176060.fb2 The Bishop - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 9

The Bishop - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 9

8

Brad stood anonymously in the crowd of people watching the television screens.

Despite the storm, fifteen people had gathered outside Williamson’s Electronics Store on Connecticut Avenue near Union Station in the heart of downtown DC.

The high-end television showroom featured Sony, LG, Samsung, and Bang amp; Olufsen’s next generation of organic light-emitting diode televisions. Razor-thin screens, sixty-five inch, seventy inch, and larger. The world’s most expensive home theater systems on display and facing the street.

From observing the store over the last few weeks, Brad knew it wasn’t unusual to find half a dozen people pausing by the window, coveting the TVs. In fact, the store’s popularity was one of the reasons he’d chosen it.

Now, the grainy images carried on each screen looked like a movie in the tradition of Blair Witch or Cloverfield, but each television contained six different camera angles, and the time marker at the bottom of each screen made it clear that the feed was live.

The videos showed the interior of an expansive building, a walkway between walled-in glass enclosures at least twenty feet tall. Speakers located beneath the storefront’s overhang projected the sound of the chattering monkeys, baboons, gorillas, and other primates as they swung from thick ropes and clambered over the stout limbs of artificial trees, obviously constructed to hold the apes’ immense weight.

A flurry of FBI agents and DC police, easily identifiable by the letters emblazoned on their jackets, moved into and out of the picture.

Because of the indistinct shadows and the glare off the glass, it was difficult to tell how many bodies lay inside the farthest primate cage on the left. At least one. Maybe as many as three.

No one else knew this, but the footage was only being transmitted to this one location.

Brad listened quietly as those around him tried to figure out what was going on: “It’s some kind of gorilla zoo or something,” somebody said.

“Is this live?” a man in a gray Valentino suit asked. “This is live, isn’t it?”

“They were talking about this on the news,” the woman beside him said. “I think it’s a senator’s kid who was killed.”

“Killed?”

“That’s the security cameras from inside the building.”

“No, it was a congressman,” someone said.

“Fischer’s daughter. That’s what I heard.”

Brad had snugged a Washington Nationals baseball cap over his head to shield his eyes from view and wore a fake, scraggly beard. Actually, disguises were one of his specialties.

He’d turned his collar up against the weather and was dressed in the reeking, tattered clothes he’d stolen from a homeless man he’d beaten senseless half an hour ago. Dressed as he was, Brad looked just like any other nameless, faceless vagrant.

Invisible.

In plain sight.

He wished he could stand here and watch for hours, but it was time to go.

He had a busy night-one more murder to commit, C-4 to pack into the metal tubes, a detonation sequence to set up.

And a few other chores.

He walked four blocks to the handicapped accessible van that he and Astrid were using; the van where he’d left the next two victims tied and gagged. Personally, he would have preferred leaving them unconscious, had planned to, but Astrid had told him it would be more fun if they were awake, anticipating what was to come.

Since they knew each other, if they hadn’t been blindfolded, they would have been comforted. As it was, in the end, the impact would be so much greater this way.

One would die tonight.

The other would spend the night with him and Astrid at the house.