Leaving his blood-slicked rifle in my shaking hands.
The Soviet Delegation:
Day 1
August 27, 1942
Washington, D.C.
Chapter 5
If she’s ever held a rifle in her life, the marksman thought, watching the supposed girl sniper disappear into the White House after the First Lady, I’ll eat my damn hat.
The doors closed behind the Soviet delegation, and that was that. “When do we get a crack at the Russkies?” the Washington Post journalist wanted to know, riffling his notes. “They’re not going to make us wait until the student conference kicks off, are they?”
“There will be a press assembly tonight at the Soviet embassy.” The marksman dialed up his Virginia drawl, turning away from the White House in its rosy dawn glow. “Save your questions till then. Unless you scored an invitation to the White House welcome breakfast this morning.”
“You got one? Lucky son of a gun . . .”
The marksman smiled. Luck had nothing to do with it; the men who’d hired him for this job moved in high circles, and they’d made sure his name （the name on the immaculately falsified press badge, anyway） was on the list. “Why do you need to see the girl up close?” they’d grumbled. “You need to frame her, not date her.”
“I’ll need to know how to pull her aside when the time comes,” the marksman replied. “If she’ll be easy to distract or difficult. If I’ll need to bribe someone in her delegation to give me access to her, and if so, who. And I’ll only have a week, from the day the Soviet delegation arrives to the last day of the conference, to figure all this out.”
“Sounds like a lot of work” the answer had been, and the marksman shrugged. In truth, he’d always rather enjoyed the elbow grease involved in a new job: settling into a well-planned cover identity, backing that identity up with solid research, living the job if necessary. He remembered that time in 1932 when he’d worked four solid months in an insurance office to get access to a mark . . . sold a lot of honest insurance, too. Putting those hours in was work, no question—meticulous, frequently boring work. But he’d always figured there were two kinds of men in this business: good shooters who thought pulling a trigger was the job and only did enough work to research a skin-deep cover, sweating the whole time . . . and pros to whom the deep cover was the job, who put in enough hours and research that they didn’t have to sweat by the time it came to pulling a trigger.
He knew which type he was.
“Still a lot of trouble to take for a patsy,” his higher-ups’ flunky had complained.
Says the man who won’t end up in handcuffs if this all goes south, thought the marksman. “Just keep making sure my press-pass name clears all the security and ends up on all the necessary guest lists and travel passes,” he’d said, and at least there hadn’t been any trouble there. He could usually find his own ways to gain whatever access a job needed—after nineteen years, he had a stable of contacts and informants he could pay for just about any information or paperwork—but the men he was working for now could accomplish a great deal more with a little backroom hand-waving.
He had a meeting with his employers in thirty minutes, in fact—or rather, his employers’ flunky. It wasn’t necessary, but they wanted reassurances, and he had an hour or so to kill before heading back here for the welcome breakfast, where the bucktoothed First Lady would host the Soviets and a handful of press in the small dining room on the first floor of the White House. Idly, the marksman wondered what Mila Pavlichenko was doing now. Was she awed to be standing under that fabled roof or sneering at the capitalist Western decadence of it all? Was she reviewing her cover story about her supposed 309 Nazi kills, or feeling lost, floundering, far from home? He hoped the latter. Lonely women were easy to pick off. He’d targeted quite a few over the years.