Revenant

Chapter 4

There's a certain art to waiting. Trust me, I'm in a position to know.

As a teenager, I got bored with stuff in practically no time at all. Patience was one of the things I had to really work at to acquire in some measure. I still work at it, as a matter of fact. For me, waiting is an intellectual exercise, a chance to find out if I lack the capacity to come to terms with monotony.

However, there's only so much about waiting I can describe. If you've never sat next to the open window of an abandoned third-story office for five hours doing nothing except watch the barely illuminated street below, well, I doubt anything I tell you will be able to adequately convey the mind-numbing tedium. And the worst part about it all is the fact that during all this, you're reminding yourself that you could be mere seconds away from the most exciting, nerve-jangling part of the job . . . the moment when you line up those sights and you pull the trigger.

Try to imagine that you're a sprinter at the olympics. You're in the starting blocks, the timekeeper has just yelled 'Get ready, get set-', and you're now waiting for that sharp retort of a pistol firing into the air before throwing yourself forward as quickly as humanly possible. Now imagine that they've introduced a new rule about when the race can begin, and the starter's pistol can go off at any time . . . two seconds from now, or ten hours. And the whole time, you're crouched there, tensed like a coiled spring, waiting for something that could happen at any second . . .

As you might have already guessed, while attempting to come to terms with mindless tedium, one of the things I end up doing is coming up with metaphors that will adequately describe the mindless tedium. For the purposes of brevity let's just say that it's really, really boring, and really, really exciting, and leave it at that.

I felt three light taps on my wrist. Grunting, I reset the timer on my watch and scanned the nearly empty street again, both through the glass of my M24A2 sniper rifle, and through the image-enhancing near-infrared viewfinder I'd mounted on the window bracket. Then I let my gaze roam over the now-familiar pattern of objects and locations that were part of my naked eye visual patrol - street, alley, alley, door to the building Sack was in, garbage dumpster, homeless drunk, parked car, parked truck, other parked car, window, window, window, window, pier, window, window, side-street, and back to main street below. Quick scan over to the left, over to the right, and horizon. Patrol finished. I checked the time.

One-thirty in the freaking morning. What fun.

It was all I could do to keep from sighing out loud. I'm sure there were places out there that had even less going on, but even if I were told of such a place I'd probably need a little convincing. The most exciting thing that had happened so far had been the homeless guy arriving on the scene, weaving his way over to the dumpster with a mostly empty bottle of Southern Comfort, singing a song that had something to do with goblins. He'd sparked my interest at first, raised my suspicions a little, but after inspecting him a great deal I'd concluded that he wasn't anything more than what he seemed to be - a harmless drunk with decent taste in liquor and a rather unfortunate snoring problem.

Every so often I'd look through my sights at him, idly wondering what article of clothing I might be able to hit without waking him up. If he'd been wearing a ratty hat or something of that nature, I might have actually been tempted.

Just training a gun on someone who isn't aware of you is a strange feeling. You start thinking about it in terms of your own experiences, and how little you really know about what's going on around you. How many times had I been in someone's sights, completely unaware of the fact that my brains were in eminent danger of seeing the light of day? Considering the nature of the organization that I'd managed to leave behind me, I'm pretty sure it had happened more than a few times. If I'd actually stuck around, maybe someone would have pulled the trigger by now.