The Man Who Would One Day Tell

Martin bent lower and seemed to meld into his weapon. He closed his left eye and inhaled the familiar scent of gun-oil and steel.

The 2-16x44 mm tactical scope brought the scene up-close and suddenly very personal and he felt the rush he always felt at times like this. The warmth of the sniper rifle spread along his arms, his shoulders, and into the short graying whiskers along his jaw.

Without rushing, he swept across the immense wooden stage jutting out to the west of the Eiffel Tower. He rested his gaze on the empty black podium at the edge of the stage beneath bold-lettered banners and thousands of black balloons.

Now came the expected battery of thousands of angry voices. The sound of heated foreign words rose from the square and Martin redirected his sight-line south and south-west where a gathering mass of highly distressed, sign-waving people let it be known that they were far from happy about something and were not going to stand for whatever it was much longer.

Martin smiled to himself though he found none of this particularly funny. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. He had both eyes open now as he gazed down and across the courtyard at the elevated stage where a fat man walked quickly toward the podium. He gave the microphone a brief tap with his index finger.

He said, “Mesdames et Messieurs...” his words sounding warbled and wind-blown from where Martin kneeled behind the open window.

The fat man said, “Mesdames et Messieurs...” again.

Martin closed his left eye.

The fat man spoke quickly and turned with a sweeping arm directed to a young woman marching toward the microphones as the cheers of the crowd rose higher and higher. She thanked the fat man and took the microphone in her hand.

Martin brought the crosshairs of his scope back and forth across the young woman's forehead. He was shocked at how young she looked. How pretty. Her voice rose up to him from the street below and seemed to grab him with her passion alone. She was saying something in French, Martin had no idea what, but it was loud, defiant, and musical. He didn't know why they wanted her dead, this pretty woman, but he would find out eventually who she was. He would put it in his book, the long and getting longer unpublished manuscript he would one day show to the world. Nothing Martin had been hired to do would go unpunished for much longer. He squeezed the trigger and saw the woman's forehead explode into pink mist.

A quick duck of his head, and Martin was crawling beneath the window toward the door. At the door he stood to his feet. He removed his leather gloves and put them in his pocket. His book was going to tell all the sad stories of all the people and when he finished it he would change this world for the better. . It would make everything right. Everything less wrong. He knew that. He knew that! As he walked without hurry down the back stairs, he knew that.

552 Words