A breeze was scurrying through the trees: of course there was movement. The leaves fluttered; the slender branches swayed, too. Yet he had to trust his instinct, and soon his rational mind made sense of what had pricked his intuition. The branch that moved was thick, too thick to have been affected by the passing gust. It moved—why? Because an animal had shifted its weight on it, a scampering squirrel? Or a person?

Or: because it was not a branch at all.

The light made it difficult to make out details; though Janson fine-tuned the scope, the object remained frustratingly indistinct. He imposed different mental images on it, which was an old field trick he had learned as one of Demarest’s Devils. A branch, with twigs and leaves? Possible, but not satisfactory. Could it be that it was a rifle, covered in arboreal-camouflage decals, to which small twigs had been attached? When he pictured the optical image according to that mental model, all sorts of tiny irregularities suddenly clicked into place. A gestalt effect.

The reason that the branch seemed unnaturally straight was that it was a rifle. The twigs were attached with furred twist-wires. The tiny area of darkness at the end of a branch was not a tar-healed tree wound, but the rifle’s bore hole.

Five hundred yards away, a man was peering through a scope, just as he was, with the settled resolve of sending him to his death.

I’m coming for you, Janson thought to himself. You won’t see me when I get there, but I’ll get there.

A team of soccer players were making their way toward the playing fields, and he joined them briefly, knowing that, from a distance, he would be hard to pick out among the dense crowd of tall, athletic men.

The lake thinned into a stream, and as the men crossed the wooden bridge, he rolled off into the water. Had the marksmen seen him? There was a good chance that they had not. He expelled all the air from his lungs and swam through the murky, turbid water, staying near the bottom. If his misdirection succeeded, the sniper scopes would still be trained on the crowd of athletes. High-powered scopes inevitably had a narrow field of vision; it would be impossible to keep an eye on the rest of the terrain and follow the crowd. But how much longer before they realized he was not in it?

Now he crossed the water to the south bank, pulled himself up the concrete basin wall, and dashed over to a copse of beech trees. If he had slipped their purview, the reprieve was only temporary—one mistake could put him in the deadly snare. It was the most thickly forested area of Regent’s Park, and it brought to mind training exercises along the ridgelines outside Thon Doc Kinh.