With a calm determination, she eased the muzzle of the rifle to her left and brought the cross-hairs to bare on the face of the President. He moved about in a peculiar cadence that was somehow out of sync with his awkward reading of the teleprompter. The height of the transparent security panels was greater than she had judged, or his height was less. Regardless of the source of her error, the miscalculation prevented an unbroken, clean shot over the shield.
As she continued to track her quarry, she noticed that his movements gave her a clean shot of the top half of his grotesque, spray-tanned face every few seconds as he read the prompter to his left. Knowing his nature to pontificate when his confidence was high, she waited, patient to calculate the regularity of his motions. Her internal stopwatch timed the target and steadied her heartbeat, though she knew the Secret Service agent was no more than a few yards from her sniper’s nest. Not a half-hour prior, the relaxing watchman had leaned upon her hidden perch as he puffed on a cigarette and awaited the arrival of the Presidential motorcade thirty-five stories below.
Now that the President had taken the podium, the agent was scanning the surroundings through his own sniper’s scope, like a dozen of his fellow agents on the myriad of rooftops above the spectacle. She could feel the watchman’s presence nearby but could not see him. In her estimations, there were many threats posed toward this Commander in Chief against which the Secret Service must be vigilant. She was convinced that none of their vigilance could have foreseen the threat posed by her cunning.
The odor of the agent’s crushed cigarette still lingered in the stale air of her nest. The familiar aroma reminded her of the beginnings of the path leading her to this point in time, the eve of the Presidential Election. Though she knew the date on the calendar, the heretofore steady progress of time and consistent workings of other things had no meaning these days. The stench of a crushed democracy hung in the air across America as certain as the stale remnants of cigarette smoke she inhaled with each paced breath.
Four years prior, she had been convinced that the catastrophic election results that led to the image now in her sights was a fluke. In the blur of time since that long night, she had learned that it was all a lie; a fraud perpetrated by Russian, Saudi and American oligarchs in order to steal a U.S. election and install an infantile, orange-faced, clown-tyrant as the President.
Two years prior, she had been convinced that the midterm elections would set things right. Again, her hopes were dashed as, despite mounds of evidence, including the thorough accounting of campaign collusion and Presidential crimes in the Special Counsel’s report. The Democrats who had taken control of the House during the Blue Wave failed to act in time to prevent further crimes against the people by the criminal in chief. Now those Democrats were upon the precipice of a devastating loss. Months of voter suppression and media manipulation had made sure of their looming defeat.
The way she saw it, she was the last chance America had and this was the final opportunity to realize that chance. After the election, a dead tyrannical President would result in the sycophantic idiot Vice President being installed in his place. If she could end the reign of Vlad’s Puppet now, the deceived public would never vote for his running mate; not after she was discovered to be the killer. It was a sublime plan; it was God’s plan and she was His instrument.
She had the rhythm now. Like an erratic, bouncing pumpkin, the orange face presented itself to her a little over a second after he performed his favorite cross bodied, sweeping, right-handed gesture. At this distance, she knew her round would take a second and a half to reach him making the zero mark halfway through his gesture. She factored in the two inches of drop and six inches of crosswind. The clown was only facing her when he read the teleprompter on his left, so she waited until he turned again.
He was in that part of his speeches that she’d heard a hundred times before. This was the part right before the crowds always began chanting “Lock her up!” How ironic, she thought, as he made his turn to face her. She hated that puffy orange clown-face so much the bile rose in her throat as she took the breath and let half out. She squeezed the trigger.