In the rear of the apartment, the kitchen is lit, and carrying through the beaded curtain is the static-filled sound of an animated radio announcer rattling on in a language with which Evan is unfamiliar. Tajik? Bukhori?
How little he knows of this life he is about to extinguish.
The hanging beads slice his view into vertical slats. The man sits at the small chipped table, facing away, spooning soup from a bowl. An old-fashioned radio rests on the counter beside a hot plate. A prosaic little portrait: Man Eating Dinner Alone.
Evan steps through the curtain, the clattering beads announcing his presence. The man turns and looks back through his wireless spectacles. There is a moment of recognition, and then the lines of his face contract in sorrow. There is no anger or fear—only sadness. He nods once and turns slowly back to his soup.
Evan shoots him through the back of the head.
As the man tilts forward, his chair slides back a few inches and his body remains resting there, chest to the table’s edge, face in the soup.
Evan lifts him out of the soup, upright into the chair, and cleans his face as best he can. His left eye is gone, and part of his forehead. As Evan returns the dish towel to the counter, he comes upon a crude clay ashtray, shaped by a child’s hand.
He vomits into the sink.
After, he finds a bottle of bleach in a cabinet and sloshes it into the drain.
As he exits onto the dark staircase, he becomes aware of a man easing up the stairs, drawn perhaps by the sound of the gunshot. The man’s left fist gleams even in the shadow.
They freeze midway down the stairs.
The man is all dark silhouette to Evan, just as Evan is to him. The man’s head dips, orienting on the pistol in Evan’s hand. The man lowers his own gun, opens his other palm in a show of harmlessness, and shakes his head. Evan nods and brushes past him.
Ten minutes later, halfway back to the city, his knotted chest still prevents him from drawing full breaths.
His next stop is the abandoned textile factory. As he enters, darting through the warren of giant fabric rolls, the trim Estonian appears suddenly. He holds a no-shit Kalashnikov, its curved magazine protruding like a tusk. Evan has brought a pistol to an AK-47 fight. They are standing by the industrial weaving loom where they met before.
The Estonian cocks his head with benign curiosity, but his grips stays firm on the assault rifle, his small eyes hard like pebbles. Even at this hour, roused from sleep, he wears neatly pressed trousers and a tailored shirt, though one flap remains untucked. The door to the office behind him is closed, but a smudged glow illuminates the fogged glass of the window.
The men square off in an uneasy truce, not aiming their weapons but not putting them away either.
“I need your help,” Evan says. Slowly, cautiously, he raises the Makarov, then fiddles with the slide. “It keeps jamming.”
The Estonian’s smile appears, a neat arc sliced through soft pink cheeks. “That is because you did not buy it from me.” He reaches for the gun. “But seriously, this is a statistical near impossibility. Makarovs do not jam.”
Evan knows this, but it was the only excuse he could fabricate in the moment.
The Estonian shakes his hand impatiently. Beneath his other elbow, the muzzle of the AK nudges forward. “Well?”
Evan is forced to relinquish the pistol.
The Estonian takes it, then sets down his own weapon on the loom. He drops the magazine, examines it, then grins at Evan’s ignorance. “The underside of the magazine feed lip has a burr from grinding on the clearance.”
With the toe of his loafer, he hooks a cardboard box and tugs it out from beneath the loom. Digging through the contents, he produces a new magazine, jams it home, and hands the pistol back to Evan.
“I’m sorry,” Evan says, and shoots the man through the chest.
The Estonian falls back, his palms slapping the concrete. He is trembling, his arms wobbling violently. A cough leaves a coat of fine spittle on his blue lips. His pupils track up in little jerks, find Evan. Never has Evan seen such terror in another person’s face.
Evan crouches, takes his manicured hand. The nails are clean and cut short. The Estonian clutches Evan’s fingers, grips his forearm with his other hand, pulls him closer. The partial embrace in another context would be affectionate. Perhaps it is even now. Evan lowers him gently to the floor, cradling his head so it doesn’t strike the concrete. He holds the man’s hand until it goes limp.
Then he rises, walks back to the humble office, and opens the door. The girl, bloody-lipped and ashen, lies balled up on the mattress. A heroin kit rests on a metal folding chair. She is naked, spotted with bruises, skin tented across bones. Her left shoulder looks dislocated. It is impossible that she would not have heard the gunshot.
On a metal desk across from the mattress, a cigar box brims with bills. Evan picks it up, sets it on the floor by her thin arm. “You’re free to go now,” he says.
She rolls her eyes languidly toward him. “Where?” she says.
He leaves her there with the box full of cash.
That night he beds down at a different hotel, logging in to e-mail and leaving a draft for Jack. “Operation closed.”
He checks departure times out of the second-largest airport of the neighboring country. Tomorrow will be a busy day.
And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Now
1
Face in the Crowd
A man melted into the throng of tourists gathered along the E Street walkway. He was neither tall nor short, muscle-bound nor skinny. Just an average guy, not too handsome.
A Washington Nationals baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes to thwart the security cameras. He’d shoved rolls of dental cotton above his molars to alter his facial structure and thwart the biometrics software that the Secret Service ran on every face in the crowd. He wore fitted clothing that showed the contours of his body, no out-of-season overcoat that might conceal gear or weaponry and draw unwanted focus.
He had flown to D.C. from the West Coast—as he had the time before and the time before that—under a passport in another name. He’d rented a car using a different identity and checked in to a hotel using a third.
He slurped the Big Gulp he’d picked up at 7-Eleven, another prop to augment the T-shirt from the National Air and Space Museum and the Clarks walking shoes he’d bought last week and tumbled in the dryer with dirty rags so they’d look broken in. The soda tasted like what it was, sugar soaked in corn syrup, and he wondered why people willingly put this type of fuel through their system.
He knew which visual triggers to avoid; he wasn’t sweating and was careful to make no nervous movements—no protective hunching of the shoulders or jittering from foot to foot. He didn’t carry a bag or a backpack and he kept his hands out of his pockets.
Evan Smoak knew the Secret Service protocols well.
He’d spent the past half year assembling intel piece by piece and tiling it into a larger mosaic. He was nearing the final stages of general reconnaissance. It was time to get down to mission planning.
He set his hands on the bars of the eight-foot-high gates. The trees of the South Lawn formed a funnel leading to the White House, which would have been a fine metaphor for Evan’s own narrowed focus if he were the type to bother with metaphors.
Setting his Big Gulp on the pavement, he raised the camera dangling around his neck and pretended to fuss with it. In order to slip it between the bars of the fence, he had to remove the hood from the 18-200mm Nikkor lens. When he put his eye to the viewfinder, a zoomed-in image the White House’s south side loomed unobstructed.
Lost in a mob of tourists taking pictures, he let the lens pick across the grounds. The obstacles were impressive.
Strategically positioned steel bollards dotted the perimeter.
Subterranean beams waited to thrust up from the earth at the slightest provocation.
Ten feet back from the fence line, ground sensors and high-res surveillance cameras lay in wait, ready to capture any flicker of movement or tremble of the earth on the wrong side of the bars.
Uniformed Division officers stood high-visibility posts at intervals across the terrain, backed by an emergency-response team equipped with FN P90 submachine guns. In keeping with Secret Service stereotypes, the agents wore Wiley X sunglasses, but the shades had a strategic advantage as well: A would-be assailant could never be sure precisely where they were looking. The high-visibility posts kept people in the crowd from seeing all the security measures they were supposed to miss.