Page 111 of Lone Wolf

As he started out, he felt the heat of Friedhoff’s glare at his back. Beside the couch, June blocked his way to the foyer. Her iPhone video was going full blast, an electronic beat underscoring a flurry of fast edits.

“Excuse me,” he said.

She didn’t look up.

Blading his body, he slipped past her and moved to the front door.

She didn’t seem to notice.

49

The Second-Best Sniper Hide in the Kill

Zone

Evan was set up in the second-best sniper hide in the kill zone. A seventh-story corner office at a fifty-meter stagger across the street from the condo building that was Russo Dmitri’s destination. Based on the text from the recovered phone, Evan knew that the Wolf’s bullet was going to arrive in the one-block span unfurled below him.

He’d borrowed this particular office because of its open sight lines and wide vantage, its outswing casement windows, and its gauzy voile roller shades that hid the reflection of his sniper scope. He had not chosen it for its witty poster art (“You Can’t Deposit Excuses!”), nor the ponderous heave and groan of water cycling in the fish-tank-for-one (red veiltail betta), nor its Air Wick Freshmatic dispenser (Hawaii scent).

Though he intended to observe and then track or approach Karissa Lopatina, he’d brought his Savage 110 Elite bolt-action. In the event that she made his position and sought to engage, he didn’t want to find himself having brought binoculars to a sniper fight.

In the unlit office he lay flat on his stomach across a folding table two meters back from the open window and lowered blind. For the past forty-five minutes he’d moved little more than his eyelids. In his thirteenth year, he’d been taught by a marksmanship instructor to hold prone sniper position for as long as was demanded, to move in inches per hour when the necessity arose. Breathing in air perfumed with papaya and hibiscus, he let the reticle creep across the entire area of operations—curb drains and lampposts, windows and parked cars, rooftops and awnings—and land once more on the sniper hide he would have chosen himself if he were the one who was going to execute Russo Dmitri.

The double billboard was perched on the roof of Book Soup across the street from the bleached-yellow extant signage of the old Tower Records. The billboard’s two faces were separated at an angle, meeting at one end like a chevron, providing an isosceles triangle of protection within. A perfect view to a kill.

Currently empty.

He’d identified the hide for the same reasons Lopatina would. Given Dmitri’s likeliest route, the perch provided the straightest line of sight to his vehicle for the longest window of time before its planned turn in to the parking structure. It would widen the Wolf’s range to between seventy-five and four hundred meters, though if he were her, he’d take the shot at the closer end. The dual billboard had a platform as well as plentiful scaffolding beneath, opening up multiple routes across the adjoining roofs and down. The billboard faces would tamp down the echoes and mask the muzzle report, which would buffalo the shotlocs—shot-locator microphones —that the last mayor had ordered built in to most telephone poles. Lopatina would make use of a Killflash ARD honeycomb mesh cover to mute any glint of the scope and supersonic projectiles that would emanate hard-to-trace shock waves. The rounds would be machine-turned, differentially tempered, barrier-blind solid copper projectiles with hardened tips to get through a windshield and body armor with little difficulty. Hanging a wind flag would be too conspicuous, but there was plentiful lightweight debris blowing in the gutters to give her whatever cues she needed at this distance.

Yes: The billboard was the best position for the shot.

Which meant he’d wait here in the runner-up spot, patient as a mantis.

These blocks of the Strip were one of Los Angeles’s pressure points, an epicenter wired to the life of the city. The bookstore’s sign glowed in red and yellow neon. The billboard threw a spa-cool blue light. Car headlights washed across bars and restaurants, across decked-out hipsters and past-their-prime rockers. The thump and pulse of unseen dance floors set dark-tinted windows vibrating, throwing back wobbling reflections of cars and streetlights, rendering them aquatic.

A squiggle of movement along the sidewalk caught his attention, a FWIP scuttling underfoot, largely ignored by passersby and partiers. The delivery robots had become part of the scenery here, like parking meters and trash cans, just one more piece of the urban landscape to step around.

He’d unclipped his fob watch and placed it on the table in front of him next to his RoamZone. The Vertex clockwork was originally commissioned for ordnance timing by the British War Office during World War II. Its luminescent hour markers and hands showed 9:13. Another forty-seven minutes until Russo Dmitri’s approximate arrival.

Evan felt his first ping of uncertainty. He’d anticipated that the Wolf would have been in position by now.

He waited and waited some more.

The facing billboard read, NO PATIENCE REQUIRED. SAME DAY DELIVERY.

He tried to think of anything of enduring worth he’d ever gotten that hadn’t required patience.

If he hadn’t been watching precisely the right spot with 4X thermal night-vision magnification, he would not have seen her.

A flicker within the darkness. A gloved hand gripping a piece of scaffolding. A flash of a masked face. A ripple of altered shadow.

And then a quarter-second blink of visibility as she strobed across a shaft of ambient light and out of sight behind the V of the billboards. He’d caught only the quickest glimpse of the sniper rifle at her side, but that was all he needed.

A Savage 110 Elite Precision bolt-action chambered in 7.62x51 mm NATO and enhanced with a Phoenix-S clip-on thermal scope—just like the one in Evan’s hands. But hers looked to be a right-hand bolt-action to his left.

A mirror image.

Since she was a pro, she wouldn’t be recoil-averse, but the Savage 110’s adjustable stock could be suited to her petite stature, and as a common rifle it was suited for a shoot-and-dump. Rewinding the mental snapshot he’d taken of her, he noted the titanium tube extending the muzzle. His guess was a SureFire suppressor pinned in place; the Wolf wouldn’t mess with a cheaper variant that screwed on and off while also screwing with the ballistics.