“I could stay here, but do you want to chance him seeing me somewhere or coming to the hotel and them paging me? Him learning I’ve avoided him. No, if you want me to, as you said, ‘keep him out of my knickers until Friday,’ the safest play is for me to go out of town until then. This way, no matter how he reacts or what he does, it all rings true.”

  “Was that really necessary?”

  “I told him I was from out of town, so what reason could I give for being here until Friday and not seeing him?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Hey, if you want to see who caused this situation, look in the mirror, pal.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The night I met him, you ordered me to play it as a classy lady with a wild side. Remember? You told me to cozy up to him. To caress his dick through his trousers. What do you think that meant to him?”

  “That you’re the kind of woman he likes.”

  “And that I was ready to get up close and personal. You see the problem? I can’t be wild and hot to trot and in town for the next two days, and, for some unexplained reason, unwilling to see him until Friday. See what I mean? I had no choice.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “You haven’t had all that much experience at this have you?”

  “At what?”

  “Meeting women who want you hard and fast.”

  “I’ve been around, M’Lady.”

  Linda sat down on the bed and pulled two of the decorator pillows behind her back. “Listen, Brad. We’re getting nowhere. You told me to hold him off until Friday, although why, I have no idea. To do that I told him I’d be out of town. I asked if I could see him Friday night. I might add, Friday was your choice, I made it happen. I suggested he show me the view of the river from his high-rise condo. This is how you wanted it. The plan is set. You need to learn to accept yes for an answer.”

  “I don’t think the boss will like this.”

  “Tough. He’s the one who dictated Friday. As for you, well, maybe you’re the one that came up with the bright idea of grabbing his privates. That’s what made him eager to come by my hotel room this morning. I had to do something to keep him out of my knickers, to make Friday work. Tell your boss you forced me to set too fast a pace. I could’ve played interested but somewhat reserved. We could’ve had drinks and dinner or played gin rummy or whatever for a couple days. But no, you forced me to put my hands on him. So, here’s the bottom line: I don’t give a shit if your boss is pissed at you. While I’m gone you can reach me on my cell.”

  “No. We’ll have lunch today. I need to give you your final instructions. We’ll meet at eleven, out in front of your hotel.”

  “All right. Okay. But after lunch, I’m heading out. I don’t want to hang around here and risk Billy seeing me. I’ve already told the hotel I’ll be gone for a couple days just in case he stops by to see me. That’s it. This covers it until eleven today. I’ll follow you in my car, then get on my way after lunch.”

  “Now just hold on, M’Lady. We’re calling the shots here, not you.”

  “Look, dickhead. If I’m going to do this, I need for it to run smooth enough that I have a solid change of not getting caught. I’ll follow you and then leave after lunch.”

  “Where did you tell him you were going?”

  “A shareholders’ meeting. I do day trading, which you probably already know. The meeting is in the Seattle area. If you’re not familiar, that’s across the Columbia River into the state of Washington.”

  With that Linda hung up. She threw a few outfits in her bag, and called downstairs to tell the hotel she’d be out for a couple days, but she wasn’t checking out. She was leaving some things in the room and would be back Friday.

  Over the years, mostly on her deck overlooking the ocean, Linda read a dozen or more stories of people who survived a great challenge. With the fat trimmed off, these stories all had the same underlying theme—I will not be a victim. Right then, Linda knew she, too, would not be a victim, and, no matter what it took, neither would Steffi be a victim, especially not Steffi.

  Minutes before eleven she went down to her car, backed it out and turned around so she could look straight ahead toward the entrance to the hotel. She wanted to see Brad pull into the parking lot. They’d go to lunch. She wanted to hear her final instructions for killing Billy Knight.

  I’ve thought that often enough, that I’m getting used to thinking it.

  20

  SYRIA

  Snipers wait in their hides until they locate their target. They face issues of water, food, latrine, and avoiding being eaten by hungry insects, not to mention snakes, wild pigs, and dogs; all of which are often attracted to a sweaty shooter. Staying still while a snake crawls over your leg or chest. Blowing to chase off a scorpion. Staying hydrated. Squiggling to prevent your extremities from going to sleep or cramping. All this is part of how snipers pass their time. Sheer boredom can also attack the waiting man.

  Emotional issues crowd in for a piece of the waiting sniper’s mind. It’s one thing to kill in the heat and fear of a live battle. It’s another to lie in secret, watching and waiting for a target to unknowingly walk into the ordained path of a bullet. Targets are sometimes battlefield participants, but not always. Today, Ryan’s target was an uncle attending the wedding of his nephew. A family occasion. A common time of revelry.

  The time for Uncle Mustafa to die.

  Snipers tend to be very intelligent. They sometimes take on the mental outlook of a fighter pilot. But, unlike the pilot, the sniper sees the face, the humanity of the target, up close through his scope. Snipers sometimes adopt the mindset of the executioner of an evil person. Other times, a sense of revenge plays a role. Ryan faced his personal hesitance with a legitimate rationalization, the greater good—after all, governments execute the worst among their citizens. Similarly, governments execute the worst outside their citizenry through the use of snipers, or the judicious use of highly targeted military efforts. Those nearby are sadly, but necessarily, collateral damage. The drone’s attack or the sniper’s bullet either can eliminate a known terrorist or another merchant of mayhem. When used well, these killings save many lives. And, collateral damage is minimal compared to traditional wars where the collateral damage from aerial carpet bombing was often enormous.

  The death of this Iranian scientist could, according to Israeli projections, delay or slow Iran’s development of nuclear weapons for close to a year. Eliminating, at least delaying, a vicious attack on Israel, or some other country Iran may target, would save lives. At the very minimum, delay the deaths of innocent people. That time could give Middle Eastern political leaders, as well as the U.N. and Western governments, time to further pursue a meaningful treaty. Allegedly, Israel had already eliminated several Iranian scientists who worked on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Adding Astarabadi to that list could prevent Iran from being able to adequately staff their nuclear ambitions, the perfect end being Iran forced to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weaponry, as unlikely as that was. More likely it was a meaningful delay. Such a delay was why Ryan was lying behind a pile of rocks just off a desolate ridge a little over a thousand yards from where the target was expected to appear. Lying with a semicircle of shrubbery behind him, backed by trees and beyond them, a nearly sheer cliff.

  Ryan was qualified as a sniper up to fifteen hundred yards. The world’s best snipers made kills at more than a mile and a half. He didn’t really like being a sniper. He found the endless waiting distasteful. This mission was a specific assassination. The target was known, as was the target’s expected location. This eliminated the need to lie in a near comatose state endlessly waiting for a possible target.

  Ryan’s sniper hide was far enough that the curvature of the earth, and the centrifugal force of the earth spinning on its axis, as well as gravity all became elements he had to take into consideration.

  Syria is in the northern hemisphere, and, from his hide to the target, the bullet would travel eastward. As he understood the intricacies, this meant the centrifugal force would act opposite of gravity, thus riding the bullet higher. Generally speaking, eastward shots fly higher, westward shots are, conversely, pulled toward the earth’s surface, thus fly lower. North and south as well as shots at the equator or either of the poles have still different dynamics.

  Scientists who deal with external ballistic considerations, as well as other factors that go into precise distance shooting, developed the Long Range Rifle System (LRRS). The computer and software that comprises the bulk of the LRRS was built into the weapon Ryan requested and Mossad provided—the CheyTac Intervention M200 rifle using the .408 CheyTac Cartridge. The cartridges came in a detachable box magazine holding five rounds. He had several magazines, but needing a second, even needing all five rounds in the first, would mean something went awry. The remaining bullets and magazines would, likewise, hopefully not be needed to discourage anyone following him as he escaped the immediate scene, and later the entire country of Syria.

  The external ballistics scientists speak in terms like the azimuth, the Coriolis Effect and the Eötvös Effect. Ryan didn’t really understand a lot of what they said. Nonetheless, on his level, he saw the poetic justice of using the brilliance of what some scientists developed, to eliminate other scientists working on weapons that approached doomsday proportions.

  #

  At 1,000 yards, no one would hear the suppressed spit that accompanied the departing cartridge. The sun pounded the back of Ryan’s neck, the only skin he had exposed. He needed the sun behind him to take the shot. Once the target was down and people realized he had been shot, they tended to look in all directions. Before that happened, Ryan would be gone from his hide. If not, some would look his way. For those few, the sun would be in their faces, causing them to quickly look in a different direction.

  He pulled a camouflage cloth hat from a pouch along his thigh. He put it on his head and secured the chin strap. In the event he had to move fast, he didn’t want the hat flying off leaving his DNA at the scene on a sweaty hatband. He hunkered down and kept his scope focused on the Astarabadi yard.

  The house itself was a modest-sized box, rectangular masonry of some sort that through the scope looked gray or tan, unpainted. The portion of the roof he could see was galvanized tin or some sort of metal, absorbing some of the heat and returning the balance back toward the sun the way a catcher returns a fastball back to the pitcher. The metal looked relatively new. Rust hadn’t yet bitten into it. A good-sized chimney stood at one end, probably for the kitchen. The other end was a wing with a small chimney and windows. A tree extended over the roof of that portion. Ryan guessed this was where the bedroom, or several bedrooms, were located. That position was chosen so the tree would help cool where they slept. One window was broken, its security temporarily reinstated with boards. That corner of the roof was partly caved in from a bomb, or maybe an explosive from an RPG.

  Through his scope he saw people gathering. The crowd was both growing and pressing closer to the back of the house.

  The backdoor suddenly flew open. Mostafa Astarabadi’s brother came out first. Next came his son and soon-to-be daughter-in-law. Then came Ryan’s target. The backslapping and laughter confirmed that everyone was happy. The area around his target was too chaotic for an immediate shot.

  Ryan reset his position and rested his index finger along the side just off the trigger. It was time to steady his breathing. Long, slow, steady inhales, followed by long, slow, steady exhales.

  The well-wishers, mostly the women, pressed closer to the door. Ryan’s target moved away to give the outside guests access to the happy couple. Many of the men, standing some distance away, began firing their AK-47s, light machine guns, and even a few bolt action rifles into the air.

  Ryan continued his calm breathing pattern as he squeezed off his first round. The clothing over Astarabadi’s heart puffed out for a moment, a reaction to the entry of the cartridge. He staggered. A moment later, Ryan again caressed the trigger sending the second cartridge to the target’s head just above the left eye. The drift had been a couple inches to Ryan’s right, given the easterly direction of the shot in the northern hemisphere. The entry point was just above and off the bridge of the target’s nose—from Ryan’s point of view.

  Ryan momentarily kept his watch on the surreal scene as the well-wishers continued their gaiety. The rifles held by the local men still screaming at the sky. The women scurried about in their black dresses. After some seconds, perhaps a minute, no more, someone noticed that Uncle Mustafa had collapsed to the ground.

  By this time, Ryan had the rifle broken down and secured inside his backpack. He slipped the long distance scope and the night vision module into a long fabric sleeve sewn inside the back of his camouflage shirt. It allowed him to carry the scope the way local fighters in some African countries carried long knives. The scope would substitute for a monocular. It could be quickly reattached to the rifle in the event he needed to slow or eliminate anyone in pursuit at a great distance.

  He watched as, one by one, the men stopped firing. Some took shelter while others looked in various directions. Those looking generally toward Ryan, toward the sun, as expected, quickly looked away.

  Ryan half rolled and half scampered down from his position on the backside of the dome and headed downhill in a northerly direction with everything carried in his hands. After twenty yards he ducked behind some brush and slung his backpack over his shoulders. He pitched a few items he no longer needed over the cliff, down into a jumble of rock and shrubs, and stuffed his Glock into his belt holster. A moment later, he was headed north as fast as the local terrain permitted. He had a couple hours of daylight left, followed by an hour of twilight. He wanted to move as far north and west as he could get in that time.

  As darkness came, he slowed to a walk, staying under tree cover as much as possible, with his ears alert for the sounds of trucks or helicopters. Other than a mostly shrouded moon, there was little ambient light in these mountains. This necessitated moving slower than he would have preferred. Eventually, he found a cavity in the ground he could squirm into and rest.

  He ate a little beef jerky and drank some water. He figured by this time the Mossad would have anonymously provided the Syrian SANA news service with the documents that proved Astarabadi had become more Shia than Sunni. That would cause some consternation. Men outside the blood family would argue its significance. Some, perhaps, even whether or not they should bother to hunt the shooter. In the end, the ruling Assad family were Alawite Shia, so the effort would be made, but some of those doing the actual hunting, from the majority Sunni, might feel less zeal.

  In the morning, he would continue in the same direction, which was generally away from where Ahmed El Sayed believed Ryan would meet the drug caravan. He’d paid the head of the smugglers ten-thousand dollars to join with the caravan and stay with them until they neared the Mediterranean coast of Syria, just north of the Lebanese border, in the general vicinity of the Russian seaport. The seaport was the real reason for Russia’s continuing commitment to keeping Al-Assad in power. The caravan was expecting Ryan to approach around noon tomorrow as they moved south on the road nearest the Orontes River.

  If either El Sayed or the smugglers sold that information to the forces hoping to capture Ryan, their betrayal would draw government forces away from Ryan’s actual route to Syria’s Mediterranean coast near its northern border with Turkey. The area near the home of the Bashar Al Assad family whose ancestral beginnings were in the northern coastal Latakia province, or governorate, as the Syrians called such regions.

  Ryan reassembled his rifle, attached the scope and positioned it along his body as he settled into the ground cavity. It would be ready if he needed it due to unexpected events that might occur during the night. He chose the direction that would allow the rising sun to shine into his eyes without being veiled by any trees or shrubs. That would wake him so he could be on the move before those hunting him could begin a concerted effort to find his trail.

  21

  Before the color of morning fully covered the sky, Ryan was startled by a hard poke to his chest. Not sharp, more a sudden thud. He didn’t move, more than to the extent the poke itself caused movement. He opened one eye. The jostle was caused by the muzzle of an AK-47. The other end was firmly in the hand of the Syrian Turkmen Brigade leader Ryan had met with in the foothills outside Aleppo. His lips were barely visible in the midst of his tangled dark beard. His hand went to his bearded face. His index finger crossed where his lips would reasonably be—keep quiet.

  A second rebel touched the leader’s arm. The leader motioned to Ryan, an urgent motion that started at his shoulder. The motion turned the leader, and he led his men off into the brush in the direction of the higher elevations to the north.

  Ryan rose, slung his backpack into position, took his rifle in hand, and followed the band of Turkmen which, by Ryan’s count, at least those he could see, numbered five.

  Off to his left lay an enormous natural bowl of stillness which somehow seemed out of place in ravaged Syria. Something moved in that stillness. Ryan extracted his scope and used it to see a lonely brown bear skirting the edge of a meandering stream. Absent the frictions of the fighting factions of the country, the land seemed almost guileless. After another hundred yards or so, they stopped near a stream in which the water hurried to climb small rocks to cascade back to its origin. There, the five Turkmen broke out into a hearty laugh. One shook his rifle at the sky.

  “We have fun with you. No one is within miles. We are alone.”

  Ryan pushed his hat back on his head and stared at the leader. “You speak better English than you did in Aleppo.”

  Another laugh. “I speak better in my mountains.” He squeezed his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and then released it with great drama, his hand broad, his fingers separated. “You are a good dude. That’s the right word? Dude? Now that we know in your heart you are one of us.”