“How many gunmen were there?”
“Five, I think.”
“And the civilians?”
“Seven wounded, forty-two dead.”
Yocke was poised to ask another question when the walkie-talkie squawked to life and the lieutenant walked away with the device to his ear.
The reporter looked around helplessly. Twisted and bloody bodies lay everywhere. Packages and attaché cases scattered about, here and there a shopping bag. He walked over to one woman and carefully picked up the wrapped Christmas presents that lay strewn randomly around her. There must be something, some gesture he could make to the arbiter of man’s fate that would commend this woman’s humanity. A prayer? But the grim god already knew. He placed the packages in a neat, pathetic pile beside the slack body.
She had been shot in the back, apparently as she tried to run from the obscene horror behind her.
Forty-two! My God!
Where will it end? Yocke wondered gloomily as a wave of revulsion and loathing swept over him. He averted his eyes and turned away.
Henry Charon stood in an empty third-floor office on L Street and scanned the traffic on the street below yet again. From where he stood he had an excellent view of the streetlight and the cars queuing there waiting for the light to turn green. And he could see the drivers.
The drivers sat behind the wheels of their vehicles waiting for the light to change with the look of distracted impatience that indelibly marked those who endured life in the big city. Some of them fiddled with their radios, but most just sat staring at the brake lights on the car ahead and occasionally glancing at the stoplight hanging above the intersection. When the light turned green they crept across the intersection and joined the block-long queue for the next light.
This was a good place. Excellent. A stand, like that one above the red-rock canyon where he had killed seven elk over the years. The elk would come up through the canyon from the aspen groves every evening about the same time.
He would be along soon. He was a creature of habit, like the elk. Regardless of traffic or weather, he always came this way. Or he had on the four evenings in the past that Henry Charon had watched. Yet even if he chose another route this evening — there was a chance that would happen, although slim — sooner or later he would again come this way. That was inevitable, like the evening habits of the deer and elk and bear.
Beside Charon was the rifle. This one was less than perfect; no doubt the stock was poorly bedded. But it would do. This would not be a long shot. No more than sixty yards.
A round was chambered in the rifle and the magazine contained three more. Henry Charon rarely needed more than one shot but he was ready, just in case. Although the habits of living things were predictable, random events happened to us all.
Henry Charon didn’t move and he didn’t fidget. He stood easily, almost immobile, watching. His ability to wait was one of his best qualities. Not waiting like the urban commuters, impatiently, distractedly, but waiting like the lion or the fox — silent, still, ever alert, always ready.
His eyes left the cars and went across the pedestrians and the people looking at headlines and making purchases at the sidewalk newsstand on the far corner beside the entrance to the Metro station. The vendor was warmly dressed and wore a Cossack hat with the muff down over his ears. His breath made great steaming clouds in the gloomy evening.
Charon’s restless eyes scanned the cars yet again, then watched them creep across the intersection. One man blocked the crosswalk with his car when the light changed on him and he sat unperturbed staring straight ahead as pedestrians walked around the car, front and back, and glared at him.
Now he saw it — the car he was waiting for. Henry Charon lifted the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. Yes. It was him.
Charon looked at the cars ahead of his man with a practiced eye, estimating how many would get through the next green light. About six. That would bring this car down to third in line. Perfect.
Henry Charon laid the binoculars down and picked up the rifle. He checked the safety. Still on.
He looked again at the pedestrians, at the other cars, at the bag lady on the far side of the street rooting through a trash can.
The light changed and the traffic moved. One, two, three … six! Yes. The car he wanted was right there, third one back.
Henry Charon raised the rifle to his shoulder as he thumbed off the safety. The crosshairs came immediately into his line of vision without his even tilting his head. He put them on the driver, on his head, on his ear. Automatically Charon breathed deeply and exhaled. He was squeezing the trigger even before all the air had left his lungs.
The report and recoil came almost immediately. Charon brought the scope back into line and looked.
Good shot!
He laid the rifle down and walked briskly to the door, pulled it open and closed it behind him, making sure it locked. He passed the elevator and took the stairs downward two at a time.
Out onto the street — around the corner from where the victim sat dead in his car — and away at a diagonal. Charon stripped off the latex gloves from his hands and thrust them into the first trash can he came to. His car was in a garage five blocks away. He walked briskly, unhurriedly, scanning the faces of the people on the sidewalk with his practiced hunter’s eye.
With all of the wounded and most of the dead removed from the underground Metro station, Jake Grafton, Yocke, and Tarkington went back the way they had come in. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hayden Land, was standing with the major general in the middle of a knot of people in uniform by the main entrance.
Grafton went over to the group and stood where General Land could see him and he could hear everything that was said.
Toad Tarkington stood near the door to the mall. He pointed the rifle he was carrying at the sky and examined the action. His face was intense, grim.
A question popped to mind as Yocke watched Toad. Would the naval officer have used it? No, he had made the mistake of asking the wrong question once already today, and as he looked at Toad, he thought he knew the answer. Yocke was still feeling the aftereffects of the adrenaline. Somehow, for a reason he couldn’t quite fathom, Toad seemed the proper person to tell. “I was pretty pumped up back there.”
“Uh-huh,” Tarkington muttered and glanced at the reporter, then resumed his scrutiny of the weapon.
Yocke couldn’t let it alone. “You know, you can watch a hundred movies and see the carnage every night in the hospital, but nothing prepares you for that feeling when the bullets are zinging by and you realize that every second could be your absolute last.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that, life for you might stop right here. Like it did for all those folks down there on those subway platforms.”
Toad finished his inspection of the rifle and held it, butt on his hip, pointed at the sky. He surveyed the knot of senior officers and the smooth-faced soldiers in battle dress and glanced up at the steel-gray sky. “I don’t know how much life insurance you got,” Toad said, “but if you’re going to trail along behind Jake Grafton, you’d better get some more.” Without waiting for a reply Toad wandered off to find the soldier who had lent him the rifle.
Yocke watched him go.
The brass was still in conference. And here comes Samantha Strader, as I live and breathe. She marched over to the group and joined it. His reporter’s juices flowing, Jack Yocke managed to squeeze between the shoulders of two aides.
One of the men talking was not in uniform, although he had that look. Yocke whispered to the man beside him, who whispered back, “FBI. Guy named Hooper.”