His hands had never stopped moving, assembling the rifle from its pieces. He’d separated from the other journalists as soon as they were admitted onto White House grounds; it shouldn’t have been so easy, but it was. The Secret Service weren’t on high alert for small functions like this, and his path had been smoothed for him by his shadow-suited employers, who made sure his name made the night’s list and gave him the routes in advance where he would need to avoid security points as he melted into the gardens.
He checked his watch, timed down to the second. The Soviet delegation would be finishing up their last photographs in the oval reception room just inside the South Portico. After that they’d spill out onto the lawn, a last informal mingle with Halloween punch before everyone departed . . . and the President and his wife would wave farewell from just above the portico stairs.
The shot across the south lawn would be long, but he’d made longer. He just needed Mila Pavlichenko out of the way first . . . and if her husband did his part, that should be in about ten minutes.
I HAD THE feeling, once again, as if I had spiders crawling down my spine. We were all mingling on the South Lawn now, sipping cups of highly spiked Halloween punch for a final informal aperitif as the delegation’s mountain of gifts was packed into the embassy cars pulled around front. Eleanor was spinning one of her amusing, informative anecdotes about the celebration of October 31 in America: costumes, harvest parades, candles placed in hollowed-out turnips or pumpkins . . . but I couldn’t focus. That unsettled feeling was back, stronger than ever, and I couldn’t shake it. I lit a cigarette and looked up at the moon rising over the tipsy, triumphant crowd of celebrating Soviets and eager journalists. The moon was waning gibbous—it had been months since the moon’s phase was a matter of my nightly survival, but I still couldn’t help tracking her wax and wane. The wind had died down; it wasn’t cold by Russian standards, but the yellow satin dress was flimsy enough that I’d shrugged into my lynx coat before coming down to the White House lawn. I took another deep inhale of a Lucky Strike, watching the sparkle of Mr. Jonson’s diamonds on my wrist in the moonlight.
We will meet again . . .
Where exactly did he think we were going to meet again, when tonight was my last in his country? I shook my head at my pop-eyed suitor, who had probably thought he was being very romantic. Anyone could have told him that the line between very romantic and vaguely creepy is not one you want to land on the wrong side of when you are courting a sniper. Kostia would split himself laughing.
Kostia. Surely he was the reason I felt so unsettled. I side-slipped a journalist cajoling One more smile for the camera, Lady Death? and turned back toward the columned portico of the White House’s southern side. President Roosevelt had not, of course, followed us down the stairs to the lawn; he sat under the awning between the portico columns, chatting with someone or other. I could see the confident line of his profile all the way from here. If Kostia were with me, we’d be automatically assessing potential angles of fire.
“There,” I said aloud, nodding at a series of hedges to the east of the lawn. “Better yet, there.” A thicket of trees and shrubs on the other side, near the West Wing. I lifted my cigarette for another drag and stopped. Even here, even now, I turned my lit cigarette inside the curl of my palm, hiding the ember . . .
And it slid into my memory with a click: William Jonson in the sharpshooters’ club in Chicago, laughing at himself for shooting so badly during the demonstration, lighting a Lucky Strike—which he held in a cupped, reversed hand, like a sniper.
It’s not just snipers who smoke that way, I thought. Any battle veteran who had stood a night watch did. Had Mr. Jonson been a soldier? He was too young to have fought in the Great War. And he’d shot so badly in the demonstration, half his shots missing the target altogether . . .
Which is exactly what a trained sniper would do if he wanted to look like something else.
We will meet again.
“Mila!” Alexei was trying to get my attention from across the crowd, but Krasavchenko had waylaid him about something. My husband beckoned me, but I turned the other way, stubbing out my cigarette in the grass underfoot, looking up at President Roosevelt on the portico. I didn’t know what I was doing, just that the sense of wrongness was stronger than ever, and my eyes were flicking back and forth between the potential lines of fire so automatically parsed by my sniper’s eye （an eye like a diamond, Eleanor’s voice whispered）。