THE MERCHANT OFVENICE

‘Who pulls the trigger?’

Solomon had to wait for an answer.

In fact he had to wait for every answer, because I was on a skating-rink, skating, and he wasn’t. It took me roughly thirty seconds to complete a circuit and drop off a reply, so I had lots of scope to be irritating. Not that I need lots of scope, you understand. Give me just an eency-weency bit of scope, and I’ll madden you to death.

‘Do you mean the metaphorical trigger?’ I said, as I passed. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Solomon had smiled and lifted his chin a little, like an indulgent parent, and then turned back to the game of curling he was supposed to be watching.

Another lap. Speakers blared out some jolly Swiss oompah music.

‘I mean the trigger trigger, sir. The actual…’

‘Me.’ And I was off again.

I was definitely getting the hang of this skating thing. I’d started to copy a fancy cross-over turn from a German girl in front of me, and it was working pretty well. I was just about keeping up with her too, which was pleasing. She must have been about six.

‘The rifle?’ This was Solomon again, speaking through cupped hands, as if he was blowing on them for warmth. He had to wait longer for this reply, because I fell over on the far side of the rink, and for a moment or two managed to convince myself that I’d broken my pelvis. But I hadn’t. Which was a shame, because it would have solved all sorts of problems.

I finally got round to him again. ‘Arrives tomorrow,’ I said.

That wasn’t strictly true, as it happens. But in the circumstances of this particular de-briefing, the truth was going to take about a week and a half to deliver.

The rifle wasn’t arriving tomorrow. Bits of it were already here.

With a lot of prompting from me, Francisco had agreed to go with the PM L96A1. It’s not a pretty name, I know, nor even a very memorable one; but the PM, nicknamed ‘the Green Thing’ by the British Army - on the basis, presumably, that it is both green and a thing - does its job well enough; that job being to fire a 7.62 millimetre round with sufficient accuracy to give the competent recreational shooter, which was definitely me, a guaranteed hit at six hundred yards.

Manufacturers’ guarantees being what they are, I’d told Francisco that if the shot was an inch over two hundred yards - less, if there was a cross-wind - I wasn’t taking it.

He’d managed to get hold of a Green Thing in take-down format; or, as the makers would have you have it, a ‘covert sniper rifle system’. It comes in pieces, in other words, and most of those pieces had already arrived in the village. The compressed sniper-scope had come in as a 200 millimetre lens on the front of Bernhard’s camera, with the mount hidden inside; the bolt was doing service as the handle of Hugo’s razor, while Latifa had managed to get two rounds of Remington Magnum ammunition into each heel of a stupidly expensive pair of patent-leather shoes. All we lacked was a barrel, and that was coming into Wengen on the roof of Francisco’s Alfa Romeo - together with a lot of other long metal things that people use for winter sports.

I’d brought the trigger myself, in my trouser pocket. Perhaps I’m just not the creative type.

We had decided to do without the stock and fore-end, as both of them are hard to disguise and, frankly, inessential. Likewise the bipod. A firearm, when all is said and done, is nothing more than a tube, a piece of lead, and some gunpowder. Putting a lot of carbon-fibre bits on it, and a go faster stripe down the side, won’t make the person you hit any deader. The only extra ingredient you need to make a weapon meaningfully lethal - and, thankfully, it’s a thing that’s still pretty hard to come by, even in this wicked old world - is someone with the will to point and fire it.

Someone like me.

Solomon had told me nothing about Sarah. Nothing at all. How she was, where she was - I could even have made do with what he’d last seen her wearing, but he hadn’t said a word.

Perhaps the Americans had told him to say nothing. Good or bad. ‘Hear this, David, and hear it good. Our analysis of Lang indicates a negatory response profile to incoming amatory data.’ Something like that. With a few ‘now let’s kick ass’ phrases thrown in. But then, Solomon knew me well enough to make his own decisions about what he told me or didn’t tell me. And he didn’t tell me. So either he didn’t have any news about Sarah, or the news he did have wasn’t good. Or then again, perhaps the best reason of all for not telling me, because the simplest is often the best, was that I hadn’t asked.

I don’t know why.

I lay in my bath at The Eiger, turning the taps with my feet and adding a pint or two of hot water every quarter of an hour, and thought about it afterwards. Perhaps I was scared of what I’d hear. That was possible. Perhaps I was thinking about the risk of my covert meetings with Solomon; that by extending them, with a lot of chat about the folks back home, I was putting his life at risk as well as my own. That was also possible, if a touch shaky.

Or perhaps - and this was the explanation I came to last, moving cautiously around it, peering at it, prodding it with a sharp stick every now and then to see if it’d get up and bite me - perhaps I’d stopped caring. Perhaps I’d just been pretending to myself that Sarah was the reason I was going through with all of this when, in actual fact, now would be a good time to admit that I had made better friends, discovered a deeper purpose, had more reasons to get out of bed in the mornings, since I joined The Sword Of justice.

Obviously, that just wasn’t possible at all. That was absurd.

I climbed into bed and slept the sleep of the tired.

It was cold. That was the first thing I noticed as I pulled back the curtains. A dry, grey, just-remember-you’re-in-the-Alps-sonny kind of cold, and that worried me a little. True, it might keep some of the more reluctant skiers in their beds, which would be useful; but it would also slow my fingers to 33rpm and make good marksmanship extremely difficult, if not impossible. Worse still, it would make the sound of the shot travel further.

As rifles go, the Green Thing isn’t a particularly noisy instrument - nothing like an M16, which frightens people to death fractionally before the bullet hits them - but even so, when you happened to be the one holding the thing, and you’re busy lining up your cross-hairs on an eminent European statesman, you tend to get a little self-conscious about things like noise. About things like everything, in fact.

You want people to look the other way for a moment, if they wouldn’t mind. Knowing, as you squeeze the trigger, that half-a-mile away, cups would stop on their way to lips, ears would cock, eyebrows would raise, and ‘what the fuck was that?’ would come tumbling out of a few hundred mouths in a few dozen languages, just cramps your style ever so slightly. In tennis, they call it choking on the shot. I don’t know what they call it in assassination. Choking on the shot, probably.