Six . . . watch him stop, watch him catch the flash of the diamonds just barely visible beneath the far arch of the bridge.
Seven . . . become stone, become ice, become so still frost could gather on me—all as I watched the President’s would-be killer raise his weapon, satisfaction in every line of his body because he thought he had me dead in his sights.
Eight . . . final adjustment for wind, normally. No need here.
Nine . . . take aim.
Ten . . . breathe in.
Eleven . . . breathe out.
THE MARKSMAN WAS smiling as he fired, straight into the huddled heart of the lynx-fur mass. The girl sniper toppled on one side in the sluggishly moving stream, and he felt the slow, ecstatic beat of his heart as her arm flopped out. Got you, you Red bitch.
Then he saw the diamond bracelet slide off the fur sleeve without catching on a limp hand. Saw the fur collar gaping around a mass of pine needles. Saw the necklace he’d given her, wound around a sodden bundle of pine branches and sparkling up at him with a cold, merry light.
He looked wildly up from the dummy and saw the glitter. Not of diamonds, but of moonlight off a gun muzzle. Oh, fu—
TWELVE.
My shot took him clean through the right eye.
Chapter 34
I want to go home.
All my light-footedness was gone as I began making my way out of Rock Creek Park. Every ache and pain had flooded back into me the moment I slid half frozen and shaking with aftermath out of that lightning-forked beech tree. I’d still made myself wade down into the creek where the dead man had toppled, heave him onto his back, and go through all his pockets. No identification, no keys, not so much as a handkerchief or a book of matches to tell me who he was or where he’d come from—only his rifle, and a scatter of bullets and odd little rough rocks in one pocket, which I transferred to mine so I’d have something to show the Soviet ambassador. Shrugging my cold-marbled arms gratefully back into the sodden lynx sleeves, I stood for a moment looking down at the man I’d killed. Number 310, looking up at the sky with his blank, unremarkable face, the moon reflecting glossy and empty from his open eye. He looked surprised. They so often did. Even when you were the one used to dealing death, you were still surprised when it came for you.
What’s your name? I wondered, looking down at him. And then in a sudden surge of exhaustion and distaste, I didn’t care. I didn’t care who he was or who he’d been working for. I didn’t care about anything but going home and holding my son in my arms, cradling his beautiful head between my hands as I promised him on my life that I would never leave him again.
So I left the marksman behind, jamming the pistol that had killed him into my coat pocket and limping on my torn soles back toward the city street and the abandoned Packard. Once I got there, it was some six or seven kilometers back to the hotel on foot . . . I’d walked it before, swinging my yellow satin dress in its shop bag, but that had been on a warm day in comfortable canvas lace-ups, not in utterly shredded American stockings on a blustery midnight. But I’d have to walk it now; I couldn’t drive and I didn’t have a single coin for a taxi. Would the delegation have returned to the hotel by now, or were they embroiled in uproar at the White House? Had the White House even realized they’d had an assassin on their grounds, or—
“Mila!” Alexei’s voice, sharp with alarm through the trees. “Is that you?”
“Alexei?” I pulled up, swaying with exhaustion—he stood just inside the tree line at the edge of the park, a silhouette against the shadowed saplings, streetlights not far behind. “Why didn’t you go raise the alarm?” Even as anger went through me in a spasm, relief did, too. Now I could collapse into the embassy car and he could drive us wherever we needed to go to make our report. I’d make him a hero in the telling, just for that—give him all the credit he liked, as long as I could sit down.