The apartment to which the key admitted him had been rented, again by elaborate ruse and considerable bribery, to get him where he had to be, in a building subsidized for lower-income families by no less than the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Everything was seemingly legal and had been handled by a completely innocent contract employee of Iranian intelligence on money supplied by—well, that was unknown, even to the most intimate of conspirators, but by somebody with an interest in havoc, mayhem, anarchy, and collapse, especially in the United States of America.

The apartment was sparsely furnished with furniture, also rented. The dining room table could be shored up for stability and used as a shooting bench upon which he would execute his mission. Nothing else was memorable, except for a crate that had been delivered a few days before he arrived: it was from a boutique furniture craftsman in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Examined carefully, it revealed no signs of tampering. He disassembled it, first the crate, then the bookshelves themselves, reducing both to wooden slats neatly stacked against the wall. The process revealed the rifle.

Accuracy International Arctic Warfare model, .338 Lapua Magnum, Schmidt & Bender 5.5×25×56 scope calibrated in MOA. He pored over it, checking the fingernail polish marking on each screw to make sure that they remained tightened exactly to the torque he had applied in Wyoming for maximum accuracy. In the kit of tools, he’d packed, along with the ten rounds of ammunition, dedicated wrenches, a lens-cleaning pen, his iPhone 8 with the FirstShot app already calculated to zero on the rifle at eighteen hundred yards, a Kestrel Pocket Weather Meter, and, among other shooter knickknacks, a bore sighter. This instrument allowed him to test for the scope setting for inadvertent alterations against the valuations he’d made in Wyoming. Again, it was unchanged, perfect.

Juba slept on the floor without a problem, took all his meals out, bought a few clothes with cash left over from the trip and washed them out every night, to dry overnight, so that he didn’t attract attention due to shabbiness. Occasionally, he met other tenants in the lobby or in the elevator, but nobody here cared about anybody else’s woes, much less existence. The tenants were in their own world.