Take Two - Part 1

I did another hit earlier this week.  This might be my last one with a gun.  Why?  Here's my two biggest reasons:

- With 2 high profile hits, my target audience will definitely be taking steps to be less vulnerable.  I see now why IEDs are so popular in Iraq.
- Getting a rifle in and especially out of the area will become more difficult and risky.  Sure I could just ditch the gun right after the hit but this is a pretty significant piece of physical evidence to leave behind.  Even if I kept the gun free of fingerprints or DNA, the police could get lucky.  Heck, if "ice" bullets worked, I'd use them.

Anyway, enough about my personal problems.  Let me tell you about job #2.   He was another big financial cheese.  I had to do a bit of discrete financial snooping to learn the name of his real estate trust.  Once I had that, it was easy to look up the address of his country estate in the County Tax Assessor records.   Then I did some due diligence, drove some of the routes from his office to his house and did some stakeouts.

I don't know if his people started mixing up his travel routes after my first hit or if they were on the ball before that.  Alas, while that sounds good in theory, if the actual lay of the land locks you into fairly fixed routes, especially near the office or home, mixing it up between doesn't really do that much good.  For this guy, his bucolic country isolation was fatal and I'm not even talking about that close to home. 

About a half mile from his house there was a T-junction at the top of a gentle slope.  There was also a drainage culvert on the right side of the road leading to the T.  I figured I could lay in wait in the ditch then when his limo came to a stop at the T, I'd take my shot.  With the low angle, I figure I could take out the rear differential on the limo, then the gas tank and burn him out or up.  I'd take the chance that his limo wasn't all wheel drive, had a self sealing gas tank or an armored differential cover.

Back at his office building, the really helpful bit was a coffee shop right across the street from the underground parking garage ramp.  But I'm getting slightly ahead of myself.  After I located his country house, I hiked out every morning for a week, really freaking early, like 4 AM, and went into concealment about 200 yards down the road from his main gate.  Well every morning between 5:45 and 6:15 the *same* limo came to pick him up. 

Hey kudos for not being at the same time every day but a 30 minute variation window isn't a big deal when there's so much concealment available.  I stuck around for another couple of hours to make sure it wasn't a decoy vehicle. Of course the windows were heavily tinted so I couldn't confirm if he really was in the vehicle or not.   So yes, unless I could come up with a way to confirm he was in there, I'd be running the chance of taking down an empty vehicle.

While I am not an expert on armored limos, this one appeared to have laminated "bullet proof" glass, but it didn't seem to have the super thick (~ 40mm) rifle resistant level of protection.  I based this assessment on how the limo moved - body roll, pitch and yaw during acceleration, braking and turns - it just didn't seem that heavy and a first class armor job can almost double the weight of a vehicle.  If the job is done right, serious upgrades to the engine, drive train and suspension have to happen.  Anyway, this probably meant there also wasn't an elaborate automatic fire suppression system or an environmentally sealed passenger compartment.

Every afternoon, I'd setup at the coffee shop, futz around on my netbook, sip a drink, nibble on a pastry and keep an eye on the parking garage.  There was significantly more variation on his quitting times but the key thing that made things easy for me was that it was the same limo every time.  And the thing that sealed it for me was the day he was scheduled to make a widely publicized evening appearance out of town.   The morning schedule stayed the same but the evening ride home happened a bit after midnight, again with the same limo,  so I doubt they were doing empty decoy runs.  That was a Zen 7 hours sitting in the forest.  Good thing I have a high boredom threshold.  After that, I stopped going to the coffee shop and spent several evenings at the T-junction.  The driver did a full stop every time and more than half the time, there were no other cars near by.

Honestly, the thing that was weighing most on my mind at that point was what I would do about other people in the limo.    If he had coworkers in there, I was okay with taking them out along with him.  But I didn't have anything against the chauffeur or bodyguards and ideally, I'd keep family members out of this.  What to do, what to do...