Beyond the main portico of the station a curious glass roof rippled out into the center of the main square. The road curved around a paved area. To the right of the entrance a bright yellow DHL van was collecting the day’s deliveries. To the left was the short-term parking lot. It was filled with almost identical “people carriers” and family cars. Bicycles were chained up against every post that supported the glass roof. Even through the glass, the sky above was like some crystal blue mountain stream. Across the street was one of those chain-store cafes that had turned the simple pleasure of drinking a coffee into visiting an emporium. On the far side of the square he saw a building almost entirely constructed of glass. It might have been a design school or a fancy office block, he couldn’t tell. It was at odds with almost every other building around it.
There were signs pointing every which way. He followed the pedestrian route down to the Rhine. The path divided into two, half for cyclists, half for walkers. There was no one for three hundred yards ahead of him. Konstantin took his time walking, looking left and right like a tourist drinking in the medieval architecture. A small cafe spilled out into the street. The eight wooden tables were empty, but two of them had dirty espresso cups on them and the corner of a napkin that fluttered in the wind. Next door, buckets of tulips, sunflowers, velvet-headed roses and other colorful bunches of flowers had been arranged around the doorway. There was a white handwritten sign in the door saying “Closed,” but a striking middle-aged woman stood in the window, fixing the display. Seeing him, she smiled. Konstantin smiled back. The windows of the first floor were dark, as there were no skylights. He turned to follow the angle of trajectory from the first floor as best he could, but it was far from ideal. In the shooter’s place he wouldn’t have used it. That was enough for him to dismiss it.
Down at a waterfront kiosk he bought a packet of unfiltered cigarettes. The man took his money. They exchanged pleasantries. Konstantin mentioned the barriers and the shopkeeper burst out laughing. “Where have you been for the last month, my friend? The Pope’s coming to cleanse us of all of our sins,” he said, still grinning. “In a few hours you won’t be able to walk here for people. It’ll be crazy.” He didn’t smoke, so he didn’t have a lighter to light the cigarette he put in his mouth. The barriers ran all the way along the riverside. A few people had already taken their places at the front as though they were queuing for pop royalty at a sellout concert. They had their picnic baskets and neat little tripod stools. He liked the way a father took a chocolate bar and broke it into squares, giving one each to his wife and the two children.
“Any trouble?”
The shopkeeper kept on smiling. “Here? Trust me, the only reason kids hang around on street corners is because they’re waiting for the lights to change.”
Konstantin smiled at that. Most people believed the towns they lived in were safe, at least averagely so, but looking around him he knew he could probably take the shopkeeper at his word. There was some industry, so that meant there was probably some friction, and given the tight economic climate all across Europe, that friction probably escalated into the odd fist fight on a Friday night. Fairy tale twin town didn’t look like it had a high instance of breaking and entering, car thefts or other antisocial crimes. There was very little in the way of graffiti that he had seen, even on the tunnel walls or along the wall that kept pedestrians back from the water’s edge. Of course that could have been due to clean-up crews for the papal visit.
And as idyllic as it looked on the surface, plenty of nastiness could be happening behind those cookie-cutter windows and he would have been none the wiser.
Konstantin hopped over the metal barrier and walked down the center of the road. He intended to walk the parade three times before the Popemobile drove the Pope to the steps of St. Florin’s.
Contrary to what he had told Lethe there was almost nowhere along the entire riverside part of the parade that would make for a good, clean shot. He walked over to the wall and looked across the water up at the citadel. If the shooter was up there, he didn’t have a prayer. It made sense from a tactical standpoint. The Popemobile was a specially adapted Mercedes Benz M class SUV. There was a special glass-enclosed “room” built onto the rear of the vehicle. The glass would be bulletproof, of course, and the roof reinforced with armor plating. To pierce the glass, the shooter would need to be good enough to fire a fatal triangle-three shots in a triangle so tight they literally joined the dots. An experienced sniper would be capable of making the shot in the right conditions, but then it came down to trajectory, distance, wind, whether it was a moving target, reaction times of the security detail and all of these other intangibles the shooter couldn’t know before he lined up the shot.
Taking the shot either as the principal entered or exited the protection of the bulletproof cage made more sense but lacked the spectacle. In an intense moment of paranoia he wondered if someone couldn’t have tampered with one of the windows, prepping it for the shot? The agents riding along would be expecting the glass to protect the Pope. They wouldn’t expect it to betray them.
He reached for his cell and called Lethe. “Two things,” he said before Lethe finished saying hello. “One, get the security detail to triple check the integrity of the glass on the parade car. Two, run the utility bills on every address in a mile radius of the route. I’m thinking the shooter will have found himself a spot two weeks, ten days ago. He could be the kind of cold pro used to privation, but the guys in Berlin were a joke. Which means it is unlikely-but it’s possible-that this guy might have turned the water on. No phone, the cell coverage is fine. Three, look for buildings that are supposed to be empty, leases out, that kind of thing.”
Lethe didn’t point out that he was only supposed to say two things, not three. “Will do.”
The more he thought about it, the less likely it felt that he was looking for a shooter.
The window of opportunity was so small, and certainly this waterside route didn’t offer more than one or two possible vantage points, which in itself discounted them because any shooter good enough to hit a fatal triangle on a moving target from the kind of distance they were talking about would be good enough to know that statistically only one or two possible vantage points meant, barring miracles, a zero chance of getting away from the scene. It was uncommon that really good shooters went on suicide missions.
Fanatics went on suicide missions.
This brought him back to thinking about Mabus and Miles Devere.
“Four things,” he said, calling Lethe back up.
“Fire away.”
“You’ve got Devere’s cell, can you trace it?”
“As long as the battery is connected I can run GPS tracking, sure. Wonders of modern technology. There’s no such thing as off the grid.”
“Don’t tell me you can do it, tell me where he is,” Konstantin said. He turned the cigarette over and over again in his fingers. He could understand why nervous people smoked: it gave them something to do with their hands.
Lethe gave him an address in Jesuit Square, part of the Old Town.
Thirty minutes later Konstantin was staring up at one of the curtained windows, sure that the shadow looking back down at him through it was Miles Devere. There was a beautiful symmetry to it. Hunter and hunted locking eyes without either man quite knowing his role in the play of violence. Who was the hunter? Who was the hunted? It appealed to Konstantin’s overdeveloped sense of the theatrical. He was the first to break eye contact, walking toward the building. He wondered if Devere even knew who he was. But of course he did, the Russian reasoned. A man like Devere had to be a control freak. This was his game. He wouldn’t have been able to bear not knowing all of the pieces that were in play.