a loose-fitting tracksuit and a medium-sized athlete’s duffel bag.

  Casting aside the green Harrods plastic shopping bags, he folded his purchases neatly into the sports bag and walked back to the embassy via Sloane Street and Cadogan Place. He and Shakira dined with the ambassador that evening, in company with two visiting Saudi sheiks.

  The following morning, Sunday, July 29, the day before Admiral and Mrs. Morgan were due to board the London flight from Washington, D.C., Ravi summoned the Audi from the Motcombe Street garage and asked one of the embassy staff to fill the tank, because he and Shakira were going on a journey of almost 150 miles.

  They left at around 11 A.M., both dressed casually in jeans and sneakers, Shakira wearing a blue shirt and denim jacket, Ravi in his black T-shirt and suede jacket. This was his Irish killing gear, although he did not anticipate murdering anyone today. Indeed, he did not expect to meet, or speak to, one other member of the human race all day.

  They once more drove west, but not on the gloomy old A-4 under the Chiswick flyover. This time they sped straight over the top and out onto the wide, fast M-4 motorway. They drove past Heathrow and proceeded for almost an hour to where the landscape begins to rise into the foothills of the Berkshire Downs.

  They left the M-4 at Junction 13 and headed north up the A-34 toward Oxford, finally branching left to the switchback road that leads to the village of West I
lsley. This is land where all villages seem to lie in the folds in the Downs, invisible until you are actually in them.

  Ravi remembered this country well. He had been out here many times with his father, to look at racehorses being worked, to visit his father’s two trainers. In his mind, he recalled the majestic sweep of the Berkshire and Oxfordshire “prairies,” miles and miles of undulating land where wheat and barley are grown, the endless fields split only by narrow roads and the horse-training gallops.

  But most of all, he remembered the long woods, big but narrow growths of trees set high on the summits. In particular, he recalled those above the horse-racing village of Lambourn. He had seen nothing like it, anywhere in the world, these stark stands of high trees, sometimes four hundred yards long and rarely more than a hundred yards deep, like great, dark Medieval castles ranged along the heights.

  Ravi did not know precisely where he was going, but he would know it when he saw it. And he drove through West Ilsley and on through the prairies, through literally square miles of ripening wheat and barley, up through the high village of Farnborough, and then fast down the three-mile-long hill to the town of Wantage, birthplace of King Alfred the Great and the largest town in the fabled Vale of the White Horse.

  From here, he drove along the road that leads to the 374-foot chalk carving of the white horse, which has peered across the valley at Uffington for more than two thousand years. Ravi, however, swerved off up the hill to the sensational view of the Lambourn Downs, right across the rolling land, to the castles he had come for, the long woods. And there they were, ranged before him, forbidding, even in the bright summer sunlight. The one closest to him stood high above one of the most important jump-racing stables in the world, that of the maestro Nicky Henderson, godson of the late Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.

  Like all of the other five long woods, this one was shadowed, several hundred yards in length, and only a hundred yards wide maximum. It did, however, unlike the others, lack privacy, because the road down to Lambourn village ran hard beside it.