He arrived back at his chalet several hours later and made himself lunch, his own recipe for bruschetta con funghi to start and two large sausage sandwiches for his main course. Just what he needed. He followed it with a protein shake and swallowed a handful of supplement pills. After bathing he sat naked on his bed and drew the handgun from the holster attached to the underside. He withdrew the magazine and popped the rounds, reloading them in the order they’d come out. He put the gun back.
It was late morning, the sun streaming between the Venetian blinds on the east wall. He walked over to the window on the west wall, pulled the string sharply to raise the blinds. The valley stretched off into the distance, the village of Saint Maurice visible at the centre, its triangular roofs topped with white. Pine trees covered the mountainsides. Snow-capped peaks lined the horizon.
There had been a time when Victor had almost believed he could separate his life from what he did for a living. Such a time had long passed. Now he realized he was merely just alive, that he didn’t really live. Normal people didn’t hide themselves away in remote mountain villages, protected by reinforced doors and three inches of armoured glass. It was hard to remember when it had been any different.
He lived alone for his own protection. Here nobody knew him and he knew no one in return. He found it easier, too, to live away from cities, from people. It was hard to miss something he didn’t see every day. Living alone had never been difficult for him, but total solitude was something Victor had been forced to learn to deal with. But like any skill he needed to survive, he had mastered it eventually. Staying busy was the most important element. When he wasn’t working he spent hours each day keeping himself in top physical condition, hours more training and honing his skills. Weeks may go by between contracts, but his was a full-time vocation. The rest of the time he climbed, skied, read, played the piano, and took frequent trips to explore the globe.
There were some things that such distractions could not replace. Victor’s idea of a relationship was a call girl he liked enough to use more than once and who was good enough an actress to pretend she didn’t find his touch repellent.
Looking out over the picturesque valley it was almost possible to pretend what happened in Paris wasn’t real. Here he was just another wealthy businessman enjoying an isolated mountain retreat. Maybe he wouldn’t leave. He had enough money stored away to live comfortably for years if he was careful. Maybe when it had run out he could take a regular job, teach languages or even climbing. If he wanted to teach though, he knew he was going to have to work on his people skills. Maybe in time he could actually start to live like a regular person. Assuming he could remember how to.
The first step would be to smash the flash drive into a thousand pieces, throw them into a ravine, and forget he’d ever taken the Ozols contract. He had escaped whatever enemies wanted him dead, and no one knew he was here. He could stay hidden, take no more contracts. They would never find him here. He nodded.
Yes, it was time to get out.
He started to turn away from the window when his eyes were drawn to a point high in the forested hills that lay to the west of the chalet. He saw a glint, a tiny flicker of light. The reflection of the sun on metal.
Or glass.
He understood what it meant too late, seeing the small, bright flash that appeared in the same place an instant later. He started to move to his left when a hole exploded through the window before him.
The bullet hit him in the middle of his chest and everything went quiet. He saw the cobweb of cracks in the reinforced glass, saw the tiny hole in the centre of the web. No sound reached his ears except the dull echo of his heartbeat.
Victor’s vision faltered. Lines blurred into one another.
The window seemed to move sharply away from him, and the ceiling came hurtling down. He didn’t understand but then the back of his head smacked against the polished floorboards. He tried to breathe, gasped, struggled to suck air into his lungs.
He raised a hand, inched his fingers along his bare chest, felt sticky blood, pain as he touched the hot bullet in his flesh. He’d expected to find a gaping hole with blood pumping freely, but the end of the bullet was protruding from his skin. It hadn’t penetrated the sternum.
The chalet’s polycarbonate and glass-laminate windowpanes would stop even high-velocity rifle rounds… not quite, Victor thought.
The glass hadn’t stopped the bullet but had slowed it considerably, so that, when it had struck, its kinetic energy was almost spent. Ignoring the burn, Victor pulled the bullet from his skin and tossed it aside. It exhausted him to do so. He tried to stand but couldn’t remember how to tell his limbs to move. The ceiling beams melted into one another above him.
He realized what was happening but could do nothing to stop it. The bullet’s impact had sent ripples of hydrostatic shock through his body, interrupting the normal rhythm of his heartbeat. His body didn’t understand what had happened and so was doing the only thing it knew how to do in the face of intense shock or trauma.
It was temporarily shutting down.
The shooter would have watched the bullet hit and Victor fall but wouldn’t be able to see him as he writhed on the floor, incapacitated but not dying. But all he would have to note was the thickness of the cracked window to realize that Victor was still alive. And he would come to finish the job.
Victor’s eyelids closed.
CHAPTER 20
14:18 CET
The sniper peered through his Schmidt and Bender 3-12X scope at the thickness of the windowpane. It was made up of alternate layers of glass and plastic. He recognized it straight away. Armoured. Shit.
McClury silently berated himself for not noticing before. He should have spent more time studying the house’s defences, but he consoled himself with the fact this had been a rushed job from the very start. Beginning with a phone call twenty-four hours ago, he’d been told to head straight for Geneva. In the back of a car, he’d been given the name of a town, a location, a photograph.
It stank to high hell of a cleanup.
McClury folded back the rifle’s bipod and stood, disturbing the light covering of snow that lay across his body. His weapon was an Accuracy International L96, a bolt-action rifle made by the Brits. In McClury’s opinion one of the best all-round rifles in the world for this type of work. Precise and powerful but not too big or heavy. He’d used enough of them in the past to qualify his opinion.
He wore white Gore-Tex pants, a jacket with a hood, and a white ski mask. The rifle’s furniture had been wrapped in strips of white electrical tape. McClury unbuttoned and unzipped the jacket and threw it off. It was camouflage and protection against the cold but impeded movement. Underneath he wore a black thermal shirt. He felt the chill immediately, but for now he could live with it. He left the white ski mask in place.
His hide was a little under five hundred yards away, overlooking the target’s chalet. McClury had been set up just under the crest of a snowy outcrop dotted with trees to hide his silhouette and to make him virtually invisible.
He’d been holed up outside for twelve hours straight, watching the house the whole time, waiting for the perfect shot, eating and drinking while lying down, urinating into a bottle, defecating into a plastic bag. On his own he couldn’t watch both exits at the same time and had set up with a good view of the front of the chalet, expecting the target would at some point leave that way. The target would have been dead a second after stepping out the front door. No such luck.