He was nervous about giving the speech.
As a local politician, it had been decided that he should officially open the new shopping precinct. It would be a short opening ceremony, but it may well draw a fair-sized crowd. If it wasn’t for his wife’s insistence he would have had someone else make the speech. However, she convinced him that with her moral support he could do it. He knew it would be good for his prestige on the local council. So, after a great deal of thought, he agreed that it was his place to say a few words. He needed to learn them. So, he began to regularly rehearse his lines by shuffling bits of paper and mumbling to himself.
When the morning of the opening came, he arrived to find a large, noisy crowd gathered outside the centre’s main entrance. Supressing his growing anxiety, he mounted the podium and looked for his wife among all the faces. Then he spotted her, she was giving him an encouraging wave. He smiled and nodded back, feeling some of the stress fade away. As his hand went into his jacket pocket for his notes he looked for her again; she blew him a kiss. This surprised him, because it was something she never did. Along with his notes he found a card. When he looked down he saw it was a small head and shoulders photograph of a typist who works at the council. In fact, the woman he’d been seeing.
He froze, staring down at it, with his nerves jangling. It took only a few seconds for the emotions of bewilderment, understanding, guilt, fear, and finally sheer panic, to race through his brain.
During those same moments, somewhere in a building across the street, a professional assassin’s finger gently comes to rest on a trigger…