The stock and barrel were a bit heavy, but sturdy. The longest piece of the rifle assembly was its 27.7-inch barrel. Disassembled, the rifle and scope fit easily into a large backpack.
Calderon’s cell phone vibrated. After the second pulsed vibration, he put the phone against his ear. “Talk to me.”
“McKenna just pulled out of the hospital parking lot and turned north,” Mr. Kong said. “Should I follow him?”
“No.” Calderon punched a button and ended the call.
He crawled fifteen feet through an opening in the brush, then edged over several feet to his right, taking the position he had chosen earlier that day. Now he was invisible to anyone who might stumble onto the dirt trail behind him.
In almost complete darkness, he silently and expertly assembled the rifle, taking his time as a mental video of the shot played over and over in his mind. Calderon closed his eyes and allowed the image of a perfect shot to penetrate the rifle barrel as he screwed it into the stock. The mechanics would flow naturally if his weapon understood the job it had to do.
Next, he took the Leupold Mark 4 scope from his bag, placed it over the top of the rifle, listened again, then turned it ninety degrees and heard the satisfying snap as it locked in place.
Calderon dropped into the prone position and unfolded the bipod. He held the rifle in a firing posture and peered through the scope, pivoting from left to right, sighting targets at random: a man walking his dog on the street below; an acorn-shaped finial atop a wooden fence; an oval address plate on the front wall of a home across the street. He quartered each target in turn and waited for his finger to squeeze the trigger.
He stopped and listened before pushing the ten-cartridge magazine into the gunstock. When he was satisfied that the area was clear, he popped it into place. It gave back a metallic click.
Finally, he turned to where he hoped his prey would appear. Light streamed from three second-story windows and a French door that opened onto the upper deck. He wouldn’t get an open-air shot tonight. His target would remain inside. As long as the gutless coward passed in front of a window, he was dead.
Doing it this way grated on Calderon. He wanted to see the shock and pain in his quarry’s eyes. He wanted to watch the man squirm when he gutted him like a fish. He wanted to talk to the sonofabitch as he bled to death.
But his client had insisted. It had to be done this way. His client had said that there were “considerations outside of Calderon’s purview”—What the hell did that mean? — things he simply had to accept for the good of the project.
Calderon pulled a clear plastic Baggie from his rucksack, used tweezers to remove a paper wrapper from it, then placed the wrapper in a sprig of weeds about six feet from his position.
He then pulled a small roll from his bag, untied the ends, and unfurled a long, thin rubber pad on the ground. It wasn’t for comfort. The insulated padding would protect him from the air-ground temperature gradient that tightened muscles and caused the body to flinch at the worst possible moment.
Once everything was ready, he scanned the target area again with his spotting scope, stopping occasionally to check the wind direction and velocity.
Nothing moved in the target area. No human forms, no telltale shadows.
Calderon checked his watch. If his quarry didn’t show within the next ten minutes, he would have to abort the mission.
He exhaled heavily and stretched his muscles.
At that instant headlights appeared in his quarry’s driveway.
Luke ignored the sudden and narrow break in Walter’s curtains as he started up the steps to his duplex. His landlord’s prying nature didn’t concern him.
What did unsettle him was the ether-like miasma that was engulfing his world.
He had spent the past two hours sitting in Kolter’s with his father and Ben, speculating about potential connections between Kate and the dead children. They had come up empty-handed. While Zenavax’s work on a malaria vaccine provided a conceivable link — it was possible that the company might conduct clinical tests in that region of the world — his father had pointed out that it was an exceedingly thin thread. Guatemala was an unlikely choice for such testing given the relatively low incidence of malaria in that country.
Luke had gotten lost in the esoteric exchange between his father and Ben about alphaviruses, but ultimately that theory led to a similar dead end. The selective tissue destruction evident in both children looked nothing like the indiscriminate and generalized toxicity that Elmer had encountered with his initial flu vaccine prototype.
Just as Luke reached the top of his steps, a rattling sound interrupted his thoughts.
He spun around and saw his neighbor positioning a trash bin alongside the curb.
Luke turned back, unlocked the front door, and shoved it open with his shoulder.
Calderon dropped onto the rubber mat and lifted the buttstock of his rifle. He set the magnification to give him a full view of the target area, and aligned his eye with the optical axis of the scope so that his pupil was exactly two and one-quarter inches from the eyepiece.
A figure flashed across the southernmost window.
He placed the stock of the rifle back down on the mat and grabbed the infrared range finder, focusing on the window frame where the figure had appeared a second ago: 211.2 meters.
The room looked as if it had a depth of about three meters. He set the range on his Leupold to 212 meters. He wouldn’t take the shot if the target was standing more than one meter from the window.
Calderon drew the stock of the rifle into his shoulder again, cinched the sling tighter, and reacquired the window with the crosshairs. He worked the windage and elevation knobs on his scope. When everything was set just as he wanted it, he ran the bolt, waggled the fingers of his right hand in a piano-playing motion, then placed his right thumb through the hole in the butt stock.
He sighted the window again, fighting to restrain the exhilaration that raced through him like an electrical current.
His breathing slowed. Rolling waves of relaxation slackened the muscles in his torso and arms. When he was calmed, he looped his index finger inside the trigger guard.
Once inside, Luke quickly checked the carpeting under all three windows along the rear of his apartment, the naps of which he had brushed smooth before leaving that afternoon. Then he went into the kitchen and inspected the mat under the door that led onto the upper deck.
There were no shoeprint outlines.
The disquiet in his world was turning into a low rumble, but he knew that part of the turmoil was of his own making. In one brief moment, he had done more to help Erickson’s legal case than anything the football player’s minions could have plotted. Now they had a witness who could testify to his aggressive nature.
He had played right into their hands.
But what troubled him even more was the realization that he had wanted to hurt Erickson’s investigator. Old instincts — violent instincts — had overtaken him without a struggle. He had allowed it to happen, and that truth didn’t sit well.
Luke walked into the living room, clicked the TV remote as he dropped onto the couch, and started flipping through the channels in search of a distraction.