To the Death

That twenty-four seconds had to be reduced, and if it couldn’t, he might have to abort the mission. But Ravi knew it could. Over and over, he assembled the rifle and then disassembled it. For almost two hours he practiced, finally realizing that the principal solutions to the operation were the swift removal of the telescopic sight and the level of tightness on the wide silver-plated finger screw which attached the stock to the neck.

After another hour, he could disassemble that sniper rifle in eighteen seconds. Within two hours, he had it down to twelve, and those twelve seconds would be all he could afford while packing the rifle away and bolting down the stairs to the freedom of Dover Street.

Early that evening, before dinner with the ambassador, Ravi went shopping alone. He walked through to Knightsbridge and wandered into Harrods, to the busy ground-floor men’s department where once he had shopped with his mother, purchasing a new tweed jacket for school. Today he wanted a new dark gray suit, a blazer, a few shirts, a couple of ties, boxer shorts, socks, and shoes.

It took him forty-five minutes to punch a serious hole in £2,500, and he paid with his Amex card, which would eventually be billed to the government of Jordan via the Paris embassy. He then made his way to men’s sporting goods and purchased a loose-fitting tracksuit and a medium-sized athlete’s duffel bag.

Casting aside the green Harrods plastic shopping bags, he folded his purchases neatly into the sports bag and walked back to the embassy via Sloane Street and Cadogan Place. He and Shakira dined with the ambassador that evening, in company with two visiting Saudi sheiks.

The following morning, Sunday, July 29, the day before Admiral and Mrs. Morgan were due to board the London flight from Washington, D.C., Ravi summoned the Audi from the Motcombe Street garage and asked one of the embassy staff to fill the tank, because he and Shakira were going on a journey of almost 150 miles.

They left at around 11 A.M., both dressed casually in jeans and sneakers, Shakira wearing a blue shirt and denim jacket, Ravi in his black T-shirt and suede jacket. This was his Irish killing gear, although he did not anticipate murdering anyone today. Indeed, he did not expect to meet, or speak to, one other member of the human race all day.

They once more drove west, but not on the gloomy old A-4 under the Chiswick flyover. This time they sped straight over the top and out onto the wide, fast M-4 motorway. They drove past Heathrow and proceeded for almost an hour to where the landscape begins to rise into the foothills of the Berkshire Downs.

They left the M-4 at Junction 13 and headed north up the A-34 toward Oxford, finally branching left to the switchback road that leads to the village of West Ilsley. This is land where all villages seem to lie in the folds in the Downs, invisible until you are actually in them.

Ravi remembered this country well. He had been out here many times with his father, to look at racehorses being worked, to visit his father’s two trainers. In his mind, he recalled the majestic sweep of the Berkshire and Oxfordshire “prairies,” miles and miles of undulating land where wheat and barley are grown, the endless fields split only by narrow roads and the horse-training gallops.

But most of all, he remembered the long woods, big but narrow growths of trees set high on the summits. In particular, he recalled those above the horse-racing village of Lambourn. He had seen nothing like it, anywhere in the world, these stark stands of high trees, sometimes four hundred yards long and rarely more than a hundred yards deep, like great, dark Medieval castles ranged along the heights.

Ravi did not know precisely where he was going, but he would know it when he saw it. And he drove through West Ilsley and on through the prairies, through literally square miles of ripening wheat and barley, up through the high village of Farnborough, and then fast down the three-mile-long hill to the town of Wantage, birthplace of King Alfred the Great and the largest town in the fabled Vale of the White Horse.

From here, he drove along the road that leads to the 374-foot chalk carving of the white horse, which has peered across the valley at Uffington for more than two thousand years. Ravi, however, swerved off up the hill to the sensational view of the Lambourn Downs, right across the rolling land, to the castles he had come for, the long woods. And there they were, ranged before him, forbidding, even in the bright summer sunlight. The one closest to him stood high above one of the most important jump-racing stables in the world, that of the maestro Nicky Henderson, godson of the late Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.

Like all of the other five long woods, this one was shadowed, several hundred yards in length, and only a hundred yards wide maximum. It did, however, unlike the others, lack privacy, because the road down to Lambourn village ran hard beside it.