Three Hundred Yards

You don't sleep after the reception. You lie on top of the covers and hear Garvey say it over and over.

Sexton.

The Army took your name off everything six years ago. You signed the papers in a windowless room at Fort Bragg with a colonel who wouldn't look at you. The after-action report on Objective Tallow was sealed above top secret. Officially, you were a motor-pool mechanic who did one deployment and came home. Five men died in a valley that doesn't appear on public maps, and the government decided it had never happened.

And the Secretary of Defense said your call sign at a party.

At breakfast Juliet watches you over her coffee. "You're quiet, Ethan."

"I'm always quiet."

"You're quiet in a different key." She doesn't push. She just slides the sugar toward you, which you don't take, which she knows, and the gesture sits on the table between you like a question.

The Castlemont Rotunda was a bank once: a round marble hall under a dome of iron and glass, a hundred feet high, lit tonight in gold for the first anniversary of the inauguration. Eight hundred guests. A jazz orchestra. Ice sculptures shaped like the Capitol, already weeping.

From the moment you walk in, you're working, and you hate that you're working.

You count the doors: six. You count the agents: twenty-two that you can see, probably forty that you can't. You look up, because nobody ever looks up, and you see the dome: glass panes in iron ribs, black sky above, the reflections of the chandeliers floating in it like drowned moons. Around the base of the dome runs a narrow roof terrace, and on it, you catch the shapes of two Secret Service counter-snipers in dark jackets, rifles slung, moving slowly.

Beyond the dome, the city. Hotels, office blocks, a parking garage, all of them taller than they should be.

"Stop it, Ethan," Juliet says through a smile.

"Stop what?"

"Looking at the ceiling like it owes you money." She's in red tonight, a column of it, bare shoulders, her hair pinned back so the scar in her eyebrow shows, and the whole room tilts toward her when she moves. Men stop mid-sentence. A senator's wife actually puts her hand on her chest. Juliet doesn't notice any of it, or pretends not to. "Dance with me. The press office wants a dance."

"I don't dance."

"You'll learn in the next forty seconds."

You learn. Badly. She steers, which she says is fine because she's been steering since she was nineteen. Her hand is warm on your shoulder. For the length of one slow song you let yourself stop counting doors.

That's when you see him.

Garvey, at a round table near the bandstand, with his wife and two generals. He isn't dancing. He's looking at you over his reading glasses. When he sees you see him, he raises his glass half an inch.

Then something tells you to look up.

Not a sound. Not yet. Just the shape of the night over the dome changing, a fraction of a second where one of the counter-snipers on the terrace turns his head toward the southeast, the way a dog turns toward a sound you can't hear.

You've already pulled Juliet off her feet and down onto the marble when the glass breaks.

It isn't loud. Rifles in movies are loud. This is a crack and a high, bright shiver of breaking glass, and up on the terrace the counter-sniper spins and goes down hard against the iron rail. Then the screaming starts, eight hundred people at once, and glass rains down through the gold light like sleet.

"Stay down." Your hand is flat between her shoulder blades. "Stay down, Juliet."

She stays down. Her eyes are huge.

Agents pour toward the President's table on the far side of the hall; Rutherford Montague disappears under a scrum of dark suits. Sefton is coming toward you through the crowd, shouting into her wrist. And you're already measuring, because you can't not: the hole in the pane, the angle of the falling glass, the spin of the man on the terrace. Southeast. Elevated. Three hundred yards, give or take. The parking garage, top level.

And the man on the terrace was not the target. He was the obstacle. The real target is in the line beyond him, down here, at the round table by the bandstand, where Hiram Garvey is still sitting upright with glass in his hair, too old and too stubborn to duck.

The shooter will need four seconds to work his bolt and reacquire.

You're up the service stairs before you decide to be.

The roof door is propped open. Cold air. The counter-sniper is on his back by the rail, gasping, both hands on his vest where the round hit, alive. His rifle is beside him. You don't ask. You pick it up, and your hands remember everything your head has spent six years trying to forget.

Down on one knee. Rail for a rest. Glass dome glowing gold at your back. Southeast, the parking garage, seven stories of concrete, top deck dark.

A muzzle flash would be too late. You're not looking for a flash. You're looking for the shape that doesn't belong: a darker dark along the top deck's concrete wall, a rectangle where there should be a curve.

There.

You breathe out. You don't think about the valley. You don't think about anything.

You fire.

The sound of your own shot is the loudest thing you've heard in six years. Concrete explodes off the lip of the wall exactly where the rectangle was, a hand's width low, and the rectangle jerks and is gone. You work the bolt, track, wait. A car door on the garage's top deck. Headlights spiral down the ramp, no faster than any other car. You don't have a shot. You don't take one.

Behind you the counter-sniper is staring at you from the ground.

"Who the hell," he says, "are you?"

"Motor pool," you say, and set his rifle down very carefully beside him, and raise your hands, because three agents with drawn pistols have just come through the roof door.

Sefton is the fourth. She takes in the rifle, the wounded man, you, the garage, all in one look. "Stand down," she says to the others. "Stand down. He's with the package."

The package. Juliet. You turn your head.

She's in the doorway behind Sefton. She followed you up the stairs, in a red gown, through a building where shots were just fired, because of course she did. Her hair has come down. There's a smear of someone's blood on her bare shoulder that isn't hers. She saw all of it. She's looking at you the way nobody has looked at you since a ridge at night six years ago.

Not shocked. Not frightened.

Recognizing.

The armored car is silent except for the radio traffic. Vantreese is driving. Sefton is in the front seat on the phone with somebody who outranks her. You and Juliet are in the back, a foot of leather between you, the city sliding by in sirens and blue light.

She speaks without turning her head. Quietly. So only you can hear.

"Three hundred and ten yards," she says. "Through a dome, at night, off a rail, with somebody else's rifle." She swallows. "He wrote me that you could do that. I didn't believe him."

The back of your neck goes cold.

"Who wrote you?"

She finally looks at you. Her eyes are wet and furious and absolutely steady.

"I asked for you, Ethan," Juliet says. "Wyeth didn't pick you off a list. I picked you. By name. I read your sealed file. All of it. Objective Tallow. The valley. The five men." Her voice drops lower still. "And I think the man who ordered them killed sits at my father's cabinet table. I think he was in that room tonight. And I married you because you're the only person alive who might be able to prove it, Sexton."