He started running, his gaze roaming around him. The very normalcy was what was so eerie. The park was not crowded, but it was far from vacant. Here was a young man swaying to whatever was pulsing through his Walkman. There was a young woman with a stroller, talking to another woman, a close friend, from the looks of it. He could hear the distant cries of young children in paddleboats, frolicking in a shallow, fencedoff area of the boating pond. And, as always, lovers walked hand in hand between the copses of oak and white willow and beech trees. They were in their own world. He was in his. They shared a terrain, blithely unaware that anything was amiss. How could there be?

That was the genius of the operation. The sniping was virtually soundless. The tiny explosions of bark or turf or water were too fleeting and inconspicuous to be noticed by anybody who was not primed for such evidence.

Regent’s Park—that serene glade—had been converted into a killing field, with nobody the wiser.

Except, of course, the prospective victim.

Where was safety? The interrogative rose in Janson’s head, rose with screechy, needful urgency.

He had the sole advantage of action over reaction: he alone knew his next move; they would have to respond to what he did. But if they could condition his actions, make him act according to a curtailed number of options in reaction to their own actions, that edge would be lost.

He darted this way and that, along what he estimated as a line transverse to the axial array of the sniper team.

“Practicing your footwork?” remarked an amused older man, his white hair combed forward and trimmed, Caesar-style. “Looking good. You’ll be playing for Manchester United one of these days!” It was the sort of jibe reserved for somebody one took to be insane. What else made sense of Janson’s strange, darting movements, his dashes right and left, seemingly random, seemingly pointless? It was the zigzagging of a wingless hummingbird.

He put on a sudden burst of speed and plunged through a crowd of pedestrians toward York Bridge. The bandstand beckoned: it would shelter him from the snipers.

He ran along the banks of the boating lake and past an elderly woman who was throwing bread crumbs to ravenous pigeons. An enormous flock of the birds took flight as he pounded through their midst, like an exploding cloud of feathers. One of them, batting its wings just a few yards ahead, suddenly dropped like a stone, landing near his feet. The smudge of red on the pigeon’s breast told him that it had caught a stray bullet intended for him.

And still nobody noticed. For everyone but him, it was a perfect day in the park.

A small burst of wooden splinters erupted at waist level, as another shot flicked off the rail of the wooden bridge and into the water. The quality of the shooting was remarkable: it was only a matter of time before one reached the X-ring.