Tim Stevens - Jokerman

Tullivant settled his right eye against the telescopic sight and waited.

The car carrying the target crawled along the driveway like the beetle that was making its unhurried way along the twig inches from Tullivants face. Tullivant tracked the vehicle in the crosshairs of the scope: an executive car, a silver Mercedes R Class, probably armour plated. In its wake a thin skein of dust dissipated into the morning air.

The Mercedes was moving from right to left, from Tullivants point of view. He took his eye away from the scope for a moment to obtain a broad view of the scene again. On the left-hand side of his visual field the driveway expanded into a gravelled forecourt which hugged the front of a large, Georgian-era house. Three more cars were parked before the house, and a knot of people thronged around them.

The Mercedes pulled up on the forecourt and stopped. Across the expanse of lawn, Tullivant heard its engine shut off.

He twitched his neck to one side sharply to get rid of a crick that was threatening to develop, shuffled his shoulders a little, and applied his eye to the scope once more, ignoring the cool sticky sting of sweat which had gathered between his collar and the skin of his throat. Nine in the morning, and the August heat was already threatening to soak the country in lethargy as it had done every day for the last five weeks.

On the distant forecourt, all four doors of the Mercedes had opened and men were getting out. Three of them, including the driver, had the solid sinewy movements of professional fighters. The fourth, like the others in a suit, was smaller, less confident. The cluster of people whod been standing near the other cars began to move forwards. There were five of them. Once again, the majority had the watchful, springloaded demeanours of warriors; but one was a civilian. A woman.

Tullivant held the scope steady on her profile. She was in her middle fifties, with bobbed highlighted hair and a business suit.

The Home Secretary.

Tullivant had always thought it a strange title for the second most senior member of the government. It sounded like somebody a middle-class professional might employ to manage their household administrative tasks. Her face was impassive, no welcoming smile lighting it up. Not even a politically motivated rictus.

The civilian whod stepped out of the Mercedes approached, extending his hand. The Home Secretary took it briefly. It was a functional shake, not the faux-hearty grip of a photo-opportunity. There were no cameras to capture this particular meeting.

Well, none if you discounted the hidden CCTV devices trained on the forecourt. The ones Tullivant, more than half a kilometre away, was out of sight of.

His exact distance from the small party in front of the house was six hundred and ten metres. His rifle, a Canadian C14 Timberwolf, was famous for its anti-personnel accuracy at a range of up to 1,200 metres. The margin was a large one.

A modified sports shooting weapon, the Timberwolf had been the standard sniper rifle of the Canadian Armed Forces for nearly a decade. Tullivant hadnt served in the Canadian army wasnt Canadian at all but hed developed an affinity for the Timberwolf, and it was now his tool of choice for this type of work.

He felt the first flicker of an increased pulse rate, the swelling in his chest which signalled that his breathing was aligning itself with a state of imminent action, and he knew the moment had arrived.

Tullivant had positioned himself along a thick horizontal branch of an ancient, colossal oak. Among the dense late summer foliage, in his dark green overalls and olive balaclava, he knew he was all but invisible.

Through the scope, the Home Secretarys face leaned towards that of the small civilian man, as though they were about to kiss. Her lips were moving in a murmur.

Tullivant centred the crosshairs on the side of the head, just in front of the ear.

He drew a moderately deep breath.

Released it slowly.

Squeezed back on the trigger as he did so.

The rifle was fitted with both a muzzle flash hider and a sound suppressor, but the thump and crack of the firing mechanism was startlingly loud in Tullivants ear.

The bullet that left the muzzle did so at a velocity of something under one kilometre per second, and was capable of bringing down a large game animal.

The head disappeared from the view afforded by the telescopic sight.

A ragged cluster of yells rose up from the party in the forecourt, sending jackdaws cawing and wheeling up above the trees around Tullivant. Somewhere below the canopy of the forest, some kind of four-legged beast took flight. A deer, perhaps.

Tullivants instinct was to drop down off the branch onto the floor of the forest and run.

Instead, he maintained his position, roving with the scope until he saw what he wanted amidst the blur of human movement in front of the house.

The crumpled body, its head an indistinct smear.

Tullivant swung down below the branch, holding on with one hand for a moment while he gripped the rifle in the other, and dropped, landing bent-kneed on the thickly carpeted forest floor.

Near his feet was a canvas bag. He removed the magazine from the rifle and dismantled the weapon quickly, zipping the components into the bag.

Leaving the balaclava on for now, he began to run, loping among the trees, taking just enough care not to trip over a raised root or snap his ankle at the bottom of an unseen hole.

Instead of making his way straight to the road which ran along the edge of the forest, Tullivant headed towards it at a slant, so that at one point he was almost moving parallel to it.

Ahead, through the trees, he saw the van. A plain white van, one of thousands on Britains roads this morning or any other.

For an instant, as he emerged from the dense cloak of the trees and scrambled up the ditch beside the road, Tullivant imagined cars screaming to a halt, guns being trained on him, men shouting. But of course that was absurd. Even if the people on the forecourt had worked out which direction the shot had come from, even if theyd made it over the wall surrounding the property, and even if theyd managed to follow Tullivant on his counterintuitive jagged path through the trees they wouldnt have been able to summon vehicles, or additional manpower, quickly enough.

Tullivant hefted the canvas bag containing the rifle into the back of the van, stowing it in a specially created compartment under the seat. He stripped off the balaclava and the overalls and stuffed them in the compartment with the rifle. Underneath, he wore paint-stained jeans and an old white T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a brand of lager.

He fitted a peaked cap to his head. Glancing in the mirror, he saw nothing behind him but the road, winding back and upwards through the forest.

Tullivant started the engine and forced himself to pull away slowly, as the post-adrenaline jitters began to set in.

There was something wrong with the scene, and it perturbed John Purkiss that he couldnt immediately put his finger on what it was.

Vale had fallen into step beside him as hed emerged from Warren Street Underground station and turned right down Tottenham Court Road, as hed been instructed. It was the way Vale often began their meetings, appearing from nowhere like a silent vampire. Even without his customary trenchcoat, which hed forgone because of the summer heat in favour of an ancient tweed jacket, Vale managed to look sepulchral. Tall, bone-thin and with a hunch that was growing more pronounced each time Purkiss met him, Vale was an oddity for his generation: a sixty-something-year-old member of the Establishment who happened to be of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity.