Dead Men's s Boots

It was handy that the building had never been double-glazed – although if it had I could always have dropped down into the yard and tried my luck with the back door. Safely out of view, I could have taken my time.

As it was, though, things seemed to be going my way. Even groping around in the dark and at an odd angle, kneeling down because the pane was on a level with my knee, I found the window catch almost immediately and was able to lever it open. Then I slid the window up as far as it would go and climbed inside.

There was carpet under my feet, but it was too dark for me to make out anything of the layout of the room I was in. Fighting the urge to blunder ahead anyway and find my way by feel, I waited for my eyes to get a little more accustomed to the dark. It was just as well I did: as the space around me resolved itself slowly out of shadows into some degree of visibility, I realised that I wasn’t in a room at all: I was in a turn of the stairwell, which was just as narrow as I remembered it.

Trying to remember the layout of the building from my one and only daytime visit, I went up rather than down. I had a rough sense of where Todd’s door would be in relation to the stairs, but not how far up it was. The first door opened when I tried the handle, but the layout within was wrong – the desk was over against the far wall instead of under the window. I pulled the door to behind me and went on up.

On the next floor up the corresponding door seemed to be locked, but then I noticed with a faint stir of surprise that it was bolted from the outside. I undid the bolt and peered in.

This time the darkness was absolute, even when I pushed the door wide open. More unsettlingly, the room was emitting a soft bass rumble, almost more vibration than sound. Under the circumstances, there were close on a million good reasons for not turning the light on, but that was what I did.

Outside of the movies, I’ve never seen an assassin dismount and dismantle his sniper rifle and put the pieces carefully away in the sculpted foam receptacles in a sleek black suitcase. I assume it does happen, but with no personal experience to go on I have to take it on trust.