In the apartment, he wore a mask, a hairnet, hospital slippers, and tight rubber gloves to safeguard against inadvertent DNA deposits in order to sustain the fiction that the occupant of the room, when it was discovered after the event, was one Brian Waters of Albuquerque, New Mexico, NRA life member, thousand-yard rifle champion, well-known hunter and gun crank, and author of some hideous screeds as yet to be deposited on the Dark Web. He would do that in the aftermath of the shooting with a single keystroke. In the next minutes, Juba would scrub down the rifle with acetone and apply certain biological traces of Brian Waters. Then he would disappear, and what would happen would happen.

He confronted the view. He initially was almost afraid to look, but it was all right. He was on the sixth floor, sixty-seven feet off the ground. He overlooked the building across the street and, beyond that, the roofs of smaller buildings, descending to the broad band of river three blocks away, and, across the river, his target zone.

Everything was as it should be, yet everything was different. It was as if he were confronting the reality of a dreamscape. He had seen this view in his mind, consciously and unconsciously, for over four months. Everything familiar, yet nothing familiar: that was the dynamic. He had to learn it, adapt to it, not let it throw his concentration off.

He understood that to make his shot, he had to be on-site days before. Unlike combat sniping, it wasn’t a case of putting the crosshairs on the target, letting your reflexes squeeze the trigger, scrambling away before they could locate you and send incoming fire after you. It had to be his reality, as familiar as his mother’s face, known in all its nuances, comforting in its exactitude. So he spent hours each day on the rifle, on the scope, on the table, his fingers learning anew—as if they’d forgotten—the shape and feel of the design via the exercise of the dry fire, his muscles learning the weight, his arms reacquiring the sensation of holding the rifle in that perfect merger of strength and gentleness. He had to become one with the rifle, a kind of exalted state of biomechanical intimacy, not easily achieved, not achieved, in fact, except through great effort and with practice, especially on demand. And he had to be able to do it on demand.