She drew her weapon and eased the door open a crack. Peered into the hallway. Empty. Nothing out of place. A third of the way down the length of the corridor she could see a sign on a closed metal door that read ROOF — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. She slipped into the hallway, eased the door closed quietly behind her, and began walking rapidly toward the roof access.
47
Nikolai was hot. He had been huddled on the roof for two hours on a sunny day in early June. If there was one thing Nikolai Primakov hated, it was heat. Cold he knew. Cold he could deal with. In seventeen years growing up in Yakutsk, and then years of service to the Soviet government, Nikolai had lived and worked in some of the most frigid, forbidding places on earth.
But here, today, the sun caused the heat to radiate off the asphalt roofing gravel, making the temperature skyrocket. He was thankful the mission would soon be complete and he could climb down off this roof and out of the damned sunshine.
Nikolai had burned a lot of nervous energy simply waiting. After killing the guard and dumping his body next to the roof’s access door, he had lugged his cart up the stairs and then hustled down to the seventh floor entrance. There he removed the belt sander he had been using to prop the door open and placed it on the stairs while he used a strip of duct tape to seal the latch open. Then he eased the door closed and retreated back up the stairs to the roof.
With the door’s one-way locking system, if the tape were to fail and the latch were to operate as designed, the door would open only from the interior and Nikolai would be trapped on the roof, unable to escape after shooting Reagan. There was a metal ladder fastened to the rear of the building to be used as a fire escape, but Nikolai fully expected that escape route to be blocked within seconds after the U.S. president fell.
After ensuring the viability of his escape route, Nikolai returned to the roof and rolled his cart toward the front of the building, struggling to pull it through the asphalt. He stopped next to a gigantic air conditioning unit that rose out of the roof like a monstrous tumor. He snugged the cart up against the west side of the unit, using the massive structure to shield him and his equipment from prying eyes in the closest buildings.
To counteract the possibility of being seen by a worker on the east side of the Minuteman Insurance Building, Nikolai dug through his cart, pulling out two signs attached to portable metal stands. He unfolded the signs and placed one six feet away from each corner of the air conditioning unit, facing the adjoining building. The signs read, CAUTION, CONSTRUCTION ZONE — HARD HATS REQUIRED!
After erecting the signs, Nikolai pulled off the heavy canvas tarpaulin he had used to conceal his guns and other equipment. A large clamp had been affixed to two of the corners, and after unfolding the tarp, he lifted one corner up to the edge of the air conditioning housing and clamped it home, as he had planned on his reconnoitering visit, then repeated the process on the other side. He pulled the remaining two edges as far away from the unit as he could manage, then anchored them to the roof with the belt sander on one side and a heavy portable jigsaw on the other.
By the time he had finished, Nikolai had transformed the east side of the air conditioning unit into a portable work area. Stamped on the side of the tarp, in bright red letters, were the words DC HVAC INC–INSTALLATION AND SERVICE — AVAILABLE 24 HRS A DAY. The KGB’s theory was that hiding in plain sight would be the most effective way to avoid detection on the roof of a Washington building. Residents of large cities were so accustomed to construction sites and repair work on infrastructure that eventually the workers became almost invisible. It was simple human nature. People saw what they wanted to see.
Once he had placed his signs and set up the tarp, Nikolai finalized his preparations and then ducked his head and disappeared out of sight under the canvas lean-to. He had stayed there ever since, munching on his candy bars and sipping on his water, not even leaving the protection of the tarp to take a leak. When nature called, he simply unzipped and pissed into one of his empty water bottles.
To pass the time once day had broken, he disassembled and reassembled the Dragunov, working methodically, then checked the magazine on his Makarov pistol and sharpened his combat knife. None of it needed to be done, but he did it anyway. Checked his watch and discovered it was barely past nine. Did everything again.
Out on Columbia Road, eight stories below in front of the Minuteman Mutual Insurance building, Nikolai could hear the city as it groaned and creaked through another late spring morning, the nonstop rumble of cars and trucks, horns and voices floating through the air, and the occasional far-off scream of a siren. Early in the morning, the sounds of the police cars and fire trucks had caused Nikolai to tense up and become instantly wary, but he quickly concluded there must be no shortage of crime in America’s capitol city because the sirens seemed at times to come almost nonstop.
The time passed slowly, although Nikolai was well acquainted with the prospect of lying in wait for his prey. He had hunkered down much longer than this plenty of times, spending one memorable mission shivering for three days inside the hollowed-out trunk of a massive downed oak tree on the outskirts of Moscow waiting for a local party commissar who had become a little too fond of the wife of a Red Army general.
The general had commissioned Nikolai privately, paying him out of his own pocket, not that Nikolai cared. Somehow the guilty party had been tipped off that the general was gunning for him. The man had holed up inside his house like a scared rabbit, refusing to move. Eventually he had, though, peeking out the back door — who knew why? — and Nikolai had put a bullet through the center of his forehead.
After three days.
In the bitter chill of a Moscow winter.
So in many ways, to Nikolai this was a walk in the park. The only thing complicating the mission was the stature of the target, but Nikolai had eliminated high-profile men before and had always been as cold as the Siberian wind when the time came to pull the trigger. Today would be no different.
Finally it was time to assassinate the President of the United States. Nikolai wished he could have napped at some point, but hadn’t felt comfortable enough in his surroundings to do so. If someone discovered the taped latch on the roof access door and came to investigate, Nikolai knew he would have only seconds to eliminate the intruder and do it quietly enough to avoid jeopardizing the entire mission.
He stretched. Yawned. Checked the time. Nine-fifty-five. President Reagan’s remarks were to take place at ten o’clock exactly. The KGB had no way of knowing how long the speech would last, but the consensus had been that it would likely be short and to the point, given the fact that the U.S. President was not a young man and the speech was to take place outdoors in the sun and heat of June in Washington. That meant Nikolai needed to be in position and ready to go the moment Reagan stepped to the podium.
He shook out his arms, then did a quick set of deep knee bends to get his blood flowing. Nikolai crawled to the edge of his shelter and poked his head out the side, like a turtle gazing out of its shell. He looked first at the much higher structure next to the Minuteman Building. Saw nothing. Banks of windows soared overhead, but there were no faces looking down at him, at least none that he could see.