For the love of Lenin, I asked myself, what are you doing? I could focus my eyes again, but my head still pulsed. My ribs throbbed with every step. I was in my stocking feet since I’d kicked off my flimsy heels; I was decked out in yellow as bright as a traffic light rather than my sniper’s camouflage, and I had a weapon I’d never fired before . . . but I didn’t stop walking toward the trees, not hurrying, watching every shadow, because if this man were smart he’d wait for me just inside the tree line in case I came crashing down the street and into the wall of woods without looking around me. But I wasn’t going to do that. Even caught at a disadvantage like this, I still knew my trade, and I knew something now about my enemy. He’d been hunting me since I came to this city, and he’d been hunting Franklin Roosevelt, who wasn’t my president but was still—as long as I’d pledged friendship to his wife, and as long as he’d pledged friendship to my country—under my protection. And this man who’d thrown a challenge down to me with his diamonds and his hate-filled notes wasn’t a sniper like me. He wasn’t even an assassin, because he hadn’t killed anyone—not tonight, anyway. He was just another marksman, and I was Lyudmila Pavlichenko.
And with every step toward the trees, I felt my sniper self filling me back up. Maybe I wasn’t at my best with my injured ribs and ringing head, and maybe I looked like just another Washington elite hurrying home from a dinner party—some politician’s pampered wife swathed in dappled furs, diamonds glittering at her throat under the streetlights. But it was All Hallows Eve, when dangerous things supposedly walked the night . . . and the most dangerous of them here was me. A woman who wore a lynx pelt like the predator she was, who strode under the waning moon not with a socialite’s bustle or a housewife’s scurry, but with a gunslinger’s glide, shoulders swaying easy, hips loose and rolling below, pistol swinging ready at her side. I pulled the diamonds from around my neck and wrists and stuffed them into my coat pocket so their sparkle wouldn’t give me away, and as I slid from the paved surface of Colorado Avenue into the dark choir of trees, the glossy propaganda poster-woman so at ease in the national spotlight disappeared. Breathing through her skin was Lady Midnight, Lady Death, the woman who had terrified Nazi invaders from Odessa to Sevastopol.
Even if I’d been living soft on tour for two months, the muscles of my legs remembered what it was to clamber Kamyshly gully and No-Name Height under fifteen kilos of snipers’ gear. My feet were being sliced and bruised beneath me, but I put the pain away along with the pain of my cracked ribs, finding the nearly invisible trail and noiselessly following its bend. I went slow, keeping low to the ground and taking cover behind every tree trunk and boulder, listening for the faintest rustle or creak that was out of place.
Where are you?
I remembered the way to Boulder Bridge perfectly, even in the blackness of night. I was edging past the jutting rock where I’d lingered the last time to gaze over the ridge, pressing through tangles of mountain laurel toward the bend that would lead to the creek and the stone bridge, when instinct raked the back of my neck with dark claws. The barest rustle of leaves, a faint slide of pebbles, the tiniest click of metal where no metal belonged in the tapestry of night noises—I threw myself flat on the earth without a second’s hesitation. An instant later the crack of a gunshot echoed through the dark, and I heard a bullet bury itself in a tree trunk just beyond me.
I rolled hard to my left and didn’t stop. Another shot whined as I went into a tangle of mountain laurel, scrambled through it with twigs raking my face, and finally wedged myself in a ball behind a boulder of rough granite.
He’s up on that rocky outcrop, I thought, mentally tracing the shot’s angle. The one where I stopped to take in the view. The one that made me think, “What a perfect place for a stakeout.”
IT WAS A perfect place for a stakeout. The marksman lay flat, the Mosin-Nagant’s barrel braced, the ground spread below in a perfect arc. If she moved from behind that boulder in any direction, he’d split her through the eyes—at this distance he couldn’t miss, even in the dark.
Now it was a waiting game. He almost called down to her, in sheer curiosity. But what was there to say? The question had been asked silently: Which of us is better? The answer would come at the tip of a bullet.