Both compounds were tools of the trade for what he did, and with ten operational kills over the past year, he figured that he only had half a dozen more years to work before he could retire to the villa in the South of France he had his eye on.
The front door of the condo building opened. There he was, the fat fuck representative, adjusting his skewed tie.
I hope it was good for you, because you are soon gonna be bait for the mountain lions.
He climbed out of his car and looked around. There wasn't anyone else around. People paid for their privacy around here and during his earlier surveillance of the area, he figured he could cut Willis up with a chainsaw in the middle of the street and no one would pay attention.
Settling his nose plugs in, he took a deep breath. Putting his thumb on the trigger of the canister, he walked briskly up towards Willis like he was going into the building.
As he walked past, he held the canister up and gave Willis a full five-seconds spray of it in the face. There was a grunt as he passed out, crumbling to the ground in a heap.
Brody looked around to see if anyone had noticed. No one. He was prepared to administer fake first aid to an apparent heart attack, but it looked as though he wouldn't need to do mouth to mouth to this filthy bastard.
He first checked for a pulse. It was there, weak, but it was there. Based on his past experience and the representative's body weight, he would be out for at least three hours.
As he hoisted the inert form over his shoulder, he thought about how this particular assassination would be unique to the wild back country of Colorado — being left out to die hundreds of miles from any help, alone, hungry and hallucinating. No one would ever find the body.
Besides, the rough country was beautiful this time of the year.
He staggered under his burden, hurrying as best he could — this was his first congressman and if he accomplished this job quickly and well enough, he might to get to kill a senator.
Leo had settled down to wait, crawling completely inside himself. His binoculars never stayed very long in one place, but constantly moved, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He had already drawn a picture of the surrounding terrain on a piece of notebook paper in front of him, with the appropriate distances marked as he had determined using his laser rangefinder.
The only problem he could see was the angles involved. If he had to shoot into a building from where he was located, at a target that was a great deal higher than him, that could add a serious complication. The best place to have been was hidden in one of the buildings that looked down on the front of the business — that way he could have a decent chance of being at the same level.
He had no doubt that he could quickly calculate the cosine of the angle and figure that into any shot he needed to take, but he might have to shoot through building materials to reach the sniper. The bullets he had designed were very stable over extremely long range, but he had never shot them through the side of a building to see how that affected their trajectory and penetration. And at an extreme range, it might not even have enough energy to reliably kill what he was shooting at.
The idea was to put a very large hole in whatever you were shooting and let the air out. He had experimented with hyper-velocity, small caliber bullets, but too often they disintegrated on the way to the target, leaving merely a lead spray in the air — pretty, but not very accurate or effective.
The recoil of his rifle was beyond brutal and his shoulder still ached from his shooting session yesterday. But he hoped that all he would need to take was only one shot.
The only other vehicle in the lot was a fiberglass bodied van that said “Peerrman Plumbing” on the side. Leo had watched it carefully — what the hell was a plumbing truck doing sitting in an empty parking lot? But there was no movement from the vehicle and it looked to have been parked there all night. It was suspicious enough that he made special note of it on his shooting diagram including the range and where he would shoot if someone emerged from it. Maybe there was someone inside it, watching him — he'd read that some surveillance vehicles had special mechanisms that would lock the suspension so that you could practically Disco in the back and not have it move at all.
He wished that he had a thermal imager — not that it might not penetrate the sides of the fiberglass van, but it had other possible uses. It could also show any place in the nearby offices that were occupied — and could contain a sniper who was gunning for Jackie.
Speaking of Jackie, this must be one hell of a shock for her, being the hunted. Leo really didn't know what that felt like, always having been on the other side of the rifle. He figured that the cops or feds would figure out who James Phillips really was and then someone would put two and two together along with the hotel credit card usage in Denver and start asking the right questions.
He planned to be long gone before that happened. He could live so far off the grid that he didn't exist. Hidden in his truck was over fifty thousand dollars in well-used bills and three times that amount in untraceable gold bullion. Food and ammo was all he needed to be happy and mostly that came cheap.
Would Jackie want to join him? She was pleasant enough of a companion — mostly quiet, which is what he, a man who spent most of his life inside his own head, liked. Maybe she would be completely different when the weight of people trying to kill her was lifted.
Hell, he had gone his entire life alone and any change would have to be carefully considered, weighed and calculated, very much like a thousand yard rifle shot in gusting winds.
Forcing himself back to the task at hand, he took another sweep around the area with his binoculars. When was Jackie going to present herself as bait?
Allan Wells peered into the laptop's screen. For fourteen hours of sitting, the only thing stirring was some plastic grocery sacks and an old newspaper blowing in an ill breeze. The targeting computer had locked onto them, but quickly discarded them as the possible target. He was proud of his software and hardware. Ideally, and someday, he could hire some throwaway minion to set up the rifle system while he sat on a beach somewhere getting ripped on drinks with flowers and umbrellas in them. But that was still at least two versions away.
He didn't like being so close to where the target could appear, but he couldn't help it — the tall buildings around the site prevented any line-of-sight communications and there weren't any wireless Internet access points that he could hijack for his own use. His equipment had told him that there was a high speed access point right in the building he sat next to, but with his limited skills, he couldn't break into it.
Having gone over the targeting package on the subject he was to shoot, he figured it was Jackie Winn who had set it up. Damn the bitch, he mumbled to himself.
He stood up and stretched, careful not to bang his head on the low ceiling of the van. It had started life as a delivery truck for a bread company that had gone out of business and he had picked it up for a little over a song. It had a new engine, rebuilt transmission and had been completely gutted inside. There was a decently equipped bathroom, a small kitchen including a microwave and refrigerator, a hidden locker containing a rifle and ammunition and a handgun. The rest of the van was outfitted so that he could maintain and practically rebuild his rifle system. Off in a corner was a futon, which was stacked with servos and controllers.
After this job, he was going to take a little time off while he figured out what direction he wanted to take with his remote sniper system. There was a long list of improvements that were possible, but he was working himself to the conclusion that he should pretty much start from scratch. Sure, he could reuse some of the software, but the rest of the design needed to be scrapped. Technology had changed so much over the past five years that he could practically build the entire system with off-the-shelf components, micro-controllers, computer, sensors and servos. The ideal system would be cheap, easy to maintain, could be fitted with several different rifles — including a semi-automatic — and be a great deal easier to calibrate and maintain. Heck, if he did it right, there might be a decent market for such a system with the military and police departments. The news was full of reports of unmanned drones killing bad guys all over the world, why not an unmanned sniper system? With facial recognition software, it could be hidden someplace and wait for the appropriate target to come strolling by and kill it.