The Ministry for the Future

23

It took a while to get a gun. Not easy. Finally he managed it by stealing a rifle and its ammunition from a Swiss man’s closet, where Swiss men so often kept their service rifles. It turned out to be absurdly easy; the country was so safe that quite a few people never locked their doors. Of course Swiss men were ordered to keep their service rifles under lock and key, and they all did that, but some were more careless with their hunting rifles, and he found one of those.

He was ready to act.

He researched his subjects of interest. One of them would be attending a conference in Dübendorf in a month.

So he carried the stolen rifle in a backpack over the Zuriberg, to a parking garage near the conference center in Dübendorf. He took the stairs up to its top floor, then climbed up onto its roof. When he got to the roof he was looking down on the main entrance to the conference center. He assembled the rifle and set it on a wooden stand he had knocked together, and looked through its sight at the entrance area.

His target walked up broad stairs to the entry and turned to say something to an assistant. Blue suit, white shirt, red tie. He looked like he was making a joke.

Frank regarded the man in the crosshairs. He swallowed, aimed again. He could feel his face heating up, also his hands and feet. Finally the man went inside.

Frank put the rifle back in the backpack and carried it down the stairs. Up in the forest, on the hill separating the city from its suburban town, he cast the rifle onto the ground under a tree. Then down the hill, back to his shed.

That had been a criminal, something like a war criminal, there in the crosshairs of that gun. A climate criminal. Few war criminals would kill as many people as that man would. And yet Frank hadn’t pulled the trigger. Hadn’t been able to. A target whose life’s work would drive thousands of species to extinction, and cause millions of people to die. And yet he hadn’t done it.

Maybe he wasn’t as crazy as he thought. Or maybe he had completely lost it. Or simply just lost his nerve. He wasn’t sure anymore. He felt sick, shaky. Like he had just missed getting hit by a bus. That made him angrier than ever. He still wanted to kill one of the people killing the world. A Child of Kali, here in the West. A fellow traveler.

He had seen people die, had been broken by that very sight. So making more death was perhaps not the right response. Hurt people hurt people, one of his therapists had said. This was no doubt true. But it was too sweeping, too easy. It didn’t have to play out like that every time. Though he did want to kill something. People like that oil executive, or that jerk he had lashed out at and knocked down, thoughtless assholes or great people as they might be, some of both, no doubt. They might get killed for their crimes someday, and deserve it too. But not by him. He didn’t care about that guy he had hit, but that was an accident. Shooting someone was not like punching an asshole. He would have to find a different way. Though he still wanted to kill something. It was hard to think of anything else.