A Raging Storm

CHAPTER EIGHT

Storm knew the instant that he saw her and heard the Russian accent. In her late twenties, she was wearing functional shoes, skin-tight designer jeans, and a dark gray sweater pulled over a low-collared, gray, wide-striped shirt whose tail peeked out. A professional women’s dive watch was on her wrist. She wore no jewelry but did have a thin silver belt around her waist that Storm suspected could be an effective garrote in her well-manicured hands. He put her at five-foot-six and 119 pounds. She had long black hair pulled back from unblemished bronze skin. Her dark eyes were highlighted perfectly by thin brows.

Storm knew the SVR — the successor to the Soviet KGB — didn’t believe women were emotionally stable enough to be trained as operatives. Instead, the Russian intelligence service used them as secretaries, couriers, and sometimes as prostitutes in covert operations. They also sent them abroad as illegals, giving them fake backgrounds and sending them into enemy countries to embed themselves in the local culture and gradually work their way into useful positions to spy. But they never used them as Vympel soldiers or on protective details.

If Storm was correct, this woman was not a native Russian but was from one of the Soviet’s former republics whose intelligence services didn’t share Moscow’s machismo attitude. He suspected she worked for Ivan Petrov.

The overnight flight proved uneventful. Unfortunately, Storm found himself seated next to a rather plump middle-aged woman who drank four glasses of Riesling, fell asleep instantly, and began snoring with an open mouth.

As soon as the flight landed, Storm exited, keeping an eye on both the late arriving passenger and Showers. After clearing Customs and Immigration, he ducked into Heathrow’s Virgin Atlantic clubhouse, where he used his laptop in one of the private rooms to send a photo to Langley of the female passenger. He’d snapped the picture with his cell phone when she’d gotten up to use the toilet after dinner on the transatlantic flight. The agency’s facial recognition program identified her in less than a minute.

Antonija Nad was a former member of the Special Operations Battalion in the Croatia armed services. The BSD, as it was known, focused on airborne assault and behind-enemy-lines combat. It was one of the most respected special forces units in the world. It was also one of only two European forces that allowed women to fight in specialized units. She’d resigned from the Croatia military a year ago to work for PROTEC, a security firm based in London.

He had guessed correctly. She had to work for Petrov.

Storm checked the time. By now, Showers and Nad would have exited Heathrow. He walked to the airport’s rental counters to get a car and an hour later pulled up outside the London Marriott Hotel Park Lane across from Hyde Park. Storm never understood why Americans booked rooms in American hotels when they traveled overseas. It was like eating McDonald’s in Paris. But someone in the government, who had arranged the tickets and hotels, had gotten them adjoining rooms there.

Because Showers was still being briefed at Scotland Yard, she hadn’t checked in. Storm decided to find a room elsewhere. He drove through the neighborhood until he spotted a cozy bed-and-breakfast a few blocks from the hotel. The grandmotherly owner at the antique reception desk said one room was available, which he rented with cash. Jones had warned him to not trust anyone. He was taking his advice.

The flat was on the second floor of what used to be a high-end Hyde Park row house, with huge rooms. But that had been when the sun never set on the Union Jack. Since then, the building had been divided into small units barely bigger than a double bed. He’d stayed in worse. It was clean and had Internet access. Best of all, no one would know he was here.

Before he’d left Langley, Storm had collected crime scene photographs taken by the FBI. Taking a seat at an oak desk from the 1850s that faced his room’s street window, he sorted through the photos, stopping when he reached a batch that had been taken on the roof of the Capitol Police headquarters, where the sniper had hidden.

The shooter had used a bag of sugar to support the barrel of the 9.8-pound Dragunov rifle. The bag was a readily available prop that no one would consider suspicious if he was seen carrying it. The Dragunov was a gun that could easily be disassembled and hidden in a briefcase.

The Dragunov’s barrel had been equipped with a flash suppressor to help hide the shooter’s location. But it didn’t have a silencer. This meant the sniper had not been worried about the sound of the gunshot.

Like all professionals, the assassin had known that there would be two actual sounds when he pulled the trigger. The sound from the initial bang — the muzzle blast — would be masked by the noisy, rush hour street traffic around the headquarters building. The second sound would be the sonic crack that a bullet makes as it flies through the air. The bullet would create a sonic wave behind it as it sped forward. Anyone hearing the crack would look forward in the same direction as the bullet was going, not backward where it had come from. There was no need for him to use a silencer. Only the muzzle flash mattered, especially at dusk.

Storm looked at snapshots of the Dirksen Building taken from the sniper’s viewpoint. The distance was roughly four hundred yards, or the length of four football fields, the equivalent of 1200 feet. Storm knew the Dragunov was most effective between 600 meters and 1300 meters, or 1,970 feet and 4,270 feet, which meant the fatal shot actually had been taken much closer than during combat. It would have been an easy shot for a skilled marksman.

He turned to a photo of the Dragunov and examined the weapon. Ordinarily, the rifle’s stock was wood with a hole cut out of its center to make the gun lighter. Someone had modified the rifle in the photo by attaching a shorter, solid wooden stock to it. Why?

He tucked the photos away, stretched out on the bed, and used the remote to turn on a television hanging from the ceiling. He flipped channels until he found the BBC’s twenty-four-hour newscast. Agent Showers suddenly appeared on the screen with a uniformed bobby on one side and a man identified as a Scotland Yard detective on her other. The announcer said:

“The FBI has sent one of its agents to London to interview Russian oligarch Ivan Petrov as part of its investigation into the recent murder of United States Senator Thurston Windslow. The senator was slain in his Washington, D.C., office on Capitol Hill by a sniper who remains at large. The agent, April Showers, refused to comment, but sources tell the BBC that the FBI considers Petrov to be a ‘person of interest’ because of his close relationship with the slain senator.”

As he and Showers had both feared, someone at Scotland Yard had tipped off the British press about their arrival. Showers was paying a price for playing by the rules.