Red Rabbit Part 57

"Sparrow, Ryan. See anything likely?" Jack asked his lapel.

"Negative," the voice in his ear answered. "I'm scanning the crowd around you. Nothing to report."

"Roger," Jack acknowledged.

"If he's here, he's b.l.o.o.d.y invisible," Sharp said, standing next to Ryan. They were eight or ten yards from the interlocking steel barriers brought in for the Pope's weekly appearance. They looked heavy. Two men to put them on the truck, or four? Jack wondered. He discovered that the mind liked to wander at times like this, and he had to guard against that. Keep scanning the crowd, he told himself.

There's too many G.o.dd.a.m.ned faces! the self responded angrily. And as soon as the f.u.c.ker gets into place, he'll be looking away.

"Tom, how about we edge forward and sweep along the railing?"

"Good idea," Sharp agreed at once.

The crowd was difficult, but not impossible, to slip through. Ryan checked his watch. Fifteen minutes. People were now edging against the barriers, wanting to get close. There was a belief from medieval times that the mere touch of a king could cure the ill or bring good fortune, and evidently that belief lingered-and how much more true if the man in question was the Pontifex Maximus? Some of the people here would be cancer victims, entreating G.o.d for a miracle. Maybe some miracles actually happened. Docs called that spontaneous remission and wrote it off to biological processes they didn't yet understand. But maybe they really were miracles-to the recipients they certainly were exactly that. It was just one more thing Ryan didn't understand.

People were leaning forward more, heads were turning to the face of the church.

"Sharp/Ryan, Sparrow. Possible target, twenty feet to your left, standing three ranks back of the barrier. Blue coat," Jack's earpiece crackled. He headed that way without waiting for Sharp. It was hard pressing through the crowd, but it wasn't a New York subway crush. n.o.body turned to curse at him. Ryan looked forward....

Yes . . . right there. He turned to look at Sharp and tapped his nose twice.

"Ryan is on the target," he said into his lapel. "Steer me in, John."

"Forward ten feet, Jack, immediately left of the Italian-looking woman in the brown dress. Our friend has light brown hair. He is looking to his left."

Bingo, Jack thought in silent celebration. It took two more minutes and he was standing right behind the c.o.c.ksucker. h.e.l.lo, Colonel Strokov.

Hidden in the thickness of the crowd, Jack unb.u.t.toned his jacket.

The man was farther back than he would have done it, Jack thought. His field of fire was limited by the bodies around him, but the woman directly in front of him was short enough that he could easily draw and fire right over her, and his field of view was fairly unrestricted.

Okay, Boris Andreyevich, if you want to play, this game's going to surprise you some. If the Army or the Navy ever look on heaven's scenes/They will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines, motherf.u.c.ker.

Tom Sharp took the chance to slide through the crowd in front of Strokov, brus.h.i.+ng past as he went. On the other side, he turned in Ryan's direction and reached up with his fist into the sky. Strokov was armed.

The noise of the crowd rose in frequency, and the languages all melded into one murmuring hiss of noise that suddenly went dead still. A bronze door had opened out of Ryan's view.

Sharp was four feet away, just one person, an adolescent boy, between him and Strokov . . . easy for him to dart right and get his hands on the man.

Then a cavalcade of screams erupted. Ryan inched back and pulled out his pistol, thumbing the hammer back, putting his pistol fully in battery. His eyes were locked on Strokov.

"King, the Pope is coming out now! Vehicle is in view."

But Ryan couldn't answer. Neither could he see the Popemobile.

"Sparrow, I see him. Ryan/Sharp, he will enter your field of view in a few seconds."

Unable to say a word, unable to see His Holiness approach, Jack's eyes were locked on his target's shoulders. You can't move your arm without having them move, too, and when he did that . . .

Shooting a man in the back is murder, Jack. . . .

In his peripheral vision, Ryan saw the front-left corner of the white jeep/golf cart slowly moving left to right. The man in front of him was looking in that general direction . . . but not quite . . . why?

But then his right shoulder moved ever so slightly.... At the bottom of Ryan's field of view, his right elbow came into view, meaning that his forearm was now parallel to the ground.

And then his right foot moved back, ever so slightly. The man was getting ready to- Ryan pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the base of his spine. He could feel the vertebrae of his backbone on the muzzle of his Browning. Jack saw his head rock back, just a few millimeters. Ryan leaned forward and rasped a whisper into his ear.

"If that gun in your hand goes off, you'll be p.i.s.sing into a diaper the rest of your life. Now, real slow, with your fingertips, hand it back to me, or I will shoot you where you stand."

Mission accomplished, Ryan's brain announced. This f.u.c.ker isn't going to kill anybody. Go ahead, resist if you want. n.o.body's that fast. His finger was so tight on the trigger that if Strokov turned suddenly, the pistol would go off on its own accord, and sever his spine for all time to come.

The man hesitated, and surely his mind was running at the speed of light through various options. There were drills for what to do when someone had a gun in one's back, and he'd even practiced them in his intelligence academy, but here, now, twenty years later, with a real pistol against his spine, those lessons with play guns seemed a very distant thing, and could he bat the gun away so fast to keep it from destroying a kidney? Probably not. And so, his right hand came back just as he'd just been told....

Ryan jumped at the sound of one-two-three pistol shots, not fifteen feet away. It was the sort of moment in which the world stops its turning, hearts and lungs stop functioning, and every mind has an instant of total clarity. Jack's eyes were drawn to the sound. There was the Holy Father, and on his snow-white ca.s.sock was a spot of red, the size of a half-dollar, in the chest, and on his handsome face was the shock of something too fast for him yet to feel the pain, but his body was already collapsing, slumping and turning to the left, folding into itself as he started to go down.

It required all of Ryan's discipline not to squeeze the trigger. His left hand s.n.a.t.c.hed the pistol out of his subject's hand.

"Stand still, you motherf.u.c.ker. Don't take a step, don't turn, don't do anything. Tom!" he called loudly.

"Sparrow, they have him, they have the gunman. The gunman is down on the pavement, must be ten people on him. The Pope took two, possibly three, hits."

The reaction of the crowd was almost binary in character. Those closest to the shooter jumped on him like cats on a single unlucky mouse, and whoever the shooter was, he was invisible under a mound of tourists, perhaps ten feet from where Ryan, Sharp, and Strokov stood. The people immediately around Ryan were drawing away-rather slowly, actually....

"Jack, let's get our friend away from here, shall we?" And the three men moved into the escape arch, as Ryan had come to think of it.

"Sharp to all. We have Strokov with us. Leave the area separately and rendezvous at the emba.s.sy."

A minute later, they were in Sharp's official Bentley. Ryan got in back with the Bulgarian.

Strokov was clearly feeling better about things now. "What is this? I am member of Bulgarian emba.s.sy and-"

"We'll remember you said that, old man. For now, you are a guest of Her Britannic Majesty's government. Now, be a good chap and sit still, or my friend will kill you."

"Interesting tool of diplomacy, this." Ryan lifted the gun he'd taken from Strokov-East Bloc issue, with a large and awkward can-type silencer screwed on the business end. Sure as h.e.l.l he'd been planning to shoot somebody.

But whom? Suddenly, Ryan wasn't sure.

"Tom?"

"Yes, Jack?"

"Something was more wrong than we thought."

"I think you're right," Sharp agreed. "But we have someone to clear that up for us."

The drive back to the emba.s.sy ill.u.s.trated what had been to Ryan a hidden talent. The Bentley had an immensely powerful engine, and Sharp knew how to use it, exploding away from the Vatican like a drag-racing top fuel eliminator. The car screeched to a halt in the small parking lot next to the emba.s.sy, and the three of them went in through a side door, and from there to the bas.e.m.e.nt. With Ryan covering, Sharp handcuffed the Bulgarian and sat him in a wooden chair.

"Colonel Strokov, you must answer for Georgiy Markov," Sharp told him. "We've been after you for some years now."

Strokov's eyes went as wide as doork.n.o.bs. As fast as the Bentley had gone, Tom Sharp's mind had been driving faster still.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, we have these photos of you leaving Heathrow Airport after killing our good friend on Westminster Bridge. The Yard was onto you, old boy, but you left minutes before they got permission to arrest you. That's your bad luck. So, now, it was our job to arrest you. You will find us rather less civilized than the Yard, Colonel. You murdered a man on British soil. Her Majesty the Queen does not approve of that sort of thing, Colonel."

"But-"

"Why are we bothering to talk with this b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Tom?" Ryan asked, catching on. "We have our orders, don't we?"

"Patience, Jack, patience. He's not going anywhere at the moment, is he?"

"I want to have a phone to call my emba.s.sy," Strokov said-rather weakly, Ryan thought.

"Next he'll want a lawyer," Sharp observed humorously. "Well, in London you could have a solicitor to a.s.sist you, but we are not in London, are we, old boy?"

"And we are not Scotland Yard," Jack added, taking his lead from Sharp. "I should have just done him at the church, Tom."

Sharp shook his head. "Too noisy. Better we just let him . . . disappear, Jack. I'm sure Georgiy would understand."

It was clear from Strokov's face that he was not accustomed to having men discuss his own fate in the way that he had so often determined for himself the fates of others. It was easier to be brave, he was finding, when he was the fellow holding the gun.

"Well, I wasn't going to kill him, Tom, just sever his spine below the waist. You know, put him in a wheelchair the rest of his life, make him as incontinent as a baby. How loyal you suppose his government will be to him?"

Sharp nearly gagged on the thought. "Loyal, the Dirzhavna Sugurnost? Please, Jack. Be serious. They'd just put him in a hospital, probably a mental hospital, and they'll wipe his a.s.s once or twice a day if he's lucky."

That one went through the hoop, Ryan saw. None of the East Bloc services were big on loyalty-down, even to those who'd shown a lot of loyalty-up. And Strokov knew it. No, once you screwed the pooch, you were in very deep s.h.i.+t, and your friends evaporated like the morning mist-and somehow Strokov didn't strike Ryan as one who had all that many friends anyway. Even in his own service he'd be like an attack dog-valuable, perhaps, but not loved or trusted around the kids.

"In any case, while Boris and I discuss the future, you have a flight to catch," Sharp told him. It was just as well. Ryan was running out of impromptu lines. "Give my regards to Sir Basil, will you?"

"You bet, Tommy." Ryan left the room and took a deep breath. Mick King and the rest were waiting out there for him. Someone at Sharp's official residence had packed his bags, and there was an emba.s.sy minibus waiting to take them all to the airport. There, a British Airways Boeing 737 was waiting, and they caught it just in time, all with first-cla.s.s tickets. Ryan was next to King for the flight.

"What the h.e.l.l," Jack asked, "are we going to do with him?"

"Strokov? Good question," Mick replied. "Are you sure you want to know the answer?"

CHAPTER 32.

MASQUED BALL.

ON THE TWO-HOUR FLIGHT back to Heathrow, Ryan availed himself of three miniatures of single-malt scotch, mainly because it was the only hard stuff they had. Somehow, his fear of flying receded into the background-it helped that the flight was so smooth that the aircraft might as well have been sitting still on the ground, but Ryan also had a head full of other thoughts.

"What went wrong, Mick?" Ryan asked over the Alps.

"What went wrong was that our friend Strokov wasn't planning to do the a.s.sa.s.sination himself. He got someone else to do the actual shooting."

"Then why was he carrying a pistol with a silencer on the front end?"

"You want a guess? I'd wager he was hoping to kill the a.s.sa.s.sin himself and then blend into the crowd and make his escape. You can't read everyone's mind, Jack," King added.

"So, we failed," Ryan concluded.

"Perhaps. It depends on where the bullets went. John said there was one hit in the body, one perhaps in the hand or arm, and one other that might have gone wild, or at worst was a peripheral strike. So, whether the man survives or not is up to whatever surgeon is working on him now." King shrugged. "Out of our hands, my friend."

"f.u.c.k," Ryan breathed quietly.

"Did you do your best, Sir John?"

That snapped his head around. "Yes-I mean, of course. We all did."

"And that is all a man can do, isn't it? Jack, I've been in the field for, what? Twelve years. Sometimes things go according to plan. Sometimes they do not. Given the information we had and the manpower we were able to deploy, I don't see how we could have done any better. You're an a.n.a.lyst, aren't you?"

"Correct."

"Well, for a desk boffin, you acquitted yourself well, and now you know a good deal more about field operations. There are no guarantees in this line of work." King took another swallow of his drink. "I can't say that I like it, either. I lost an agent in Moscow two years ago. He was a young captain in the Soviet army. Seemed a decent sort. Wife and a young son. They shot him, of course. Lord only knows what happened to his family. Maybe she's in a labor camp, or maybe in some G.o.dforsaken town in Siberia, for all I know. You never find that out, you know. Nameless, faceless victims, but victims still."

"THE PRESIDENT IS p.i.s.sED," Moore told his senior executives, his right ear still burning from a conversation ten minutes before.

"That bad?" Greer asked.

"That bad," the DCI confirmed. "He wants to know who did it and why, and he'd prefer to know before lunch."

"That's not possible," Ritter said.

"There's the phone, Bob. You call him and tell him that," the Judge suggested. None of them had ever seen the President angry. It was, for the most part, something people tried to avoid.

"So, Jack was right?" Greer offered.

"He might have made a good guess. But he didn't stop it from happening, either," Ritter observed.

"Well, it gives you something to say, Arthur," Greer said, with a little hope in his voice.

"Maybe so. I wonder how good Italian doctors are."

"What do we know?" Greer asked. "Anything?"

"One serious bullet wound in the chest. The President ought to be able to identify with that," Moore thought out loud. "Two other hits, but not serious ones."

"So, call Charlie Weathers up at Harvard and ask him what the likely prognosis is." This was from Ritter.

"The President's already talked to the meatball surgeons at Walter Reed. They're hopeful but noncommittal."

"I'm sure they all say, 'If I was on it, it'd be okay.' " Greer had experience with military doctors. Fighter pilots were shrinking violets next to battlefield surgeons.