47- Bus Crash and Swim

  It was as if Agent 47 had put on blinders. Nothing in his peripheral vision was significant. The crosshairs were on Charlie Wilkins as the man stood on the basin shore like a deer caught in the headlights.

  Finish the job.

  The assassin didn’t let up on the gas. The bus was a locomotive, barreling across the grass and into the parking lot. The yellow juggernaut crashed through several parked vehicles, catapulting them in opposite directions as if they were insects. Now nothing stood in the way of the hitman and his target.

  Wilkins dropped to his knees and folded his hands in front of him.

  He was praying.

  How’s that working out for you? 47 thought.

  For the assassin, the last two seconds stretched into a time slip. The fast-paced, nonstop action suddenly switched to slow motion. All sounds ceased and were replaced by a vacuum. Agent 47 was aware only of his own heartbeat as it pounded in his chest and echoed in his brain.

  He locked eyes with Wilkins. For those brief moments, the two adversaries understood each other. 47 saw that the confidence the reverend usually displayed was gone. In its place were fear, despair, and the realization that he had lost. Wilkins had lost his faith and it was replaced by the hand of Death.

  The man opened his mouth to scream, but it was too late.

  This was it.

  The bus broke through the railing, sailed into the air six feet off the ground, and then dropped in an arc. The behemoth’s front end smashed into Wilkins with tremendous force and carried his body fifty feet over the water; then the vehicle pierced the surface and disappeared into the dark green-brown murkiness.
...

  Emergency crews worked feverishly for an hour to find Reverend Wilkins. Scuba divers finally recovered the battered body and brought it ashore, where it was then taken to the city morgue for an official autopsy.

  Area hospitals were overwhelmed by the influx of wounded rally attendees. It was too early to tabulate the number of deaths.

  Some of the New Model Army men who were arrested had already begun to talk. The truth of what happened was going to come out.

  The school bus was pulled out of the water and thoroughly examined by the FBI. There was no trace of the driver. Divers continued to search the basin bottom and found a lot of garbage, broken bottles, a couple of old tires, and other odd items, but they uncovered no other corpses. One curious retrieved item, which investigators didn’t attribute to the events of November 1, was an empty briefcase bearing a strange fleur-de-lis insignia on its exterior.

  A few witnesses reported that it had all happened so quickly that they never saw the man driving the bus. Even more onlookers claimed that no one was at the wheel—that the figure in the driver’s seat was some kind of “faceless shadow.” At any rate, the person who killed Charlie Wilkins had vanished.

  It was just one more mystery added to a list of many regarding that fateful day in Washington, D.C.
...

  Just before the school bus had crashed into the water, I filled my lungs with as much air as they could hold. As soon as the vehicle was submerged, I swam out the door, with the Silverballers tucked into the waist of my trousers. I dropped the briefcase on the basin floor and swam toward that paddleboat place. I knew it was there. I’d mapped out all possible escape routes beforehand.

  I didn’t come up for air for nearly five minutes. By then I was at the pier where the little boats were docked. It was easy to steal one, for the attention of every person in the facility was focused on the goings-on farther northwest, where all the action was. No one noticed me paddling away and eventually setting shore near the Titanic Memorial at the southern end of the long lake. I rested and dried off there among the trees and then walked along P Street until I found a taxi. The cab took me to the motel on the outskirts of the city where I’d left changes of clothing, passports, and money. From there, it was easy to leave the country under one of my many false identities.

- Hitman: Damnation, chapters 38 and 40