NPR 3 Minute Story: 3-D

3-D

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. It was time.

"Burn it," she said to her handler.

She reviewed the instructions once more in her mind: Out the door and right, thirty-five steps, left, eight steps across the street, forward forty-three steps, left, four steps, turn right and stop at street edge, at the phrase "Good afternoon, Excellency" fire twice from her handbag gun directly ninety degrees left, 0 degrees up from her breast level, step into the car in front of her.

Braille instructions could be very economical. And precise.

As was she. Confines, structure--those things violated by fire--drew her like a moth to colorless, sometimes textured, shape. The blind have a love of geometry. With numbers, it is one of the few things in the sighted world that makes sense. She recalled for a moment her love of the wooden geometric blocks she played with as a child at the Blind School, the spheres, cones and cubes. How she hated it when one became chipped or lost its sharp edge. In her mind a circling bird of prey carved out a tight circle in the sky, the base of his cone of sight, the apex his huddled target.

Of course she had never seen a bird of any type. But she understood the cone.

In all eleven assassination attempts she had been successful in, only once had a witness ever insisted the assassin was blind. Seemingly people could not believe their eyes. They were blind to her.

She had no love for the irony; women don't appreciate irony much. But she loved the architecture, the precision required. She heard a television show once, Discovery Channel maybe, and the recorded voices of several men on a Cousteau ship watching an orca. Over a mile in the distance a shark trailed a pod of porpoises looking for placenta or miscarriages. The orca dove and the amazed sailors described him. He was not tracking the shark; he did not adjust his course. He had calculated where the shark would be in time and space and met him there in the completion of a beautiful, bloody triangle.

She did that. Usually she was more queen bee than shark or hawk; her handlers usually brought her prey to her. It was easier but unnecessary. Her understanding of angles and planes was so fine she had killed accurately from thirty yards away.

She trembled ever so slightly as she smelled the book burning. The evidence. The blind also have great regard for trust.

She opened the door, felt the sun on her face, tightened her grip on her purse and her cane, turned right and began to count.