Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(16)

Although only bits of it looked like a rifle. It had a barrel almost two metres long, wound in a mathematically-precise spiral with three kilometres of fine wire and studded with connector blocks. The breech was the size of a cigarette packet and there was no butt, just a pistol grip. Mounted on top of the breech was a sniperscope the size of a restaurant peppergrinder, the big ones that waiters pester you with when you’re trying to eat your pasta. The whole thing was connected to a hydrogen-cell car battery and set on a small bipod.

Spencer checked his phone again, went to the window, unlocked it, and slid it sideways a fraction. He went back to the rifle and sighted through the scope, went back to the window and slid it open a fraction more, checked again.

He knelt down at the end of the coffee table, took hold of the pistol grip, and lifted the rifle until it balanced perfectly on the bipod. The scope was a beautiful thing, right at the limit of modern non-digital optics. Looking through it, he could see the little crowd of people on the opposite terrace as if they were standing just outside the window. There were what appeared to be dignitaries in formal suits, and larger, stouter men and women who could only have been security operatives of some kind. Some of the people in the group were wearing indefinably old-fashioned clothing – tweeds, knitted ties, waistcoats – and looking about them with the air of Third Worlders visiting New York or a Westerner seeing Shinjuku at night for the first time. Spencer’s heartbeat and breathing began to slow. The view through the scope became the entire world. A great calm suffused him, the only real calm he ever experienced.

He saw, in the crowd, a face he recognised, and his brain performed a calculation, based on the flocks of parakeets and the microlight flying past the window and the air currents he had felt on his face as he stood outside the apartment, which would have taken a supercomputer a week to complete. He channelled pure force, felt it rising from the floor and flowing through him. He ceased even to exist on a sentient level.

He squeezed the trigger.

The coilgun accelerated the round, a fragment of depleted uranium the size of a kernel of corn enclosed in a treated fibre sabot, to a muzzle velocity three times the speed of sound. Venting and suppressors rendered the report no louder than a sneeze. Through the scope, he saw the face he recognised contort suddenly, then drop out of view.

Then he was moving. He had no instructions to clean up after himself; someone else would do that, if it was necessary. He closed the window, went back downstairs, out of the front door, locked it behind him. Back along the terrace to the lift, collecting his bag as he went, no sign of alarm on this side of the arcology, the scene on the other side too far away for any sound to reach him.

In the lift, he plucked the mask from his face and put it in his pocket.

Next level, still no alarms. Nor on the next. Spencer went back through the security checks on a different set of documents to the ones he had entered with. It was five minutes since the shot; he felt no hurry or agitation, even when he had to queue to get through the gate.

Everything had been timed exquisitely. There was an airport bus waiting outside. He was one of the last to get on, and moments later the doors closed and the vehicle moved off.

At the airport, he had just enough time to lock himself in one of the toilets and strip off his outer clothes and the isolation suit. He bundled the suit up and put it in the toilet, cracked an ampoule of enzyme over it and watched it dissolve. When it was gone – it only took a minute – he flushed the toilet, dressed in his travelling clothes, put the clothes he’d worn in the arcology in his bag, and was in time to board his flight.

There followed an increasing blur of airport arrival and departure lounges. At some point he disposed of the clothes he’d worn in Mirny.

Changing planes at Krasnoyarsk, he felt things start to slip away and then reassemble themselves into a long, tiring and not very successful business trip. He was going to get paid anyway, but he worried what his employers would think.

Preoccupied with this thought, he failed to pay any attention to the person who stepped right up to him in the middle of the departure lounge and shone a tiny, very bright light in his eyes. The light stuttered; he could almost hear it, a rapid irregular clicking somewhere deep down inside his head, and he suddenly didn’t feel like doing anything but standing still.

The person with the light was all out of focus. He felt someone rummaging in his coat pocket, then the light flashed in his eyes again and he heard a man’s voice saying something and a distant corner of his mind found it quite remarkable that someone with such a broad West Country accent was speaking to him in an airport in Sibir, then the light flashed again and he realised he was late for his flight and he began to run.





1.





LEWIS WANTED HER to fly from Stansted. Lewis said that she’d be able to lose herself in the crowds at Stansted, particularly at this time of year and if she timed her flight properly. Lewis could f*ck off. It was all very well if, like Lewis, you lived in Bishop’s Stortford, practically at the end of one of Stansted’s runways. It was another thing entirely if, like Gwen, you lived in Greenwich. Faced with a two-hour commute to Stansted and Lewis’s endless prattling about operational security, Gwen booked herself on the midmorning Luxair flight out of City Airport.

Which she ended up missing by fifteen minutes, due to one of those conjunctions of roadworks, Underground signal failures, double-decker buses hitting low bridges, bomb scares and street markets which only ever happens when you need to be in a certain place at a certain time.