Game of Snipers

27

It got big fast after Greenville and Detroit. It wasn’t just the three murders; it was the concordance of the Juba prints with Israeli intelligence files, a wide circulation of his curriculum vitae at high echelons, as well as Juba’s own awareness that he was being hunted. The zombie posse, as Swagger had christened them, decided to move into a larger operation.

Task force MARJORIE DAW ceased to exist. It was seconded to the Counterterrorism Division, which put unlimited manpower and computer time at the disposal of those hunting Juba. But the unit wasn’t broken up. Instead, Nick and his assistant Chandler and consultants Swagger and Gold were moved to a suite of rooms on the Counterterrorism Division floor in the Hoover Building, and Nick had direct access to Ward Taylor, the Assistant Director in charge of CTD. They were to be the intelligence staff, the out-of-the-box thinkers, who provided guidance and zeal to the larger, more plodding operation. Taylor and Nick were friends. Taylor had worked under Nick in Dallas and done very well, while at the same time not being one of those guys who could never be wrong and had to get ahead or die. He was okay.

Swagger’s first matter of business under the new setup was to meet with the computer genius Jeff Neill, another Nick ally from way back, and see what could be teased from the mysterious machines on the floor down one flight.

“Not much,” Neill explained to him and Gold, whom Bob had dragooned for his elegant speech and manners. “Mr. Gold’s people had a village name, therefore a specific area in southern Iraq. Their possibility index was quite limited, a few square miles. They didn’t even have a program. They just took pix of everything.”

“Our program was Mr. Swagger,” said Gold. “He performed exceptionally well, up to the point of carrying an Uzi on a commando raid against the target.”

“I wish we could get ours to do that,” said Neill with a laugh. “But ours just sits there, hums and filters and occasionally freezes up.”

“So,” said Swagger, “if we run the attributes against imagery from the U.S. national weather satellites, we’ll come up with too many.”

“By a factor of several million, I’d guess. You need a more precise limiting function. The smaller, the better. Region: too big. State: too big. County: probably too big. Sector of county: now you’re talking. We can task a bird to snoop it out, we can design a program to hunt for the things your eyes looked for and saw, all that shooter stuff, and we could probably find it. But until you get me that, I can’t do much for you.”

“Okay, I’ll put that one on hold for a bit. Now, another question.”

Bob explained about the sustenance of a long-range shooting program, via reloading tools, powder acquisition, premium bullets in .338 caliber, perhaps virgin shell casings, a chronograph, wind direction vanes, a Kestrel Pocket Weather Meter, perhaps a computer and app for solving the necessary algorithms for sight adjustment, as well as the optics and mounts and cleaning tools themselves, and other things too numerous and Mickey Mouse to mention. “Not available at your local Sportsman’s Warehouse,” he said. “A couple of retail outlets, one in Colorado, one in Pennsylvania, both of which also do considerable mail order, plus a bigger outfit, called Sinclair International, all of which service that community. It’ll grow; we’re lucky it’s still pretty small. The big lick in competition shooting is something called Precision Rifle Competitions, popping up wherever there’s room, the west mostly, but the big suppliers haven’t really gotten on that bandwagon yet.

“If we can we get into their mail-order systems and determine if anyone has made a big purchase of this stuff recently. If we come up with something odd, we could check his name against the lists of competitors at various competitions and see if he’s legitimate. If he checks out, okay. If not, if it’s a sophisticated order from an unusual person — say, a city address, an address next to a mosque, something like that — then that would be worth looking into.”

“You didn’t come up with a question.”

“Sorry, too tangled up in my own thoughts. The question — two of ’em, actually: Can we get into those records from here and is it legal? And if it’s not legal, can we get away with doing it anyhow?”

“It’s legal,” said Neill. “We can put it before the FISA court for a ruling. FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed in ’78 but punched up after nine-eleven to give us some latitude in our pursuits. Juba is clearly a representative of a foreign intelligence agency, no matter who he’s working for now. The Israeli documents prove that. So you’d work with Legal — Chandler’ll set it up for you — and you’ll draw up a request. It has to be tight, limited in scope, not a fishing license.”

“I can live with that.”

“It’ll be limited in time, so you’d better have your team ready to hop in and ride hard. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. The act is designed to help you hunt for one thing and one thing alone, not as a general scouting expedition.”

“I’ve got that.”

“It’s so much easier the Mossad way,” sighed Mr. Gold. “We just do it and sleep well at night.”

“You have an advantage,” said Neill. “You’re at war. We’re playing a party game called Don’t Make Anybody Mad.”

The paperwork was expedited, the FISA ruling achieved, and at that point the Director of the Cyber Division ruled that Gershon Gold, of Mossad, was not cleared to assist in the search, being a representative of a foreign intelligence service, even though a friendly one.

Bob immediately resigned.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nick said.

“Who’s being ridiculous? He’s the best cyberguy in the world. A legend. That’s why he’s here. And now you’re telling me he can’t take an elevator down a story and sit at a monitor just like the one he has in Tel Aviv.”

“That’s what I’m telling you. It’s federal law, and, in their way, the Cyber Division is right. If anything goes wrong and it is later revealed that we illegally let an Israeli national highly educated in cyberwar into our nerve center, that could be used against us by the usual sources. Different agendas here: you are trying to catch Juba, the Cyber Division is trying to ensure the Bureau’s integrity and invulnerability to partisan or press attacks.”

“Maybe Gold is the only guy in the world who can break this thing. Would you want them partisan jerks to know that he was sitting upstairs drinking bad coffee while we were fucking up downstairs, thirty feet, as the crow flies, from his instrument of war?”

“Cyber Division is playing the odds. It’s the smart move, bureaucratically. Our smart move has to be to figure out how to get around it. Nothing personal against either man, it’s just another obstacle we have to get over.”

“Can we bring Ward Taylor in on this one?”

“Sure, but he’ll tell you the same thing. He has to. He has no choice.”

It was Gold who ended the contretemps.

“Sergeant Swagger, this battle is fought each day in every intelligence or law enforcement entity in the world. I have seen it at play in Mossad as well. We even have a nickname for it. We call it the Gray Foolishness. It can’t be defeated, it can only be outsmarted. I would counsel you to waste no energy on this, and we will work out a way to get around it. The important thing, for both of us, is not what makes sense in this building but to catch or kill Juba before he brings yet more chaos and death to the world.”

“That’s what a grown-up sounds like,” said Nick.

“So it’s on me,” said Swagger, “and I don’t even know where to start.”

So Gold gave Bob and Chandler a rough tutorial in the investigation they would have to run by themselves.

“You also must be skilled in pattern recognition, knowing that the little bit you learn here may seem meaningless, but it must not be discarded, as it might fit into some larger scheme and its importance become paramount.”

“In other words,” said Swagger, “I have to become a lot smarter than I am, and really fast.”

That afternoon, Swagger passed into a top secret computer center, and then into a special room, where he and Chandler — she did the keyboard stuff, being younger and faster — went hunting in cyberspace.

Their targets were the mail-order customer lists of EuroOptic Limited in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, Mile High Shooting Accessories in Erie, Colorado, and Sinclair International in Montezuma, Iowa, all purveyors of high-quality and high-cost equipment for the sport of long-range shooting, the first two the only FFL dealers of Accuracy International rifles in the United States.

“There are other marks,” said Chandler. “Surgeon Rifles, JP Rifles, Cadex, Sako, MHSA. Savage is in the game, so too is Ruger, at a much lower price point. How do you know he didn’t do one of those?”

“Well, I don’t,” said Swagger. “But my thinking is, AI was the first and the most famous. It’s also hard combat tested, the others not so much. It was, most importantly, the weapon system used by the British Corporal of Horse Craig Harrison in his mile-and-a-half shot in Afghanistan in 2009. Juba would know that, he would have heard of that, and, in the way his mind works, he wants to duplicate that. Thus, he’s going to put together a kit identical, or nearly identical, to Harrison’s ’09 hit. That’s part of the intellectual appeal.”

“What did Gold say?”

“He thinks it fits the personality — that is, the bastard’s methodical way of thinking and doing. He ain’t no experimenter. He will very slowly and precisely follow exactly what happened before, to get the same result, with the when/where at his choosing.”

“How about Mrs. McDowell? She’s the world Juba expert.”

“You know, I didn’t think to ask her,” said Swagger. “She was so worried that she hadn’t done well in her little undercover thing that I couldn’t get it into the conversation. Want me to call her?”

“No, let’s save her for when we’re in a real jam.”

“Makes sense.”

“Gold is enough, I guess,” said Chandler. “But one of the things we might look at is a history of sales, or specials, or something, from these outlets. The reason I say that is, maybe Juba didn’t himself place the order but had some minion of whoever is working with him do it. And his agenda might be different. Maybe one of these places had a real good buy on Steiner Optics, and the guy decided to save five hundred bucks by going Steiner instead of Schmidt and Bender.”

“Good point, Chandler. Damn, you’re smart. Ever make a mistake?”

“Only once. I married a guy who thought I actually cared about sex.”

“We fall for that one every damned time, don’t we?”

“It was nothing a divorce couldn’t solve.”

A few minutes later, out of nothing but his cogitations, it happened: a palpable thought.

“Oh, and this,” said Bob. “The rifle Juba’s using, I’m betting, was stolen from somebody here in the U.S. It was probably a high-ranking competitive shooter. Now, that guy would also want the Harrison rig duplicated for exactly the same reason. Yeah, the other stuff might work, but Juba’d know the AI rig works. And so would the theoretical original guy. He’s probably got some sniper buzz going on using the right stuff too, though he’d never admit it. So we have to look for a listing of stolen guns.”

“Got it,” she said.

The first stop, then, was the National Firearm Registry, a listing of all stolen guns. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had made off with the weapon of choice and that could lead right to the heart of the matter? But no such luck. A Barrett .50 caliber was the closest thing, but a quick call to the jurisdiction revealed that it had been recovered.

That possibility exhausted, they moved on to the sales records of the three companies.

First pass of all three sales records over the past five months — an arbitrary period, to be sure, but they’d go back further only as a desperation measure — yielded nothing of much interest. Filtering, courtesy of one of Neill’s programs, for “Accuracy International .338 Lapua Magnum,” they indeed encountered a cult based upon the worship of that rifle and that caliber. But all the purchases seemed to be more along the line of adding geegaws to the system — like dedicated cleaning kits, AI optical mounts, transit cases, wrench sets, a mirage band to stretch down the barrel and thus kill any reflection from its metallic surface, headspace gauges, bolt-cap-removal tools — all the little bitty Tinkertoys that so many in the culture told themselves they absolutely had to have.

“They’re like little girls collecting Pretty Ponies,” Chandler said.

None of the purchases was particularly big-ticket, none of them was absolutely mandatory to the shot, except for the scope, but Bob assumed that most of the shooters already had scopes, and, furthermore, granted the assumption that somehow Juba’s rifle was initially stolen in America, it would have been scoped as well. None suggested someone trying to get into the AI .338 Lapua Magnum in a big way all at once. It was all about adding a little of this, a little of that.

“Any feeling or buzz?” asked Swagger.

“You’re the rustic genius. I’m just the little grind who went to State U and got straight A’s. I’m as creative as a block of wood.”

“Let’s filter for ‘L.E. Wilson dies, 338 Lapua Magnum.’”

“What the hell is that?”

“If you want to reload for superaccuracy, it all turns on the accuracy of machining in the dies. Everyone in the game knows that Wilsons are the best. These guys will get every angle perfect to a hundredth of an inch. They’re that good. Plus, Wilsons, not being screwed into a big, sloppy press, can be loaded at the rifle range on an arbor press — that’s a hand-portable device — which makes it easier. It’s not for high volume, but it’s the one most of the benchrest guys use. It’s very accurate, no wobble or slop in the construction, the parts fit like a Mercedes engine. More, I saw one in Juba’s shop — bright yellow box, very compact — in the second before the guy lit it, and himself, off.”

She typed it in, pushed Return, and in a few seconds the computer scanned, filtered, sorted, and presented nine purchases in the past five months of Wilson die sets — neck size and bullet seater — in the .338 Lapua Magnum size, plus specific neck-sizer bushings for the first die, three at .366, two at .367, and one more at .368. From this they got nine names, which they ran against several data fields already in place, being the membership in the North American Long Range Shooting Association, which was the governing body of most of the matches, as well as entry in long-range shooting schools all across the west, part of the training craze in all the esoteric gun skills of Special Forces operators that currently gripped the shooting world. Of the nine customers, eight were in one or the other, the ninth being a wealthy South Carolina gun collector who was on the Board of Trustees of the NRA.

“Too bad it ain’t him,” said Bob, a little sourly. “The newspapers would go crazy.”

“He’s not the type?”

“I met him once. Rich guy, big in the NRA. He owns a batch of auto dealerships, and Subaru millionaires don’t turn into jihadi terrorists.”

“Good point,” she said.

Eighteen hours in, and they had nothing.

“How much time left?”

“Six hours.”

“We’re not getting anywhere.”

“Maybe we’ve proved there’s nowhere to get. Maybe we’ve excluded a possible avenue of investigation. That’s worth something.”

“I suppose,” he said, yawning, checking his watch. “Let’s take a break.”

“Sure.”

They exited security and went back to their own floor. As it was night and rather late, the Counterterrorism Division was pretty much empty except for the operations sector, which always burned lights day or night. But they passed it, went to the lounge, meaning only to sit on sofas and mosey off into a private anywhere that had no Accuracy International mail orders in it.

“Mr. Gold!” said Bob, seeing the portly Israeli at the table, going through paperwork.

“Yes, hello.”

“You’re still here?”

“I thought I might be of some assistance.”

“I wish you could be.”

“You have had no luck?”

Chandler narrated their adventures, rearranging it efficiently so it seemed less random.

“Seems to be very thorough,” said Gold.

“I thought we might have something on the neck-sizer bushings. But, no. All of them checked out. And that would be the one thing anyone running a .338 Lapua Mag program would definitely need to have.”

“Yes, I see,” said Gold.

“Any suggestions?” said Chandler. “We’ve got some time left before the FISA mandate runs out.”

“Nothing of a practical measure. However, there remains a possibility.”

“Yes?”

“Your subconscious has figured it out. It is trying to get you to pay attention. But your brain is clotted with meaningless things.”

“Sounds like you’re suggesting a drink. Only problem is, if I have one, I end up three weeks later in Calgary during the rodeo season, married to a calf roper with four kids.”

It was a familiar line of his. Usually, somebody laughed. Not this time.

Chandler leaned back against the cushion of her seat and closed her eyes, as if to relax.

“All I see is my sisters’ husbands trying to cop feels over a long, long holiday weekend.”

“Any of ’em jihadi snipers?” Swagger asked.

“No, just doctors, lawyers, and one would-be poet who sells real estate. He’s the worst. The poets always are.”

So she got the laugh.

“All right,” she finally said. “I am getting something on numbers. Three of them: 8-7-1.”

“Are you of numeric imagination?” asked Gold.

“I’m of no imagination. I’m just good at math.”

“What that means is that in the presence of numbers you are relaxed. Thus, there is less to oppose the flow between conscious and subconscious.”

“Maybe. But I just see 8, 7, and 1, from somewhere, sometime — recently, I think. Don’t know why, can’t connect it with anything. Where would there be an 8-7-1? Swagger, do you recall that in our hunt?”

“Lots of numbers. Phone number, zip codes, catalogue numbers, calibers, trigger-pull weights.”

She pulled out her iPhone, went to Safari, ran the number 8-7-1.

“It’s not an area code,” she said.

“Try a zip code. The first three numbers of a zip code.”

She did.

“Okay, it’s Albuquerque, New Mexico—87102 through 87123—twenty of ’em.”

They let that lie for a second. Then Gold said, “Contiguous zones. So that would mean that no matter if the town or suburb were different, the physical sites could be quite close to each other.”

“Yes, and what are the odds of so many different .338 guys living so close to one another? Probably, in the west, lower than elsewhere, but still pretty remote.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go back into Cyber Division and see what our 8-7-1 gets us.”

28

By midmorning, they reached the wheat.

It rolled for miles and miles to the horizon, golden, turning almost liquid by the wind rippling its surface, broken here and there by a farmhouse, a silo, maybe a stand of trees. Now and then, a huge red or green machine — thresher, combine, packer — moved like a heavy tank across the surface of the earth. The sky was blue and vast, the clouds hazy, the weather crisp and precise. He’d never seen wheat like this and was glad he now had.

These people may be infidels, he thought, but they are excellent wheat farmers, maybe even better than the Russians.

He said nothing. What would these Mexicans know about wheat? The answer was, nothing. It was an alliance of convenience — financial, for the one, and practical necessity.

Across from him sat the grandee Menendez, who spent all his time jabbering in Spanish on the phone, perhaps dispatching orders to the far ends of his empire. Juba didn’t know the details — no need to — but he knew the sort of man Menendez had to be and had no illusions about him. The matter of the boy, Jared, had made illusions impossible.

He didn’t care for that. There had been no need. The boy had proved himself. He didn’t deserve sudden death in a farmyard in someplace he’d never been in his life. But, at the same time, Juba was under mission discipline. He worked not for his intelligence masters or for the mysterious source of all the funding but for Allah. Allah required his self-control. And that is what he gave Allah, not Menendez.

Now Juba’s life and mission were in the hands of this Menendez, for how many millions of dollars, one didn’t know, and there was nothing to be done at this point except to go passive, offer no resistance, merely the softness of the sniper in him. He would observe, calculate, and record, and that would be enough — for now.

Beside Menendez was the one called Jorge, the translator, his face an odd mix of the Arab and the Mexican. What godforsaken, blasphemed union had produced such an offspring? He had the mealy look of a grub worm, obsequious and frantically obedient. He was disposable, a fact known to everyone except himself. He probably thought he was quite important, not realizing that the mere luck of his dual upbringing made him valuable to Menendez, but Menendez would squash him if the need arose. His face wore a perpetual expression of guarded optimism. He thought he was in with the big boys. Juba despised him on principle.

Meanwhile, he of course had no idea where he was — Kansas, from the little he knew, seemed about right — because he couldn’t read the frequent highway signs, nobody spoke to him except for offers of food or drink, and he himself refused to betray his curiosity. In any case, it all changed when at a certain point they diverged from the highway into a small city, coursed through its outskirts, and arrived at a minor airfield.

“Now, my friend,” said Menendez through Jorge, “it’s time to move more quickly. I didn’t feel it safe to divert to air immediately in the area of your escape, as airports would have been put under close observation. Where we are now, nobody notices anything.”

Juba nodded.

They passed through gates, around empty parking lots, and arrived at a hangar. Nearby, a number of parked planes sat angled in the sun, all with their tails low to the ground, with props thrust skyward, all with glinting, bright steel, acrylic canopies of one configuration or another, riding plump tires and looking speedy though sitting still. But they continued on, and, instead, the driver took them to the end of the runway, where, already fueled up and its engines roaring, a sleek white twin-engined jet awaited.

As the car approached, the jet’s cabin door opened and a stairway unfolded.

Menendez spoke by phone to whoever his necessary assistants were, then put his arm on Juba’s shoulder and indicated the way toward the stairway. They walked to the plane, and, in seconds, both men were inside, in a plush tan-leather interior, attended by an unctuous steward, who offered alcoholic beverages — Menendez took a brown liquid over ice in a squat, wide glass; Juba refused politely, secretly annoyed that nobody realized the faith forbade liquor — and ushered them to seats.

They strapped in.

29

As it turned out, spread over the three retail outlets — EuroOptic, Mile High Shooting Accessories, and Sinclair International — there had been nine transactions that dispatched product to an 871×× zip code. Of the nine, three had received two shipments, so it amounted to six different addresses spread over the four Albuquerque area codes, but to a single name.

“Sounds generic,” said Chandler. “Brian Waters. Mean anything?”

“Not sure,” said Bob. “Maybe a whisper of a buzz. Keep going.”

Taken together, the nine separate orders amounted pretty much to an advanced kit for the care and feeding of an Accuracy International .338 Lapua Magnum, but more or less camouflaged as a series of small orders of no significance.

“Here’s an interesting one,” Swagger said. “He orders the Wilson bullet seater and neck sizer in one package, but he orders the .367 neck-sizer bushing in another. Yet for the system to work, you need both, meaning he’s putting together the reloading kit but in increments that nobody would ever notice, save for Chandler’s 8-7-1 pickup.”

“So the implication is that ‘Brian Waters’ is putting together the reloading kit but wanted nobody to know it, particularly snoopers coming at it from cyberspace — namely, us.”

“Not only that but this 8-7-1 has ponied up for a ballistic engine, that is, a handheld computer prekeyed with possibilities and algorithms for figuring out corrections for wind and distance. You pop in .338 Lapua Mag, Sierra 250-grain HPBT MatchKing bullet, 89 grains of Hodgdon H1000 powder. Wind south-southwest at one-half value, barometric pressure at 30.12, humidity at fifty-four percent, range: 1,922 meters. Push a button, and it gives you a solution based on your zero, which you’ve preentered. It’ll say something like ‘windage left: 12.7 mil dots, elevation: 14.44 mil dots.’ You crank your knobs — elevation and windage — to that location and squeeze. Nineteen hundred and twenty-two meters away, something falls dead.”

“I think we’ve connected.”

“More here. To one address, a Whidden Bullet Pointing Die System. It’s a new, hot lick by which you can ‘sharpen’ the bullet point, which assists greatly in long-distance shooting. And, if I’m not mistaken, this other thing is an electric annealing machine, by which you heat-treat prefired brass and make it more consistent.”

“This guy must read all the gun magazines,” said Chandler.

“No, this stuff ain’t been in the magazines yet. He’s that far ahead. And that fits in neatly with Juba’s patient, plodding, one-step-at-a-time methodology, very thorough, not rushing, not making any mistakes. Both Mrs. McDowell and Mr. Gold make that point. All t’s crossed, i’s dotted. Not that he did the ordering, but he provided the operating plan and the security requirements to whoever was working with him on this.”

“So here’s my thought,” said Chandler. “Let’s run the addresses for each of the six locations and see what we turn up.”

“Good move,” said Swagger.

It didn’t take long to pull the data free.

“No homes,” said Swagger. “They’re all FedEx Office or UPS outlets, all places that take packages for people.”

“Yes, and though usually those places rent you a post office box,” she said, “in this case Brian Waters requested or paid extra not to list a P.O. box but just the street address of the little shop. I suppose that was part of the camouflage operation.”

“Yeah, and, moreover, most mail-order places won’t ship to post office boxes, only to residential addresses. But it’s not a rigorous system. The guy at the sending end isn’t going to check. If it’s just an address, he doesn’t have the time or the interest to make sure the street address is a house, not some retail thing.”

“Well, let’s run the credit card number that paid for all this stuff.”

Another quick discovery: Brian Waters again.

One man with six addresses, each FedEx Office unknown to the other five, had ordered all the goods.

Swagger went to his list of competitors.

“He placed highly in the thousand-yard championships at the NRA range in New Mexico. He’s a shooter. They had to use him as the fulcrum of their operation, alive or dead, probably dead.”

He thought of this fellow. Shooting geek, maybe a little private money, lived for nothing more than putting five .338 bullet holes inside a couple of inches at a mile. To what purpose? If you weren’t a sniper, it had no purpose, it was just damned hard to do, and he had decided he’d become one of the few men in the world who could do it on demand, off a cold barrel. That’s all his life was: he lived in a world of numbers and weights, and certain refined body movements, and one night someone snuck in and put a silenced bullet through his brain. They took his rifle and reloading stuff and shipped it secretly to Syria, where a cold-minded fellow named Juba became him, mastered his rifle, learned his tricks, all with some dark purpose in mind that would leave a lot of other people dead. Swagger shivered.

Mrs. McDowell wants you for her son. The Israelis want you for the bus. The Marine Corps wants you for Baghdad. But I want you for the shooting geek, who never did no harm and got sucked up and spit out for something he couldn’t understand.

“Now he’s here, he’s got the rifle, he’s used the credit card to reorder the stuff he had in Syria but was too bulky to smuggle in. So they’ve been replacing it.”

“Whoa!” she said. “Isn’t that leap a little far?”

“No,” Swagger said. “His name was Brian A. Waters. In the burning shop in Syria, I saw his gun case in the second before the flames took it. I saw the two initials, A and W, the B was already roasted. They need a pigeon. He’s the pigeon. Somehow, some way, this is going to turn on him. I mean, what good is an assassination conspiracy without a Lee Harvey Oswald?”

30

The jolt of landing awakened him. No dreams of American snipers this time. Instead, he saw the blank look of existential nothingness on Jared’s face as he went down, bullet in head. This was fiction. As Jared had been turned, Juba had not seen the expression, and the flash of the pistol’s cartridge from the muzzle did not illuminate it. Still, awaking, he could not shake the grief and the hurt, which surprised him. Mission discipline, he ordered of himself: push it all out, make it go away.

He shook his head and came fully awake as the plane came to a halt.

“Enjoy the nap?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not far now.”

The steward opened the door, sliding it sideways on its rollers, then pushed a button to lower the stairs. As the door cracked, bright light flooded in. Juba blinked, but felt the rush of natural air, warmth with perhaps a tang of grass to it, a suggestion of wildflowers. He stepped out to cooler temperatures and a sense of being engulfed by mountains. They were everywhere, green and lofty, some cragged with solemn old faces, others, higher up, still capped with snow. It was a small airport somewhere, presumably for rich people, as the other planes on the ground all seemed to be jets, with swept wings and sporty paint jobs featuring impressions of blur, speed, lightning, and other symbols of modern, comfortable transportation for the elites.

A Land Rover waited, with its driver inside. Next to it sat a Mercedes S, with four men deployed, well-dressed, but of the thick variety that reminded him of the American contractors in Baghdad, standing about, hands loose. Bodyguards, they’d have weaponry secured in the vehicle, quick to come out or packed against their bulked-up bodies. All wore sunglasses, all had snail earplugs, all watched warily, not the arrival but the horizon, for threats.

“Now, my friend,” said Menendez, “it’s just this last little bit, and you will have everything you require, most of all absolute security and privacy, as required.”

“I am very impressed with your preparations,” said Juba.

“We are bigger than many Fortune 500 companies,” said Menendez. “I am proud to say our growth, though stymied at times, has been remarkable in the past several years. There is money for everyone. I know money means little to you, and politics everything, but it is only with money that political ends may be achieved.”

“True. But that’s not my concern. I leave it to others. Allah has seen to give me a gift for a certain kind of war and I will use it in the infidel heartland to strike a vital blow.”

“And that is why I am so eager to assist. The money, it’s nothing. It’s the ends, really, that make all this so interesting.”

They climbed into the Land Rover, and the S fell in behind. The convoy set off along roads through a valley, beneath the peaks on either side, and again, in more time than he expected, drove and drove and finally reached a gate of no particular interest.

“From the road: nothing,” said Menendez.

The car passed through and rolled down a one-lane blacktop, climbed a small hill. There it encountered a second perimeter, this one of barbed wire, with a sentry post at its locked gate. Two men with M4s, also sunglassed and earplugged, operated the gate to let the two cars pass. They surmounted the crest and started downward.

Juba had no sense of architecture and had no way of knowing the elegant log mansion in the valley before him was famous and dated back to Teddy Roosevelt’s time, though of course it had been much upgraded. In fact, TR had stayed there on one of his many western hunting trips. To Juba, it was just an immense log house, and his idea of a palace involved marble columns, cupolas, and gold fixtures. This building reminded him of cowboy movies he had seen as a boy, all juts and angles, with gables and balconies in roughly cobbled wood.

Jorge the translator was kept busy, as this Menendez, after so much silence, had much to say.

“If the editors of Architectural Digest understood who owned the famous Hanson Ranch, they’d be stunned. Especially if they comprehended that it was their own children’s enthusiasm for our product that paid for it.”

The grandee was a man of boastfulness. He could not help himself.

“I own several houses — Mexico City, Acapulco, Cap d’Antibes, the U.S. Virgins, even Malaysia — but this is my favorite. It is very private. A small army guards it. Come, you’ll see.”

Juba had no interest in a tour, but he had been raised in the tradition of hospitality and pretended to appreciate the rooms through which he was led. He saw lots of tribal patterns on the walls and floors, brown-leather furniture of the heavy sort, paintings of bears and mountain lions and prairies and cowboys, sculptures of animals — what was “an original Remington”?—and a glistening gun cabinet, presumably full of the famous American Winchesters.

“This will interest you,” said Menendez.

He opened the gun case and pulled a weapon out — but it was no Winchester.

“I keep it to remind me of how I got here,” Menendez said. “Of course, it reflects the gauche tastes of the Mexican peasantry, but what it lacks in class it makes up for in earnestness.”

Jorge had trouble with “gauche,” but Juba didn’t care. Menendez handed him the gun.

It was an AK-74, but plated in gold. It was also encrusted with diamonds and rubies in a somewhat primitive array along the receiver, as if dribbled into place by a child. It glittered with surreal brilliance, the two themes — lethality and decadent bad taste — making even less sense than the mistranslated word.

“It was presented to me by my former competitors, now vassals, when my absorption of their organizations became complete. It is an object of veneration, respect, and, I suppose, fear. The gems, by the way, are real, and the gold is indeed twenty-four karat. Estimated value: about three million dollars. A fighter like you would think, what a waste of rifle! A connoisseur like me would think, what a waste of three million in diamonds! But to the men who gave it to me, it had real meaning, and, thus, I keep it, enjoying it both literally and ironically.”

This made no sense whatsoever to Juba, but much of what the slick and sophisticated Menendez said made no sense. He did get that it was in some sense special.

“Magnificent,” he said. “But, then, I would expect no less from a man of such accomplishment.”

“Yes, yes, appreciated. But I know you yearn to see the shop we have built and equipped for your work and the ranges to which you will have access. But first”—he gestured emphatically—“this fellow will be seen lurking about. He is my body man, my most trusted bodyguard, my assistant, a very large part of what I do and how I do it.”

A lithe but powerfully built man appeared at a door, advanced to Menendez, and bowed. Like the others, his duty uniform was a well-fitted black suit; like the others, a radio wire ran to his ears; like the others, he crackled with messages of skill and intensity; but, unlike the others, he was wearing a tightly fitted black hood, its tightness more akin to a sock than a hood. Only his eyes showed.

“As a part of his commitment to his craft, Señor La Culebra prefers to keep his face mysterious. He values his anonymity. He will always see you before you see him. He has the gift of cunning, stealth, and grace. He would have made an extraordinary sniper, but his hunger is to kill at more intimate levels, with the blade, at which he excels. His skill level is perhaps the world’s most dangerous. Policemen, detectives, journalists, competitors — they have all been awakened by the hiss of their own throat being cut. His very presence at my shoulder is an extraordinary asset when I am in meeting with my peers. Of course, when I meet with, say, my fellow suburban Los Angeles Subaru dealers and Carl’s Jr. franchise holders, I leave him in the car, behind tinted glass. He is not for the bourgeois.”

“My respects to such a talented man,” said Juba, nodding in greeting.

The hooded man nodded back, his eyes intense behind the slits of the hood.

That ceremony completed, Menendez led Juba first to a bedroom — nice, but Juba had no interest in bedrooms — and laid out eating arrangements, as well as laundry and maid service, and then out a back entrance, through a garden, across a stable yard, where Mexican boys could be seen exercising and otherwise caring for some beautiful horses, and finally to a small, corrugated prefab cottage, clearly temporary.

“Sir,” said Menendez. “To your liking, I hope. If not, corrections will be made.”

Juba took the key and entered.

It appeared perfect. Every item he ordered was displayed on a heavy worktable against the wall. He went quickly to the heart of it, the yellow packaging from L.E. Wilson, and saw several containers of neck bushings that ran from .366 to .368, as well as the crucial boxes containing neck sizer and bullet seater. Another box contained a Whidden bullet-pointing die, to sharpen the tips of the missiles themselves, and they were close by, boxes of Match bullets from Sierra, Nosler, Hornady, and other makers, all .338 Match grade. Next to the bench was packaging from Oehler, signifying a high-grade chronograph, to measure velocity. And an iPhone 8, lying on the bench. Seemingly innocuous, it had been programmed by its original owner with data onto a ballistic app, the Hawkins Ballistics FirstShot software, which offered instant solutions to the equations that ruled the universe of long-range. Canisters of smokeless powder, bright as pennants leading the Saracen army, stood on higher shelves, and a brand-new arbor press, as well as boxes of Federal 215M large-rifle Magnum primers, chamfer tools for both neck and primer hole, seven reloading manuals — all had been placed around the central icon in what was almost a crèche of infidel devotion.

And its icon was a rifle.

31

The zombies were hungry. Pink-faced, blue-suited, white-shirted, red-tied — they sat around the conference room table, champing their jaws, screaming for flesh, starved for protein to be washed down by blood.

They were the creatures Bob had always hated. So far away from it, so sure, so absolute, so magnificent, so clean of fingernail: who could not hate them? If you lived behind wires and sandbags, and shit in a hole and got shot at a lot, it was mandatory to hate zombies — not these particular ones but zombies as a class. Yet where would the world be without its zombies?

“All right, Nick,” said the head zombie, “who, what is, and why should we care about a Brian A. Waters of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who has no record and no footprint, and, by all accounts, is a pleasant, accomplished, well-respected fellow?”

“Mr. Gold, would you speak to that?” Nick said, then checked for zombies who had trouble keeping up. “Swagger found Brian Waters, but Mr. Gold identified him as only a theoretical possibility, so Swagger worked off that, isn’t that right, Bob?”

“Completely,” said Bob.

Gold was not a zombie. Somehow being an Israeli meant you could never be a zombie. Swagger wasn’t sure by what principle this was, but it was a principle nevertheless, perhaps having to do with all the shit they’d been through, their tenuous grasp of survival, and perhaps most of all the subtle intensity that underlay the Israeli faces, as opposed to the theatricality of these American intelligence and enforcement executives.

“Gentlemen,” said Gold, “it has to do, eschatologically, with the different meanings of terror in the Middle East and here in the West. In the Middle East, terror is force. It is about killing lots of people as efficiently as possible. In the West, terror is metaphor. This is a feature of asymmetrical warfare at its purest. It is not the act itself, tragic though it may be, but the resonance of that act in the public imagination. The West cannot be destroyed through numbers; it must be destroyed through its imagination. Its capacity to fight will not be eliminated, but its will to fight can be, and that is the object.

“Thus, this operation against the United States, extravagantly budgeted, extravagantly planned, extravagantly slow in gestation, is not merely about killing a certain high-value target. It is about subverting via its brutal didacticism. It means to be ‘a Big Event,’ in the way the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a Big Event. It means to resonate for decades, to haunt and cripple and dispirit. In order to do that, its execution is not enough. It must have arrived caparisoned in legend, and it must reveal a perpetrator of legendary proportions.”

“A patsy, is that what you mean?” asked zombie 4.

“Exactly,” said Gold.

“How does Mossad see it accomplishing this goal?”

“It’s not merely that the sniper kills. It’s that the blame is put upon a certain figure, and that figure must have status and meaning of disturbing weight.”

“And that would be Brian A. Waters.”

“Exactly. He cannot be a piece of unimpressive trash like Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray. His meaning must be immediately accessible. The press must uncover — or think that it is uncovering — a paper trail of meaning. What that meaning will be, we don’t know yet.”

“Sounds like they want to do Dallas again.”

“But better. This time, controlled, managed, brilliantly syncopated. These people are very clever, and in Juba the Sniper they have found the ideal instrument of their will. And in the unfortunate Mr. Waters, they have found the ideal vessel.”

“Agent Chandler?” said Nick.

“He is, or was, forty-two years old,” said the perfect one, “born in Corpus Christi, Texas, with a superior technical education at Texas Western University and a master’s in petroleum geology from Rice University. Four years working for Phillips in the Geology Department, fast promotion, excellent reputation. In 2004, he resigned, though he was next in line to take over the division, and opened his own survey-and-development company. Fabulously successful, and in six years he sold it for seventeen million dollars. Never married, no kids obviously, a man of extreme intelligence, self-discipline, and drive. Well, I should say, he did marry. He married a rifle.

“His obsession is long-range precision shooting, and he bought land enough in New Mexico for a mile-long range, as well as a collection of rifles capable of accuracy at that distance. He’s spent the last eight years on an odyssey to put five holes in a bull’s-eye a mile away. It’s been done by about fifty men, Mr. Waters hopes to be the fifty-first.

“He has no vices, no politics, no angers, no hatreds, has never said a bad thing about anybody on earth that we can find. But he is an isolate. Being entirely alone with his obsession, he is perfect prey for men who would use him. And we feel he has been used.”

“Do you believe he is dead?”

“Yes, sir. Well, dead in reality. That death is not known. To his few friends and neighbors, he’s simply disappeared, but he disappears a lot. He travels all over the world to shooting matches, he hunts in Africa and Asia and New Zealand, he goes to conferences. His friends are elite shooters, the world over, who share his obsession and speak his language.”

“What is his current official status?”

“He — or somebody with access to his email — has announced to his friends that he’s going on a hunting trip in Southeast Asia and will be incommunicado for several months. We have checked with every known outfitter, and he is not on any trip docket. He has applied for no visas or hunting permits in any Southeast Asian country. His house is closed and locked, a lawn service attends to the yard once a week, prepaid via the Internet. He has vanished, but without any alarm being raised. That is why our hope for his survival is so low. It would be so much easier for them to kill him, help themselves to his life, and use him as an avatar to their purpose under a false flag. So he is being kept alive — well, not physically, but by reputation and counterfeit footprint.”

“Is there any evidence or is this just a working assumption?”

“Well, sir, no physical trace — that is, face-to-face, eyewitness accounts — have been documented with him in several months. Physically, he seems to have vanished from the earth.”

Nick continued, “We believe that a part of this operation is to implicate him as the perpetrator of whatever crime it is that Juba the Sniper means to accomplish. A ‘legend,’ as those of you with intelligence experience will recognize, will be or is being created, and a paper trail will be uncovered, skillfully counterfeited by the best covert people in the world, to suggest that he did this, he did that, he believed this, he believed that. All of that information will play in a certain way to create a certain meaning — certain ramifications. That is why we must stop this thing.”

“Since we seem to know he’s being used, it seems like we can quickly counter any—”

“May I?” said Gold. “Nothing is known these days. All fact is conditional. Modern media allows any interested party to influence millions of people. Who brays the loudest or frames the most skillfully or feeds prejudices the most earnestly is the most believed. False news — particularly if it is backed with credible journalistic sources, as uncovered by reporters who believe they’re doing God’s work. We will be telling another version of a story, and who’s to say ours is better than theirs?”

“Where are you now?”

Nick ran through it: the guise of looking for Juba as a triple murderer and the boy as a felony assault perp in Detroit, which enabled circulation to all law enforcement agencies, as well as maximum social network and media exposure. The penetration of long-range shooting culture to obtain any hints of unusual activity that might have indicated preparation for the shot Juba was to take. The monitoring of criminal enterprises — cartels, more traditional mobs, gangs, crews, paramilitary organizations — for indicators of unusual activity in support of such an operation. The use of satellite technology to discover shooting-range layouts on private property that might also support Juba’s enterprise. The hunt for traces of “Brian Waters,” for provocative statements and clues meant to establish his legend but which might lead to their creators. Finally, the alerting of all field office SWAT teams for high readiness so that apprehension or interdiction could commence immediately upon acquisition of a breakthrough in the hunt.

“Counterterrorism is in on this?”

“Yes,” said zombie number 9, who happened to be Ward Taylor, division chief and Nick’s pal and ally. “Assistant Director Memphis has been extremely solicitous of our participation. No turf wars from Nick, I’m happy to report.”

“Good, I like that,” said zombie number 1. “Now, Memphis, CIA liaison?”

“No, sir.”

“They won’t be happy.”

“I suppose you could say, ‘Too many crooks spoil the broth’”—a little laughter at Nick’s pun—“but there’s more: CIA involvement doesn’t complicate matters by two but rather to an exponential degree. Their agenda can be so murky that even they don’t know what it is, and it can vary, week by week, or even office by office or cubicle by cubicle. It’s not that I don’t trust them — it’s that I don’t trust them. When the time comes, we’ll be happy to go to them.”

“What about Secret Service? If the target should turn out to be Executive Branch—”

“That’s when we’d come to them. At this point, to alert them to the possibility is simply to set up leaks.”

Zombie number 1 nodded. “Your next move?”

“I want to put a clandestine forensics team on the ground in Albuquerque. I don’t want our mobile lab units and three hundred technicians showing up at the closed-down Waters house. I need to get a good workup on what is missing from his house, I want to know if there are any forensic discoveries that could lead us another step — prints of any sort, DNA, who knows whatever clues. But I don’t want them to know we’ve picked up on this. If they do, they’ll take steps to cover further footprints, they’ll enter a higher state of vigilance, and they may alter their plans. We want them confident that they’ve evaded for now, which will give us time to track them down, then we’ll jump.”

“Mr. Swagger, you’ve been hunted. You’re also a rifleman of great skill and experience. Where is Juba now? Mentally, psychologically?”

“He’s happy as he’s ever been. He’s made his getaway, he’s got his rifle, he’s working with it, which for a man like Juba is not a duty but an obsession. A pleasure. He’s a sniper with a target, and a sense of importance and contribution, according to the tenets of his faith. He’s one happy boy.”

“Your job is to make him unhappy,” said a zombie.

“Swagger’s a sniper,” said Nick. “Unhappiness is his business.”

32

The rifle is not beautiful. Its designers yielded on aesthetics from the very start. They knew and loved the look of rifles — the sweep of dark wood, the glow of deeply blued metal, the grace, the symmetry. It was in their blood, but they knew, as well, that they had to ignore that siren call. Theirs was a single-minded objective, not dedicated to the kill so much as to the shot. There was no kill without the shot and thus the shot was everything.

The rifle acquired the configuration of a prosthetic limb with a hole in it, and two giant tubes organically absorbed into it. The hole afforded the shooter’s trigger hand purchase on the grip, just under the bolt. Its placement was not arbitrary, its angle was not arbitrary, its size was not arbitrary, nothing was arbitrary. Everything was designed, tested, adjusted, and retested, before it became part of the specifications. The stock behind the thumbhole was itself a spectacular construct: it was a monstrosity of bulbous swellings and pads, all in play at the convenience of screws. They could be adjusted almost infinitely, so as to fit length of neck, arm, and hand, the thickness of shoulder, breadth of chest, strength of muscle, firmness of grip. All human variables were accounted for, and the shooter before he took his first shot needed to find the ideal harmony of parts, so that the whole fit to and against his body and took advantage of his unique skeletal alignment and musculature. All these adjustable parts were issued in high-strength plastic, giving the thing in question the dull gleam of, perhaps, reptile skin, something without warmth or life. It was not meant to be loved, but respected. It was not meant to please the shooter’s heart, but the intelligence officer’s, the general’s, the president’s, the mullah’s. It was policy as firearm.

All angles machined into it were true. All springs of the finest metals. All steel of that superb blend of strength and flexibility. The trigger was almost as soft as a woman’s most private part, and it took a refined finger that had already pulled a trigger a hundred thousand times to nurse the finest action from it. People don’t realize how much of the gun is about the machinework and what miracles a man who has spent his life shaving pieces of metal to an exact measurement can do. The receiver is epoxied and bolted into the stock, so that the hold is again true, so that no oddities of alignment will haunt a shooter years on down the line. You could use it as a hammer and build a house with it, though to its owners such a thing would seem a desecration. The barrel — barrel making is an art in and of itself — drew even more attention than the other parts, because the barrel, that long steel tube embracing the supersonic missile driven down its bore toward the target, couldn’t be merely excellent, it had to be perfect. Perfect is never cheap, neither in effort nor cost. The men who made the barrels had practiced their crafts for years in such British houses as Purdey or Holland & Holland or Westley Richards. They knew the interior dynamics of steel and how it responds when grooves are engraved along the tube’s polished interior. They hunted with spectroscopes for inner flaws that might play hob with vibrational patterns, because they knew the vibrations must be true as a violin’s strings to deliver the kind of accuracy that they demanded. None of this happened easily, but only after so much experimentation, so much trial and error, all of it piled atop the years of experience.

Then came the scope. It was German, as are all the best optics, a thirty-four-millimeter tube of aluminum, steel, plastic, and polished glass, studded with dials that control adjustments for magnification, focus, windage, elevation, even a laser whose pinprick of red light focused on the target’s center, making it stand out to the shooter’s eye in the dark world of the lens. Its magnification runs from a power of 5 to 25. And the internals on such an instrument are dazzling, as is the machinework that makes everything not merely function but function smoothly as if sheathed in petroleum lubricant so that the sliding between focal distances or in and out of magnification is accomplished without notice by the adjuster. All scopes do this reasonably well, but the S & Bs do it better.

But, of course, the scope does not make all things copasetic. For if the scope magnifies the target, it also magnifies you. That means every tremor, tremble, or twitch, every breath, sniffle, gulp, burp, or fart, is instantly transmuted into action. Accuracy demands mastery of these animal impulses, which a few can achieve but most cannot. And the farther the range, the stiller the body attempting to engineer the connection must be. It is no small thing, and a Juba or a Bob Lee Swagger or any of the great rifle killers have subsumed stillness to a transcendental level. It is a skill that even with talent takes years to master, a discipline that clamps steel expectations on something so prehensile and spontaneous as a human body. Take the trigger finger and the little twitch that fires the weapon: so easy, yet so hard. You can do it a million times and fuck it up on one million and one. Why? Because for the greats, it is a part of their identity, yet beyond knowing, becoming that way only by those endless repetitions, in concert with breath, muscle, and sheer willpower.

He now opened a package and removed a cartridge. Remington — green-and-gold box— .338 Lapua Magnum. He would of course not use factory ammunition in his shot, for so much more could be gotten out of a hand-loading program, half of which he was already through. Still, the round itself was instructive, even inspirational. It seemed like a small missile, heavier by far than one expected, more than three inches long and almost half an inch wide. It was dense, far heavier than it looked, and indeed it looked heavy. It also looked absolute, without any softness about it. It was a serious thing — in its way, more serious than anything.

He held it in his hand, feeling its cool weight against the palm. He turned it to look at the perfect concentricity of the rim, the primer in the perfect center of the head, which was a perfect center again. He traced the smoothness of the brass, with its slight taper, as it rose to the shoulder, where the cartridge reduced itself and formed a neck to sustain a bullet. The bullet itself was all seriousness — copper sheathing over some kind of lead alloy, again concentric to an extreme degree. These bullets were from Sierra, a world-class expert, and since the ammunition was premium, no expense had been spared in achieving their perfection. He looked at the shanks of the thing, admiring the perfect grace of its curve in accordance with the laws of streamlining, the smoothness of the skin, for a nick or a gouge might throw it from true to meplat, as the technical call the tip, and saw again concentricity as a small hole that precludes the tip from becoming a point, absorbing the rushing atmosphere as it flies, and work, with the spin facilitated by the grooves in the rifle’s barrel, stabilizing it during its time in flight before it arrives exactly at its destination, for better, for worse, for whatever purpose filled the head of the shooter.

The statistics of the event are impressive. Muzzle velocity is near twenty-five hundred feet per second for a 250-grain bullet, the kind Juba would shoot, and at the muzzle it delivers 4,813 pounds of energy. It was with such an instrument that the British infidel Craig Harrison had killed in Afghanistan at a distance of 1.54 measured miles.

Now what remained? He’d continue his development, having found three loads of three different powders, three different seating depths, and two different primers that were superior to all the others. Now he could shoot at eleven hundred yards, twelve hundred, thirteen hundred, moving a hundred at a time, easing his way so that what seemed gigantic at the start seemed tiny by the end. He knew how far he had to shoot. He knew where the sun would be, what the temperature should be, what the humidity should be, what the velocity of the breeze should be. All these facts had to be factored in until he could do it on the first shot, cold bore, over and over again. Because on the day when the time finally came, after all the months of preparation, he would have only one chance to speak for God.

33

Swagger went on the raid, just as he had gone on the raid in southern Syria with the Israeli commandos. But unlike that episode, this one was strictly routine.

The house and property of Brian A. Waters were deserted. The Bureau team entered from overland, a mile away, after midnight, using night vision. No problems. A law enforcement — affiliated locksmith cracked the door easily, pointing out to Swagger that it had been cracked before, as evidenced by the toolmarks on the lock. That meshed perfectly with the assumed scenario.

Two gifted dogs quickly searched for explosives and drugs and found none. Once inside, the investigators used their infrared to discover that Brian Waters was systematic, neat, organized, thorough. His books, CDs, and DVDs, for example, lay on shelves in perfect, parade-like dress, alphabetized. There were books on American history, books on marksmanship, riflery, the history of the rifle, company histories, anything about the gun. There was no porn, nothing at all of a salubrious nature. This was a man dedicated to and caring for one thing: rifle accuracy. To that end, he had no family, though pictures of his nephews — towheaded boys frolicking in a backyard — were arranged perfectly on a shelf in the living room. They lent a certain human dimension — a little anyway — to a room otherwise without character and style. He seemed to have no tastes or eccentricities. It could have been a rental, for all the home furnishings revealed. Only his framed NRA Life Membership and certificate proving he’d gone Distingushed Expert — Rifle suggested an ego. These hung in perfect symmetry over his bed.

The killers — ISIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, ex — CIA contractors gone rogue, cartelistas? — had probably put a .22 bullet, suppressed, into his brain as he slept. No signs of a struggle, no signs of anything being neatened up after a struggle. The agents took his pillowcases for analysis, hoping to uncover microscopic traces of blood from the shot.

The shop could have been a museum. Again, the neatness was spooky, and it indicated why Brian Waters had never brought a woman into his life: no human being could live up to his standards of precision. Swagger noted that his many yellow boxes containing L.E. Wilson neck sizers and bullet seaters were arranged in ascending order by calibration, beginning with the humble .222 Remington, America’s first dedicated varmint cartridge, and working up to the gigantic .458 Lott elephant bouncer. But again, his neatness had tripped up his murderers and fooled them into leaving behind traces of their presence; when they’d plucked out the .338 Lapua Magnum boxes, they’d been smart enough not to leave a gap by pushing the remaining boxes together to hide the missing ones. However, they’d done so sloppily, so that the row was slightly out of whack, the boxes not perfectly dressed on one another. Waters, Swagger already knew, would never have done such a thing.

The locksmith cracked the gun safe without much trouble, and Swagger examined the firearms that had captured Waters’s imagination. He seemed to have a nice collection of vintage 1911 target pistols, as upgraded by the armorers attached to each service’s marksmanship units: from army, marines, navy, and coast guard. He had other .45s from masters of the bull’s-eye craft like Jim Stroh, Armand Swenson, Bob Pachmayr, and Jim Clark, on up to modern masters of the craft of building a handgun that could put five into an inch at fifty yards, offhand.

The long guns were equally to the point. He liked sniper rifles, and had one each of the chosen weapons of Our Boys since War 1: a Springfield, a Winchester Model 70 with Unertl, an M1D, a Remington M40 from ’Nam that Swagger knew well, and an M14 with Leupold 10× scope, which the army folks had chosen. Not quite so comprehensively, he had variations of other countries’ War 2 choices: an Enfield .303 No. 4(T), as sniperfied by the geniuses at Holland & Holland for the Brits; a Mauser 98 with a Hensoldt scope on a claw mount and with SS runes on its receiver, making it not Wehrmacht but genuinely Nazi. He even had a Barrett .50, looking like an M16 after years of pumping iron, which had proved so useful in Afghanistan, and when it delivered, it landed with such force that the guy on the other end usually pinwheeled through the air, he had so much energy loosed against his poor bones. But, of course, no Accuracy International, in .338 Lapua Magnum. And, of course, there was a slot empty near the front of the gun safe’s rack, where presumably that rifle, his current number one and his match gun and the font of his recent dedication, his intensity, his high-IQ brain, and his quiet passion, had lain.

But all in all, the event had to be categorized as confirmation, not progress. It strongly suggested incursion, murder, careful looting, without leaving a trace. It was a quality intelligence operation. Whoever had done it this time had done it before, or something similar, and they’d left little to track, nothing to go on, no next step.

Annoying?

Yes, because he’d thought it would take them somewhere instead of nowhere, and it left them with nothing new to do except to monitor reports on the whereabouts of the missing criminal and his little buddy Jared Akim, presumably under the aegis of some masterful criminal organization. But nothing specific emerged, and none of the divisions responsible for monitoring such organizations reported anything untoward, any hints of maximum preparation — vibrations of extra effort or deep planning — occurring within their precincts. It was very frustrating, until it wasn’t.

Jeff Neill, the Cyber Division guru, came to call. He was in the paper-distribution network and saw everything Swagger, Memphis, and the others did, only a bit later.

“Okay,” he said, “I want to run something by you.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Swagger.

The younger man laid two photos on the desk. They were taken using infrared illumination at the Waters house the night of the search. Bob looked and saw only what should have been there, which was the interior of a closet stacked neatly with packaging.

“This guy was ultra-organized,” said Neill. “He didn’t just save stuff, he catalogued it and stored it alphabetically so that he could access it in seconds. He’d be the rare individual who always sends in the warranty card on the first day.”

“That’s him.”

“So this is stuff he bought this year — he’s probably got the other years saved in a storage unit somewhere. Or, rather, the packaging from it.”

“Okay…”

“Look closely.”

Bob looked. He saw a few gun shipment boxes; as for convenience, Waters had a Federal Firearms License, an FFL, and a license for Curios & Relics, both of which enabled him to receive firearms at home by common carrier. There was no evidence he operated at the retail level with his purchases, as he was strictly a shooter and a collector. He just had to enter them in a book for the occasional ATF examiners, who must have treated him like a pal, as he offered no threat and kept transparent, perfect records. Bob saw packaging that was probably left over from his last big-ticket get, the Accuracy International. He saw supporting implements, plus other mundane things, such as a box for a new Cuisinart, a new speaker for his nifty hi-fi system, book packages from Amazon — quite a bit of stuff from Amazon, in fact, as Amazon was the perfect abettor for such a lifestyle.

“Am I supposed to notice something?” Bob said.

Neill put his finger on a slim piece of packaging lodged neatly between two larger pieces, almost indistinguishable. But part of the overlapping cover art was visible on the edge, and Neill had identified it.

“If I’m not mistaken, that’s the world-famous apple with a bite taken out of it. The corporate pictogram for the world’s largest computer outfit.”

Bob squinted. Yep, there it was: a bitten apple, a little leaf up top.

“That’s the package the iPhone comes in. I would know because I’ve just picked up my X and spent an hour or so programming it.”

Swagger carried an iPhone 3, or something Cro-Magnon like that, and wouldn’t have noted such a thing in a million years.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m with you. But where is this going?”

“Well, it fits, doesn’t it? A tech and engineering guy like this, he’d have the latest variation of iPhone, just as, upstairs, he’s got the latest variation of desktop system — he’s always upgrading everything. He’s probably got an X on order, it just hasn’t come in yet.”

“So?”

“We got into his desktop system and found nothing much of interest, other than that after a certain date, when he told his few friends he was going hunting, it hadn’t been accessed.”

“Okay.”

“So he’s got the 8. Now they’ve got the 8. They’d have to take it, because he’d no doubt downloaded his ballistic app into it, I’m guessing FirstShot. Anyone smart enough to use the rifle at highest capacity would know that that’s the best. Anyone taking the rifle would take the iPhone and use it to set up his really long shots. Juba would have to have it.”

Bob nodded. Seemed right so far.

“Here’s the issue. The later iPhones — the 8 and the X — are really a bitch to crack if you don’t have the code. Those fuckers at Apple are smart, you can bet on it. One of the things they’re selling is security. When one comes up in a case — say, recovered in a drug raid — we can’t even crack it. It has to go off to one of three or four high-tech computer labs, where the engineers can diddle with it for weeks before they can finally get in. And I’m guessing next that Waters was the kind of guy who shut down every night before he went to bed. So if they plugged him and they need to get in, how do they do it?”

“You don’t think they’d take him?”

“No, because if he’s alive, all sorts of complexities are added to what is already too complex. Security, support, interrogation, the fact that they would assume someone like this tough-ass, high-IQ Texas oil engineer wasn’t going to give up his secrets easily, which generates another major headache and more drama for them. No, they’d probably cap him and trust they could crack it by their own devices.”

“Could they?”

“As I said, there’s a handful of labs that could do the work. But they’re not going to a lab.”

“Of course not.”

“So they’d go into crime world. And, as it turns out, there are about three guys in that world capable of cracking a late-gen iPhone. They don’t hang out in small towns like Toad Lick, Mississippi. One’s in Boston; one’s in Seattle, obviously; and one’s in Dallas. We know all of ’em, have for years. Sometimes they help us so that we will leave them alone. Putting them in the slammer is of no use at all. Plus, we get tips from them on stuff they hear.”

“You’re guessing it was the Dallas guy.”

“I’m guessing he was paid a pretty penny for his work. So we bust him, work him over hard. We leverage him. He can tell us who paid him, what he did, what was on there, whatever. Again, I’d do it real low-profile, bust him on another charge, never move him out of Dallas, maybe just pick him up privately and take him to a parking garage, someplace anonymous, no drama, nothing to cause any ripples in the water. Maybe he leads us to whoever’s funding this thing, and we can track them to the source.”

“It’s two things,” said Bob. “It’s our best lead and it’s our only lead. Let’s go to Nick.”

34

Much was known now. He’d finally settled on 91.5 grains of Hodgdon H1000, once-fired Hornady brass, Federal 215M big-rifle Magnum primers, overall length 3.73 inches, a Wheddle bullet die-sharpened Sierra 250-grain MatchKing hollow-point boattail bullet, as loaded by an L.E. Wilson bullet seater, with a .367 neck bushing. Fired, it delivered a muzzle velocity 2,755, plus or minus, and of course each individual round he made was tested in a Hornady concentricity gauge for circular perfection. The result was a brilliant chord of power and accuracy, the MatchKing bullets being the most accurate in his ambitious testing program. He also rolled them — the bullets themselves — before seating them, for consistency, on the Hornady gauge, making certain that they were perfect.

They produced a thousand pounds of energy at twenty-one hundred yards, enough to splatter any living target, human or animal, save perhaps the great thick-skinned and heavy-boned beasts of Africa. They could pulverize the thoracic cavity of a man at that range. It would be a wound there’d be no walking away from.

Now he sat at the bench, constructed by Menendez’s clever carpenters seven feet off the ground in a solid beech tree. Before him, though edged by pines that led to mountains — lofty, green, snow-covered or not — was more than a mile of heavy grass. It was yellowish, full enough to wave in the breeze. Three hundred yards out, water — too big to be a pond, too small to be a lake — gleamed in the sun. It spread for a couple of hundred yards, a kind of swampy stew under the tufts of grass, before yielding to more solid land. Finally, 1,847 yards away and sixty-seven feet lower, at the edge of the meadow, was his target. The range was perfect, the height difference too, exactly to his specifications and verified many times over by range finder.

He peeked through his spotting scope, a Swarovski 60×. In the circle of that magnification, he saw what he had to see. The image at 60× was one hundred and thirty feet wide, more than enough to make out the scene. A post had been driven deep into the earth. It had a medieval look to it, something the great Saladin would have erected as a site for execution by fire of cowards and traitors. Moored to the post, though hanging limply unconscious from it, was a man.

He stirred, shook, then twitched hard, as if gripped in the talons of a nightmare. Juba had no interest in what those nightmares might be. What he saw was only a target, something to be hit solidly with one 1,847-yard shot. He knew that the Mexicans sat a few feet to the left, their Land Rover not far from the scene of the action, which promised to amuse them greatly. They had brought a cooler of Diet Cokes and Tecates, and some lawn furniture.

The phone on the bench buzzed. Juba picked it up.

“My friend,” said Jorge, in Arabic, “we think he will awaken soon. You won’t have to wait long, although these drugs are tricky.”

“It’s fine,” said Juba. “I have no rush. Besides, I have some calculations yet to make.”

“Excellent. We have bets going on how many shots it will take you to hit him. I bet two.”

“Probably too few,” said Juba. “The program never works perfectly the first time. We must learn its refinements.”

“Ah, well, it’s only for a bottle of tequila.”

Juba put the phone down, pulled on surgical rubber gloves, and picked up the iPhone 8. Always with the gloves so that not only would his fingerprints be protected, so would any oily excretions, any flakes of dead skin, any strands of hair that might adhere, all of which would reveal that the DNA was not that of Brian Waters. Of course, on the great day itself, the thing would be carefully scrubbed with acetone and seeded with some souvenirs of the late Mr. Waters — saliva, mucus, oil from his fingers, hair — which were the key part of the deception.

He held it, pressed the HOME button. It blinked awake and asked him for the code behind which lay all its treasures. Expensively, this had been found. He keyed it in and immediately emails came up, not many of late, but a few, saying such things as “Can’t wait to hear your stories, buddy” and “SE Asia! Now, that’s for the man who’s done everything!” and “Have fun, pal, but I wouldn’t go anywhere that didn’t have Magic Fingers in the motel rooms.”

Juba only went to the icon page and knew exactly where to look. His finger hit the one that said FirstShot, the icon a tiny bull’s-eye.

FirstShot came up, the menu offering him a selection of previously installed load choices, each one of which Waters had run through the program in his search for a winning handload for the matches. The newer were Juba’s experimental loads, the last the load he had selected, simply marked as #12. He clicked on it.

The number 12 load page came up, everything entered. It displayed his previous selections: bullet brand, bullet weight, bullet length, velocity, twist rate of barrel, height of scope above barrel, all the aspects of the bullet that could determine, support, or reduce its accuracy. Additionally, the point of zero was registered, for it would be the baseline off of which all further computations would be calculated. He had selected fifteen hundred yards for zero, verified that synchronization among rifle, scope, and load at that range in his last session.

He poked it again, and a blank menu called CONDITIONS arrived, and this is where the weather aspects under which the shot would be taken were factored in. But it wasn’t necessary to laboriously measure by Kestrel Pocket Weather Meter and enter them, one at a time. The genius of the FirstShot program is that pressing the GET CONDITIONS button at the bottom of the screen, the machine downloaded them from the U.S. Weather Service. Thus, in a second he learned, watching these numbers deploy in their slots, that it was 74 degrees Fahrenheit, with a southwest wind of 4 to 8 miles per hour, the humidity was 51 percent, the sky was generally sunny (18 percent, or intermittent, cloud cover), the altitude 1,457 feet above sea level. All these figures would be factored into the algorithm the little genius inside the box was about to solve in nanotime.

He pressed CALCULATE. Magically, a table rose before him on the screen. The machine decreed the amount in minutes of angle by which the scope had to be moved off its fifteen-hundred-yard zero to put the crosshairs on the target in these conditions. It was indexed by distance. He surfed the lengthy listing via the left-hand distance column until he got to the nearly exact value. It was 1,845 yards. Moving his eye right to left, he came to the elevation column. It read 13 MOA. Since each of his clicks was worth a half of an arcminute, he multiplied by two to come up with the number 26. He carefully turned the elevation knob atop the scope up 26 clicks. In the next column, the windage was listed; it gave him 4 arcminutes left. Factoring 4 times 2 equals 8, he cranked the windage knob eight snicks left on Herrs Schmidt and Bender’s magical tube.

That would do it. Now he found another turret on the tube and illuminated the red dot at the center of the—

His phone rang.

“Yes?”

“Juba, he’s up. Confused. Just discovered the cuffs. Seems to think he can pull his way free.”

“I’ll spare him his effort shortly. You must watch and report to me on the impact of the shot if I miss so that I can make the corrections.”

“I will.”

“I am going to fire now.”

The most sophisticated ballistic software program in the world is of no use if the shooter lacks technique. Juba did not. It’s a thing acquired over long years of practice or, instantaneously, by genius. He had both.

The rifle, solid on its Atlas bipod, came to his shoulder. Important: all shoulder must touch flat and consistent against the crescent of the butt. Without thought, Juba did this. He eased his thumb through the thumbhole, came around with his hand to place his remaining four fingers and as much palm as possible on the grip itself, as well as applying rearward pressure, tightening it to shoulder. The adjustable comb was set to support his cheek weld precisely, given the length of his neck, and, laying his cheek upon it, positioned his eye instantly to the center of the scope. He anchored his left, supporting hand over the grip, pressuring it downward toward the table. He had made himself as solid as the inevitable caliphate of the future.

The world of twenty-five magnifications, centered by a red glowing dot, yielded amazing resolution, though still tiny. It was indeed a tiny world, everything small and perfect. Clear and stable, nevertheless it offered up a man exploring his new reality. Dressed in surgical scrubs, he pulled this way and that against a post. It did not budge. Juba watched as he yelled to off-scope witnesses and grew agitated when they clearly did not respond with anything except indifference. He had unruly hair and a prophet’s beard. He was agitated — and who would not be, going to sleep among garbage cans and in dog shit and awaking in Paradise chained to a stake, offered up for burning.

Behold man: he tugged, he screamed, he addressed God. He was enraged one second, in tears the next, perhaps resigned at the end.

Juba’s heart slowed, and between the beats his fingertip played God by moving the trigger straight back two millimeters. The rifle barked and leapt, a heavy and powerful beast, pushing mightily in its fraction of a second of energy release as its primer fired its powder, which obediently alchemized into an expanding pulse of energy and sent its missile down the launch tube. Its report was muted by the Thunder Beast suppressor screwed to the barrel, tricking its escaping gases to take the long way into the atmosphere and spreading the considerably diminished sound signature over a broad, untraceable area. The rifle rose an inch or two off the legs of its bipod, settled down, and, through this action cycle, Juba’s finger remained stoically against the trigger, pinning it. Little air came into or out of his lungs, his heart was still, his muscles tight, his cheek steady upon the stock.

When the tiny world settled again, and the time in flight had expired, he made out a wisp of dust and the man, having turned at the sharp disturbance in the soil, trying to imagine what had caused such an occurrence.

His phone rang.

“A miss. I would say by a good twenty-five yards. The line to him seemed right.”

“Yes,” said Juba.

He was annoyed. This was the first test at distance, and why had the device not worked as it was supposed to?

He broke his position on the rifle, put his fingers to the elevation knob, calculated quickly that he was at least a full arcminute off, and therefore clicked in the appropriate improvement. One arcminute: two clicks.

He worked the bolt, gently ejecting the spent cartridge case, shoved the bolt forward and locked it down, thereby reloading and cocking. He assumed the same careful position, and when it was time, and he had settled into stilled perfection, his finger rewarded him with a shot.

The same ceremony of recoil and recovery through time in flight. He waited for everything to settle and the phone to ring. He saw dust at the target, roiling and buzzing, eventually clearing to reveal the man, untouched.

“Just a nick off. Hit near his feet. Maybe a whisper to the left.”

“Yes, yes,” said Juba, confident that he had it now.

He made adjustments: one click of elevation up, one click of windage to the left.

Into position, rifle steady, on scope.

And there he was, tiny, human, frail, doomed and knowing it, pulling hard against the stake, his face raised to God for mercy or maybe forgiveness. For this man, the time was now, the place was here, and the next world, whichever it may be, beckoned.

The rifle fired, rose and fell.

Time in flight: 5.1 seconds.

Juba was back on by then and saw the point of impact. Somewhere in the lower chest, the body’s midline, right at the boundary between chest and entrails. The bullet emptied its total remaining power into him, a thousand pounds’ worth, and the shock drove him backwards into the post, hair flying, body in spasm, a trace of dust vibrating off his clothes from the hit. He was dead before he went limp against his chains.

“Thank you, brother,” said Juba. “You have helped me. May God be merciful on your soul.”

It was the only prayer the fellow got.

35

His name was Lawrence M. Wakowski. His nickname, in certain sectors of his life, was Whack Job. In other sectors of his life, it was Mr. Wakowski. To the FBI, the nomenclature was determined by who held the leverage. Sometimes they called him Whack Job and enjoyed making him squirm and whine, other times it was Mr. Wakowski and he was treated with deference, respect, and other trappings of fealty.

“Thanks for coming, Mr. Wakowski,” said Jeff Neill.

“Agent Neill, we meet again. And Agent Streibling, Dallas Field Office, Cyber Division rep, an old friend indeed.”

Streibling, the local agent who’d set this meet-up, nodded but, knowing his place in the pecking order, said nothing.

“These other two fellows, I don’t know,” said Mr. Wakowski. “Kosher, though, I assume?”

“Totally kosher. Names not necessary,” said Neill. “One is high-ranking, experienced, in from Washington. The other is his associate, expert in certain arcane areas, known to be an extraordinary detective. He uncovered the string that led us to you and this meeting.”

“Gentlemen…” said Mr. Wakowski, nodding his head.

“The accommodations — suitable?” asked Neill.

“Sure. Out of the way, unavailable to chance encounters. Way off my beaten track, and yours.”

It was a cheesy suite motel near the airport, off the interstate. Left-hand neighbor: strip bar; right-hand neighbor: Best Tacos in Texas, which was true except for the other places in Texas that sold tacos.

“I checked,” said Mr. Wakowski. “I wasn’t followed.”

“Actually, you were,” said Neill. “By us. We’re very good at it. The point, however, was to make sure you weren’t followed by anybody else. You weren’t.”

“I feel secure in the bosom of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“A good start. Now I’ll turn the meeting over to my superior officer.”

“I’m Nick,” said Nick.

“Nick,” said Wakowski, “I’m Mr. Wakowski. How may I help you — that is, except by going to prison or getting myself killed?”

“Perhaps four months ago, certain parties almost certainly approached you with a job. They had a newly acquired iPhone 8. It had to be cracked. It takes even the best labs weeks to crack them. You are reputed to be one of three men in country who can do it in days. Am I right so far?”

“I could lie,” said Mr. Wakowski. “In fact, the best course for me would be to lie.”

“Not a good idea. We would have to stop calling you Mr. Wakowski then. We would have to call you Whack Job, and there’s an issue outstanding about someone who built software to evade the cybersecurity at the First National of Midlands job a few weeks ago. We know who did it, a fellow named Roy Heinz, because Roy himself told us. It was decided that Whack Job would be left alone, as he might prove more useful to us in the future. That judgment can be rescinded. And if Whack Job goes to Huntsville, being soft and weak and white, what do you suppose happens to him?”

“I’m so disappointed in Roy,” said Mr. Wakowski. “He was recommended to me as a stand-up guy.”

“Everybody talks, in the end. Which is why we’re here.”

“May I ask—”

“No,” said Neill. “But be advised that Nick and his friend wouldn’t be here if this weren’t of highest priority, of national security declination. Let’s be polite, as we’re all wearing ties, which signify politeness. But we do need your help, and we do expect your help.”

Mr. Wakowski took a deep breath. He was mid-forties, with a face lacking singularity or charisma but notable in its ovality. He could have played the title role in the new Egg and I remake. Black frames, thick lenses, receding sandy hair, charcoal suit, black shoes, a face rather like butterscotch pudding. You wouldn’t pick him out in a crowd of one. Except at Huntsville.

“Very dangerous people,” he said. “That is why I hesitate. Betray them, see my kids tossed into acid vats. My wife handled by twenty-five grinning caballeros with eagles tattooed on their necks. All this before they stake me out naked for the vultures, with great big gobs of greasy, grimy cow guts smeared on my genitals.”

“Those guys,” said Nick.

“Yep, those guys.” He shivered. “Why, oh why, did the Good Lord give me so much talent,” he said. “Without it, I wouldn’t end up with the vultures going sushi on my dick.”

“But you’d be living in a tract home, and both wife and kids would hate you for being a failure,” Streibling said.

“True enough,” said Mr. Wakowski.

He swallowed.

“You will protect my future and my children’s future?”

“For now. It could change.”

“Okay. Yes, it was an 8. Hard to beat, those motherfuckers at Apple go to sleep every night grinning about how hard it is. But Whack Job knows the way. Wasn’t easy to figure, and it helps to have an IQ of 450, but he can, with much intensive labor, get it done in four days. I’ll spare you the details. If you ain’t a 450, they’d be meaningless anyhow. So they come to me, the money is, shall we say, quite convincing, as is their reputation. In my world, better to be friends with them than enemies. Enemies get the vulture thing.”

“So you got in.”

“Yes. The guy who set it up had to be some kind of supershooter or something. Most of the data space was eaten up by some program called FirstShot. I gather it helps you put little pieces of metal in certain places from a long ways out. It figures all the little bitty factors and influences, but it’s basically a spreadsheet. It solves the problem at muzzle distance and extrapolates out to infinity from there.”

“Okay, that’s our guy,” said Nick.

“Anyhow, that was important to them. They did need access to it, they made that clear. Excuse me for my lack of curiosity, but I didn’t ask the fellow what this was necessary for. I figured I’d read it in the papers.”

“And you will, right before the vultures come for a visit, if you don’t get on with your story.”

“So I unlocked it for them and got them access to the ballistics data. But they had another requirement: they wanted it hardwired for fast access to the Dark Web.”

“For boys and girls who don’t read Computer Monthly, explain ‘Dark Web,’” said Neill.

“What you see when you click on, that’s about two percent of the web. There’s a whole other region. Its access is guarded, and it is superprotected by three Russians and a Chinaman who are even smarter than me. Only four of ’em, I guarantee you. Getting on it is part of the trick. Navigating it is the other trick. Using it is the final trick. All twisty, complex, under multiple two-factor codes and sliding algorithms. Grad students and psychos only. But it’s where you can find a hit man, snuff porn, actual explosive manufacturing supplies and RPG missiles in bulk at a good rate, that sort of thing. It’s the superego of the ’Net. As I say, hard to get on.”

“And you made it easy to get on?”

“I set up a site for them, but the key ingredient was that it had to be findable, traceable. I had to build factors into it so someone like Agent Neill or one of the Israeli wonderkids could deconstruct it and trace it back to its origin, which would be the i 8 that I had in my hand, presumably linkable to someone else. It sounded like a key to an elaborate plot.”

“You did all this?”

“I did all that.”

“What was the website called?”

“I don’t know. I showed them how to set it up, but they didn’t want me to see what it was. So I just know it’s there, and all that will be revealed when the time comes.”

“Can we find it, Neill?” asked Nick.

“Without a name or a web address, not likely. There’s more — they probably haven’t posted it yet. It’s all set up to go, but they don’t want anyone discovering it prematurely. So it’s ready, and they dump when it’s appropriate to their plans — that is, when they want us to find it.”

“Not helpful,” said Nick.

“Yeah, but you still learn stuff,” said Mr. Wakowski. “I’ll play Agatha Christie here, if you don’t mind. Their plan is to use the ballistics program to snipe somebody. The shot will be taken from Pluto. They will leave the iPhone so it will be found. Agent Neill will hire a lab to crack it, and they will see something that leads to the website, deconstruct it, and track it back to whoever the Mexican vulture keeper stole the iPhone from. Ergo: he’s blamed, no one even knows they were in play. Maybe he’s dead. That’s what I’d do if I were (a) running this thing and (b) totally insane.”

“I think we figured that out on our own already,” Nick said. “But since you’re a genius, let me ask a more general question. Does this seem like the sort of thinking you’d affiliate with the kind of criminal organization we’re talking about?”

“Excellent question,” said Mr. Wakowski. “The answer is no. Our boys — the happy tots who reached out to me — are more forceful and direct by far.”

“What is this thing typical of?”

“It’s got high-IQ intelligence agency written all over it. CIA, Mossad, MI5, Chinese Ministry of State Security, Russian MV — real big boys in the game. Someone used to playing deflection shots, in love with the false-flag paradigm, fully aware of media tendencies and how it’s all going to play out on a stage when the cable morons get on it and distill it to mouth-breather level. In my experience, they love to do that sort of thing.”

“Middle East?”

“A stretch. But I see smarter guys.”

“Okay,” said Nick, “I guess we’ll have to keep calling him Mr. Wakowski. Oh, wait, am I forgetting anything? Gee, I wonder what it could be?”

Wakowski hesitated, then said, “I was hoping you’d forget.”

“Too bad for you, pal, I just remembered it. All that is nothing without a name to put with it. Cartel, yeah. Bad people, yeah. Sworn enemies of all that’s good and holy, for sure. But I need a name, and it better be a right one or… vulture chow.”

“You didn’t hear this from me. You don’t even know me. I don’t exist. But the name is Menendez.”

36

He thought it might be the climate. So target number two paid with his life for that experiment. Clearly, the weather data from the service was too generic. It would have been downloaded from the nearest regional U.S. weather station, and that could be miles away. Good enough for TV, good enough for government work, but not good enough for man killing at a mile’s distance.

So instead of doing it that way, as FirstShot allowed, he laboriously filled in the blanks of data from his own Kestrel there at the range. Tedious, but tedium was a material snipers trafficked in. Wind speed, direction, altitude, temperature, humidity, and other subtleties of weather reality that only meteorologists knew, stuff so arcane, no TV guy even bothered with it.

He took his shot.

Better, but not good enough. The first one hit about fifteen yards shy. And although he dispatched target number two on the second shot, on The Day he would not be allowed a ranging shot. It didn’t work that way in the real world. He had to know he was on with the first press of the trigger.

There was really only one thing to do: check the precision of the scope clicks and do the math. So the next day, instead of shooting at a mile, he shot at a hundred yards, at benchrest targets.

The exercise: five targets vertically arrayed a hundred yards out, stapled to blank cardboard and mounted in a frame. But the hundred yards itself was not simply lased for distance, it was hand-measured — again, not from the muzzle of the rifle but from the elevation knob of the Schmidt & Bender — for the most accurate possible hundred yards. He started at the bottom, fired a three-shot group. He moved the elevation knob up one click and fired three more at the second target. Then the third, the fourth, and the fifth, in the same one-click increments. Of course, for every click, the three-shot cluster moved up a bit. But how much? Was it the one minute-of-angle Schmidt & Bender’s brilliant minds said or was it more? Or less? Working the target sheet with calipers, he determined that each click produced a rise in strike of not 0.552 inch, as per specs, but 0.489. It was so tiny an increment, it would have meant almost nothing out to three hundred yards, but with each leap in distance, it grew larger and larger. Thus, he was able to reconfigure FirstShot algorithms so that the click measure was 0.489.

Target number three: first shot, via FirstShot, was an ankle hit. The man — large, black, and dissolute — slid down, screaming, his lower leg shattered. Not good enough. Juba corrected a click, fired again, and eternally stilled him.

Target number four: close — closest yet — but low stomach. Probably not survivable, but given the speed of arrival of emergency personnel and the sophistication of trauma medicine, survival could not be ruled out. He had to hit the chest, destroy the heart and both lungs, sever all arteries and veins converging at the nexus of the heart. That hit, with a thousand pounds of energy and a sharpened missile more than a third of an inch wide, was the only guarantee.

Target number five.

Target number six.

Target number seven: a tough one, a fighter, he wouldn’t stop moving, he yanked, pulled, twisted the cuffs that restrained him and was still squirming heroically at the arrival of the bullet.

But all succumbed to the first shot of the finally correct program.

He was done with prayers. His food had been delivered and eaten. He had worked out, sweated hard, spent forty minutes on Systema Spetsnaz, sparring with a bag, and finally showered. Now he settled down for a good reread of Jack O’Connor’s The Complete Book of Shooting, a favorite text. He could read what might be called shooter’s English, having taught himself first rudiments, then technical terms. At first, it was very slow, but with dedication, energy, and time, he’d mastered enough to read texts that dealt with his subject, and his mind could stay with the math, which most could not. He was absorbed in “Revolution Theory II: The Wind Factor” when the knock came.

He opened the door to find Señor Menendez, accompanied by Jorge, the translator, and by the fellow with the black sock over his head.

“Yes.”

“My friend, we must talk.”

“Certainly.”

He admitted them. He sat on the bed. Menendez took the chair, the socked one stood behind him, at his right shoulder, quickly assuming perfect stillness. More twitchily, Jorge positioned himself to the left of Menendez, but somewhat forward, where he could hear both men clearly.

“I have heard that the shooting is going very well,” said Menendez, absent recently at the range.

“I have addressed the system to the scope and the ballistics of the ammunition so that the precision I require is attainable. Other factors, of course, must come into play. These sorts of things are always delicate, and what happens if The Day arrives and it’s rainy or blustery? What happens if there’s a change in schedule, some sort of confusion or event near the target area? These are all factors I cannot control, yet I worry about them still. But not for much longer.”

“Yes, yes, then your time with us is limited?”

“Yes. There comes now the shipment of the rifle to certain people, who will place it where it must be, and my own progress toward that destination, which must be carefully handled. The effort is exhausting. If I were not so true a believer, I would have long ago faltered. But I am no fool. I know Señor Menendez is not here to chat about my fortunes and my mood.”

“No.”

“How may I assist?”

He could see Jorge swallow, a sure indicator that something thorny was coming up. He felt the eyes of the man in the sock on him intently. Did they fear his reaction may cause Juba to attack? This was not promising.

“Yes, well, I’m afraid there have to be some changes made to your schedule.”

“The schedule is set,” said Juba. “I will adhere to it.”

“If only it could be so, my friend, but it cannot.”

Juba said nothing, wondering where this was going. Had the Jews found out and offered Menendez more money for Juba’s head than his sponsors had paid for their assistance?

“You are aware that I control a considerable empire. I have built it from nothing, I have learned on my own and from my peers all the hard lessons, my discipline for security is intense, my arrangements have been brilliant, my mastery of many elements that people frequently take for granted has been exemplary. And so I have power.”

“I have assumed as much.”

“In all this time, I have never been seriously threatened. Neither by competitors nor by law enforcement.”

“But now?”

“It’s the turning of luck. You can plan for everything except bad luck. And now by a stroke of misfortune, it seems I am in jeopardy. I, me, myself. And if it comes to pass that I am arrested and put in jail, even for a few years, things become tenuous. It cannot be then ever again as it is now. The system I have built will erode without me, its caretakers — good men all — will make wrong decisions, competitors will see weakness, potential defectors will be emboldened, law enforcement efforts will double and redouble. You can see why I am concerned.”

“I can,” said Juba. “But you must know that my mission is a mandate from God Himself. I cannot be deflected from it due to your concerns.”

“Alas, it seems I need a man of your skills. Badly.”

“What about this fellow right here, in the mask. He is said to be a technical of the highest degree.”

The man in the sock made no acknowledgment.

“He cannot do what you must do. And that is, kill a man, from afar.”

37

Whack Job was gone. The agents had no urge to sit in the squalid motel room, not when there was a squalid titty bar next door. So they ambled over to The Doll’s House, found it three-fourths deserted, and a blonde cogitating onstage in lights that showed off every blue vein and stretch mark, her inflated breasts a-tumble, her hips equally active, but her face a mask of lacquered ennui. She’d had better days.

The men sat at a back table, ordered Lone Stars and Buds, with Bob doing his Diet Coke routine, asked the waitress to ask the boss to turn down the disco tunes a bit, as it wasn’t the ’70s anymore, plus they had serious talk ahead. They all looked so cop — short hair, beefy, badly fitting sport coats — that this wish was swiftly granted.

“Okay,” said Nick. “Streibling, you’re up. Tell us about Menendez so we don’t look stupid tomorrow when we go through the files.”

“Menendez. Big, smart, tough, tricky. More sophisticated. Not just feeding men to vultures and cutting women’s heads off. Oh, they’ll do that if they feel it advances their interests, but it’s not SOP.”

“Who’s Menendez?”

“Raúl Menendez. About fifty. One of the few, maybe the only, cartel hotshot with American citizenship, joint with Mexican. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his dad was getting his Ph.D. in economics. Dad went on to become the head of the Econ Department at the University of Mexico, until he died a few years ago, maybe out of grief over his son’s chosen path.”

“So Raúl has brains from his dad’s side.”

“His mom’s too. Well, maybe that’s where the refinement comes from. American citizen, grad student in art history, when she met and married Raúl’s dad. She’s dead too, maybe of the same grief.”

“They should be proud he chose such a growth career,” said Nick.

“Supersmart Raúl used tony family connections to apprentice under some of the bad dudes, then went independent ten years ago, having paid his dues, having learned the business from the ground up, having made peace with the older cartel generations so he himself didn’t end up staked out for the vultures. He seems to have been guided by a vision for what a cartel could be, not just a Nazi Murder Battalion that, incidentally, sold drugs to the bean people but an international entity, penetrating society at many different levels. They use money to buy allies in other realms of society.”

“Smooth?”

“Snoot Spanish and American all the way. No mestizo blood in him. That is why, alone among them, he’s also cultivated the outer world. He seems to be headquartered in L.A., where he owns some auto dealerships, shopping centers, fast-food joints, has been mentioned as a possible investor in various sporting franchises, dabbles in movies, sits on several charity boards, has a wife and three kids.”

“Meanwhile—”

“He’s got SoCal, NorCal, and the Pacific Coast. New Mexico, especially Albuquerque, which he owns. He moved into Texas a few years back and took out a bunch of people who objected. We found them in unhappy circumstances. Meanwhile, Raúl is flooding the barrio with the latest in designer shit, he’s big into meth and fentanyl, as well as pushing the old favorite, Mexican Mud. A late big move has a touch of genius to it: he owns an opioid pharmaceutical plant in Guadalajara and produces extremely good counterfeit merchandise, right down to the packaging. He sells cut-rate to a lot of hospitals, infirmaries, and pharmacists, and even if you go to Walgreens in Cambridge, you may be buying his stuff. He makes big dough off that. Anything that makes you go buzz seems to originate from him. DEA would do anything to bring him down, and if it happened, a lot of our beefs, particularly for the ditch floaters and alley bleeders found all over the southland when he first got here, might get cleared up. But he’s too tricky for that.”

“Can we hit him?” asked Bob.

“See, that’s just it. You can’t. He’s so lawyered up, you’d never get a warrant from the locals without him knowing about it. The local cops would find excuses to do nothing, even the emergency room docs might go on strike.”

“At the federal level, we could get action.”

“You’d think. But DEA has tried that route, and it’s never panned out. He knows if someone is poking around, and next thing you know, smart guys from Harvard and the town’s biggest white-shoe law firm are visiting the federal judges, doing a real soft-soap approach, but making it clear that no matter what D.C. says, the locals don’t want any ruckus here. Because they know that when the mandarins go back to Peking, the blood will flow, and it won’t be — pardon the harsh truth — out of the veins of any mandarin.”

“Okay, he’s tough and smart.”

“As for the warrant, here’s another wrinkle: it only works if you can find him. He has no headquarters. His headquarters is his brain, which he takes with him everywhere he goes. And he goes a lot. He likes big, fancy houses, and he owns a batch of ’em — penthouses, places in Europe and the Far East. Under his name, under his wife’s name, under various corporate and dodge-company names. DEA doesn’t even know half of them. Sees family in L.A. about once every two months. So we don’t know where he is, even if we could get the warrant without loud sirens going off. So nobody’s ever made the big commitment of assets necessary to raid. It just hasn’t seemed worth it.”

“Any penetration?” Nick asked.

Streibling shook his head. “Very tough security, lots of checks and cross-checks built into the system. He travels with a crew of twelve ex — Mexican Special Forces guys, SEAL-quality gunfighters, and a spooky guy who always wears a sock on his head.”

“What’s that about?” asked Bob.

“Nobody knows.”

Nick summarized his conclusions.

“I can see that he would be perfect for Juba and Juba’s people. Solid, secure, able to provide Juba with logistics and privacy. Able to get him around the country. Everywhere he goes, he’ll have operators with him. They’re the guys who picked him up in Ohio and got him where he is now.”

“And ambitious,” said Neill. “Saw a chance to link up with some sort of extranational or transnational entity and took it. Not just for the money, but for the experience of going international. He’s a globalist.”

“What about cyber?” asked Nick.

“Well,” said Neill, “we can at least go full-press war on him, now that we’ve got a target. Somewhere, sooner or later, there’s a crack.”

“That’s what they say about us,” said Nick, with a humor-free laugh.

“Yeah, but we can keep trying, and, sooner or later—”

“Later ain’t no good,” said Swagger. “He’s on schedule right now, and we’re not sure how much time is left. These Mexican operators get him into position, he pulls off the shot, and they get him out of there. All the forensics points to poor Brian A. Waters, loner and gun nut. Depending on who he hits — and, I bet, we can all guess — some kind of major shit hits some kind of major fan, and suddenly, somehow, it’s a different world.”

“Ah, Christ,” said Nick. “This one is tough. I don’t see how we can proact. We can monitor, get ourselves included in the loop of every agency that encounters Menendez, we can apply our analytical skills and our imaginations to various scenarios and pick the most likely one and go against them. But we’ll always be behind the curve, action-wise, never in front of it.”

“Well,” said Streibling, “something could be happening.”

All eyes went to him.

“Enlighten us, Agent Streibling. I must say, you seem well informed.”

“I am. I’m about sixth-generation Lone Star law enforcement with Texas Rangers, Dallas Metro Shotgun Squad, Border Patrol — all that good DNA in my veins.”

“Go ahead, spill some beans.”

“As I say, cop people. Cops, cops, cops. They talk to cops who talk to cops. Agents, supervisors, techs — whatever — everybody talks, and some of us listen. And who do I listen to, especially with two martinis in him on a Saturday night? My wife’s sister is married to a guy very high up in DEA here in Dallas.”

“More beans, please,” said Nick.

“This is so hot, it hasn’t even hit the gossip circuit yet. You’ve got to know that Menendez drives DEA nuts. They want him so bad, it makes them crazy. They don’t care about anything but Menendez. Major effort, so much work and man-hours and lab time, and, so far, nothing. Until—”

He paused for the theater of it. Then he gestured to the waitress that he’d like another brew. Nothing like milking the big moment. Meanwhile, a new girl came onstage. Asian, somewhere between twenty-two and seventy-two, left arm tattooed with dragons fighting tigers and empresses telling off warlords. La fille jaune had eyes like headlights edged with coal tar, a good, slim bod, the upstairs rack with the required silicone filled to the brim. Her hips seemed rocket-fueled; the music was really bad. Bob tore his eyes away and returned to the moment, in which Streibling was finishing his first swallow.

“Menendez, as I say, is supersmart and supercareful. But I hear, from my brother-in-law, that he’s made one slipup. He’s committed a major crime of violence, one that could put him away for a long time.”

“How do they know that?”

“They have a witness who will testify to it and whose testimony will stand up to any cross, no matter how tough. That’s because Menendez shot him in the head. Somehow he survived. His name is Jared Akim.”

38

You see, my friend,” said Menendez, “this isn’t a request, it is what must be. You are the tool of my deliverance, and my god, or yours, has put you in my hands at exactly the right moment, while at the same time it in no way jeopardizes the bigger operation for which you were sent. It is a sideshow, a little extra fuss, perhaps best regarded as a training exercise. I want your friendship, I value your skill, I admire your courage, but I must have your cooperation.”

Juba considered, while Jorge caught up with the translation. Really, what choice did he have? With these monsters, one never knew what could happen. They had no morality, no commitment, no belief in anything as perfect as the caliphate, no belief in God.

“And if I don’t?”

“It would be so regrettable.”

“You realize that if you go back on your deal, the people who believe in me will declare war upon you.”

“What a waste that would be. Many would die, and for what? We should be brothers. We have common enemies, and slaying them is so much more important than petty squabbles.”

Juba sighed. He had no choice, not here, not now, not so close. But it was a breach of etiquette he would not forget.

“With that superrifle of yours,” said Menendez, “it seems to be no problem at all. You can kill a gnat at a mile. Here, you would kill a gnat at a quarter mile.”

“I cannot use that rifle. I must use a different rifle, and I must have maximum security, minimum time in the vulnerable shooting site, and a clear and efficient escape.”

“Is there something wrong with the rifle?”

“There is nothing wrong with the rifle. But I have spent months working with it — the scope and the ballistics software and the ammunition — to achieve a state of perfection. I cannot now take it on another operation, where I have to change all the settings, where it’s liable to be banged about, treated roughly, perhaps dropped. Then I’d have to readjust, retest, and sometimes you can never quite find what you once had. Second, if I use that rifle — a .338 Lapua Magnum — the Americans will understand exactly why I am here. They may or may not know already. I’m not sure what the Israelis learned from their raid and what they shared with the Americans. For all the Americans know, I’m merely suspected of the nebulous crime of terrorism, which could be anything from blowing up a shopping center to poisoning the water supply to filing a suit against a Hollywood movie.”

“I see. I can work with that. I am quite reasonable. Let us know what is required. It shall be done.”

“I prefer to plan my own operation. I will see things that your people could never understand. To use my gift, you must let it express itself. Without my own plan, my confidence will be considerably lessened. This is not an easy task. I will need to acquire, zero, and test a new rifle. I will need to study the site, consider time of day, distance, weather — all those factors. Like so many, you think this can easily be done.”

“Rifle?”

“The caliber will be called 6.5 Creedmoor. Made by Remington. Heavy barrel, perhaps the police model, easily acquired. The Model 700: they used them against us to great effect in Baghdad. They used them in Kuwait. They used them in Vietnam. It’s a wonderful rifle, and shooting it will be a pleasure. You must also acquire a Leupold scope, at least 10×. I need ten boxes of ammunition, Match-grade, preferably Hornady, as the caliber is their creation, so they would understand it best. Preferably, this weapon is bought used, the scope mounted and zeroed by the previous owner. If it must be purchased new, have the store mount the scope and zero it. That saves considerable time, and time is something we need. And I need a few days here to work with it. I need also plans of the site, location of the target, distances, mean weather conditions, time of day of shot.”

“My people are all Special Forces. They have experience. They will scout and assemble a preliminary plan. Yours will be the last say.”

“All right,” said Juba. “That seems all right.”

“It shall be done,” said Menendez.

“Oh,” Juba nodded toward one of the men, “and keep that one away from me. He makes me nervous.”

“You mean La Culebra?”

“No, he’s all right. I mean Jorge, the talker. He makes me jittery.”

As he changed from Arabic to Spanish, Jorge acquired an ashen look. He swallowed, smiled awkwardly, licked his lips.

“I understand,” said Menendez, and nodded to La Culebra.

La Culebra cut Jorge’s throat in one second, and Jorge died in seven.

39

For the record, this is Special Agent Jean Chandler, FBI, about to commence interrogation of Jared Akim, suspect in re triple homicide in Detroit, Michigan, affidavits on file, other charges also listed in affidavit. Also present is Agent Gershon Gold, of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, a contract advisor on terrorist matters by formal arrangement, documents also on file. Mr. Akim is without legal representation as per his signed agreement with the Drug Enforcement Agency, on file, reference C445-002. The session is being witnessed and videotaped.”

They were in a safe house DEA ran on the well-protected grounds of McConnell, four miles outside downtown Wichita. Now and then, F-18s howled into the air, and the place vibrated like a tuning fork. Bob and Nick and Neill watched the proceedings from behind a rather obvious one-way mirror into the squalid interrogation room. Outside, various DEA officials muttered and stewed, having lost sole custody of their prize, having lost the administrative war with the FBI, and having once again had their noses rubbed in their low status in the federal law enforcement pyramid.

The boy sat in orange scrubs, his head still bandaged. But he did not look groggy. Quite the contrary, his eyes glittered with wit and intelligence, and he seemed relaxed, even happy. He got that they were playing head games with him by putting a beautiful young woman in front of him — in real life, she’d never date him! — and a portly, scholarly Jew. They were supposedly the bête noirs of his fevered jihadi imagination, but he merely thought it was kind of funny. He liked pretty girls, and, actually — don’t tell anybody — he liked Jews. So the idea that a Jew and a babe would shake him was patently absurd! What, they thought he was an idiot?

“Mr. Akim, how do you feel today?” Chandler asked.

“I’m fine.”

“The head?”

“It hurts, even ten ibuprofens in, but if it hurts, that means I’m still breathing, which is good news.”

“You’re out of concussion protocols?”

“Yeah, but I still hear the sound of bad music.”

They spent a few minutes running through the mundane facts of Jared’s existence: age, place of birth, education, disposition, parents, family, intellectual journey into radicalism, anger at white girls, so on and so forth.

“For the record, please describe your current circumstances.”

“Okay, you don’t want the Marcel Proust version, you want the action-movie version?”

Chandler tilted her head, caught off guard by his wit. “That’s exactly what we want.”

“I got involved in some dope stuff. Stupid, but I needed money. One thing turned to another, and I’d partnered up with this heavy dude named Ali La Pointe. I had no idea how heavy. I thought we were going to this drug house to see The Man and buy a large chunk of product, which we were going to move in Grosse Pointe, where I have lots of connex. It was a very win-win deal.”

“It didn’t work out that way?”

“This guy Ali goes nuts when one of the dope guys pulls a shotgun on him. We were unarmed! But he’d made a kind of spear thing and got him in the eye. God, I was not ready for that. Squosh—like, that was the sound. He grabs the shotgun and goes all SEAL on the other guys. Boom-boom-boom, and he’s put them down. Some crazy woman comes downstairs, and I don’t remember the next part. Anyway, by the time I sort of get straight, we’re in a Benz S, heading out of town, with a pile of dough and a shotgun in a stolen car.”

“So you claim to be the victim of Ali La Pointe as much as the others?”

“Ma’am, if you’d seen what a guy looks like with six inches of stick in his eye, you’d have been an obedient pup too. Really, no way I was going to do anything he didn’t want me to do. I knew what he was capable of.”

“For the record, all the forensics indicate it was you who beat the woman.”

“I thought she was dead. She must have had a skull thick as the polar ice cap to survive that pounding. Yeah, well, as part of the deal, that’s sort of going to be dialed way, way down to second-degree assault, time served. So I’d rather not talk about it. I don’t think I have to, legally. Anyhow, this Ali La Pointe and I make a run for it. Again, he’s calling the shots, I’m the punk. Somehow he has a number for somebody big in the trade, and we arrange a pickup. We just make it out of a couple of bad situations by a hair, and we’re heading west. I had no idea we were even in Kansas.

“So, early in the morning, we pull into this abandoned farm. Another vehicle is waiting for us. The head guy is some silver-haired fox out of the Ricardo Montalbán school. He was all charm and smoothness, and he smelled like rich Corinthian leather. He welcomes us, he’s the boss, and as he leads us to his SUV — it was the size of a PT boat — he puts his arm around me like I’m his son or something, but he has a gun in it and shoots me in the head.”

“Why aren’t you dead?”

“Good question. Perhaps I am the chosen of Allah.”

“Perhaps you are a chronically immature delinquent from Grosse Pointe, high IQ, but still in so far over his head, he can’t see the surface,” said Chandler.

“Hmm, I wonder which one? Anyway, as they explain to me, it was dark, and maybe I lowered my head to see where I was stepping, and maybe he held the pistol slightly upward. It’s all about the angles. At ninety degrees, the bullet excavates the Lincoln Tunnel through my brain. At thirty degrees, it blows out a chunk of scalp and hair, bleeds like hell, and whacks me into total unconsciousness. I wake up — surprise, surprise — in a hospital guarded by the State Troopers who found me in the bushes. It’s three days later. They’ve got me on the Detroit thing. Since it’s drugs, another state, they turn me over to DEA. DEA interrogates me, and when we come to the silver-fox guy, their eyes turn to saucers. They don’t care about Ali La Pointe, he’s a low-level guy, and the system will eat him alive sooner or later. They want this Menendez, even if they can’t figure out what the hell he was doing riding shotgun in the pickup of a low-level dealer. But that’s not my department. A little of this, a little of that, my dad hires me a hotshot Kansas City lawyer, and a deal is struck. I ID Menendez and testify against him, they forget everything they have on me, and after he’s in, I go Witness Protection. I become Jerry Smith of Bone Fossil, Idaho, or something. But I’m alive, I’ve put the fox away, I’m a hero, I have a life, and I get to see my folks once in a while.”

“You’re a very lucky young man,” said the Jewish fellow.

“I owe it all to clean living and a fast outfield,” Jared said.

“If I may, one thing. This other man, Ali La Pointe. Interesting.”

“He’s out of the picture,” said Jared. “I mean officially, as per my agreement.”

“Yes. However, it is interesting that Ali La Pointe is the name of the charismatic and illiterate terrorist hero of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers.”

Was that a twitch engulfing the young man’s Adam’s apple? A swallow, a flick of dry tongue over dry lips?

“Now, that could mean three things,” said the man. “It could mean this chap was really named Ali La Pointe, after the movie role. Possible, perhaps. Or it could mean that an intellectually promiscuous, rather smart-ass young man decided to put one over on the dumb American police and use a name that every highbred radical Arab teenager in the world would recognize but no DEA functionary would. Or — and I believe this one, actually — as an inexperienced junior terrorist undergoing his first interrogation, he chose the first name that came to his mind, which was from his subconscious memory of that movie — it’s superb, by the way — and named the mystery figure in the narrative, Ali La Pointe. Later, he possibly regretted it but was stuck with it. This last possibility, I must say, seems more like you.”

“Who is this guy?” Jared asked Chandler.

“He is assisting us,” she said.

“Okay, who’s us?”

“Us is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You would know that if you’d been paying close attention.”

“Yeah, but my DEA deal still holds. I don’t know what you guys are here for, I really don’t. This is straight drug shit, I’m going to help them get Menendez; otherwise, I go into the general population at Kinross and last about six seconds before they kill me.”

“Actually, your deal is now off the table,” said Chandler. “It was conditional on your willingness to tell the truth. In all things. You rather artfully constructed a narrative that gave DEA what it wanted and yet you hid your real mission, which was to help Juba the Sniper. So your deal is undone, and off you go to Detroit and then Kinross. If you want, I can help you pick out panty hose for your new life as a bitch.”

40

The new rifle was fine, the new translator a great improvement. He too was elderly, calm, seemingly amused by this situation, so clearly he did not know what had happened to the man he had replaced. His name was Alberto, and he was one of those awkward figures caught between opposing cultures, the Mexican part of him not happy with the Arab part, or maybe it was the other way around. He was skinny and thin of hair, but he had about him a teacher’s air. He also had watchful eyes, a trait Juba admired.

As for the rifle, it was indeed Remington’s 700, the police model, with an oversize bolt knob and a shorter barrel for easy maneuvering, in some kind of spongy camouflaged stock from Hogue, the whole thing in a sort of coyote gray or dun desert camouflage, not so much for practicality but so that American shooters could get a sniper buzz off of it. The scope, a Leupold 4–12×, was also new and had been mounted in the gun store, wherever that was, by an armorer using Leupold rings and mounting hardware. The kit included a new Leupold range finder with proprietary ballistics software.

The armorer was a sound craftsman, and Juba found everything tight, the scope properly indexed to dead zero, and was pleased. Additionally, it was prethreaded for a suppressor with the standard dimensions of eight by twenty-four, and from somewhere in Menendez’s store of armaments, among the gold-plated AKs and the ruby-crusted Glocks, a Gemtech suppressor had been found that fit those dimensions, and it screwed right on. The range finder was preprogrammed and indexed to common commercial loads, and Juba’s 140-grain Hornady Match was one of them.

He zeroed in with several shots at a hundred yards and discovered that it delivered sub-one-inch groups at that distance, through the suppressor. The next day, he moved the target to two hundred yards, and then to three hundred, zeroing carefully each step of the way. This new cartridge, the 6.5 Creedmoor, was living up to its hype. It kicked less than a .308 and yet was more accurate. The cartridges fit perfectly into the magazine well, being essentially a .308 round necked down to accept a .264 bullet. It would have made a great sniper round, he thought. Working with the Leupold ballistics software program proved without issue. He dialed in the weather and the velocity — as tested, not listed by the manufacturer — and came exactly to the right windage and elevation clicks at three hundred yards. As a midrange shooting system, the outfit was up to his standards.

On the fourth day, Menendez brought him explicit diagrams.

“This is no good. I must see it myself.”

“You will. I bring you this for familiarity only. You will see how professional my people are. They know many things.”

The sniper said nothing, eyes betraying nothing, body betraying nothing. He simply addressed the document.

He saw a street grid, one block marked 4th Street, on which stood an immense building, as described by a rectangle, some kind of official structure, judging from its size. A diagonal line had been drawn across the map, passing over two blocks, tracing the trajectory of a shot. Its source was a circular structure, part of some kind of connected complex. Sounding out the letters, he could tell that the name of that street was Market.

“You have no issues using an infidel religious site for your work?” asked Menendez.

“It is nothing to me. If it offers the position, I will use it.”

“You will be in the dome of a Catholic church called the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. It’s perfect for our purposes. One of its six windows faces the target zone exactly, clean, unobstructed shooting. It’s easy to access, at that time of day likely to be largely empty, and its priests will yield quickly and without drama to our functionaries. A glazier will accompany you to the selected window — it’s an ancient building, everything is at least a hundred years old — and he will remove the glass from your shooting position.”

“I will have to examine it myself and make certain that all is as you say it is.”

“Why would I lie?”

“You would not lie. But you might see what you want to see, not what is there. I also will need a tripod on which to place the rifle. You can acquire one at any camera or large sporting goods store.”

“Of course. Your target will be the stairway into the Fourth Street entrance of the federal courthouse. At two-thirty that afternoon, a carload of U.S. Marshals will deliver this witness to the courthouse. In the brief seconds that he is ascending the steps, he will be accessible to you.”

“Your intelligence is very good.”

“And expensive. Now, if—”

“There is more. I want a demolition, radio-controlled, placed nearby. Its point isn’t to destroy but to stun. When it detonates, the party will halt, look around — all of them — for the threat. It’s basic animal behavior. It must be detonated as they reach the top step. He will be frozen for perhaps a second, and I will take him. Time in flight from that range is less than a second, and he will still be at least that before everybody realizes what is happening and pushes him forward. It’ll be too late by then.”

“I appreciate your confidence.”

“I do not miss. Now, tell me how we shall escape.” He parsed the diagram closely.

“No elevator down,” he said. “It will take some time. Upon detonation, a car should pull up outside. Probably best to leave the rifle, as its awkwardness makes it difficult to maneuver.”

“Fine. It was bought under untraceable arrangements.”

“We leave, transfer cars quickly, and—”

“To the airport. Where my jet awaits.”

“All the men with me, they will be armed. Just in case.”

“Heavily. Well-trained, ready to fight and die, if necessary, to make your escape good.”

“It shouldn’t come to that.”

“The locals, even the Marshals,” said Menendez, “are earnest but not the kind of highly trained, highly experienced operators on our team. They can’t possibly react quickly unless they have someone of extraordinary talent on-site. And that is highly unlikely.”

41

Jared, you have to deal with this.”

“Ah. What was the name again? He called himself Ali La Pointe, that’s all I know.”

“You’re in direct contradiction with Imam el-Tariq of Dearborn. In fact, it’s his testimony that he chose you specially to act as Juba’s facilitator, as he got acclimated to the United States. According to him, you spent more time with Juba than anybody. And if anybody knows Juba’s secrets, it would be you.”

“You know, I think I need a lawyer.”

“I would agree with that, but, unfortunately, you signed that right away. You’re here all by your lonesome. Your choices are somewhat limited.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Silence is not an option.”

“What are my options?”

“We can remainder you to Detroit, and the general prison population at the state penitentiary at Kinross. My goodness, I hope that doesn’t happen. The results would not be pretty.”

“Or?” said Jared.

“A case could be made that, in assisting Juba, you became an accessory before the fact to all his crimes. Since one took place in Israel, the Israelis, who are very interested in Juba, could demand extradition, for interrogation by their intelligence services.”

“Ouch. Okay, so what’s your deal?”

“Same as the one you’ve got. You go this afternoon to the courthouse and testify before the grand jury. That gives DEA license to pick up Raúl Menendez. You testify against him in a court of law. He goes away. You go into Witness Protection. All that stays the same. However, upon your testimony this afternoon, you are flown to a heavily guarded FBI safe house, also on military property, and you give us everything you have on Juba. I mean everything. No playing cute, as you did with DEA. We will go over it time and time again. We will medicate you, as your permission to do so will be part of the deal. We’ll go deep hypnosis. You will also work at length with the finest police sketch artist in the world, and you will give us a good portrait of the sniper. And if we feel you’re holding back in any other way, the interrogation will become sterner. And if we fail to stop him and he commits whatever mission he was sent here to commit, that will go very hard on you. When it’s all done, we’ll loan you out to the Israelis, and any other country — Malaysia, for example, or the Philippines — that has suffered at Juba’s hands. Then back to Kinross. If there is a ‘then.’”

Jared sighed, signaling epic self-pity at the horribleness of what was happening to him. It was so wrong. He didn’t realize that it was just the world routinely, mercilessly, rotating on the fulcrum of the innocent and the idealistic.

“See,” he finally said, “Menendez is shit. He doesn’t matter. He tried to kill me. I was nothing to him, so turning on him, that’s cool. It’s kind of fun. Juba is different. He’s part of the cause. I don’t care about Islam, really, but I do care about the shit that my people suffer. I don’t believe in Allah or Yahweh or Jesus H. Christ, any of it. But those people are so fucked by everybody, and nobody talks for them except the Jubas.”

“If you become older,” said Gold, “you will perhaps see the wisdom in moderation, mercy, and simple courtesy. The bold warrior archetype, so impressive to youth, will reveal himself to be psychotic, utterly corrupted by the flame of his hatred. It’s fine to have heroes of force, but you will learn that it is not fine to have heroes of evil.”

“No doubt you’re speaking from the heart, Mr. Gold, but one man’s evil is another man’s heroism. I’ll take what’s coming.”

“You poor kid,” said Chandler. “You’re shipping yourself to Hell.”

“Do they get Netflix there?” the boy asked but was unable to laugh at his own joke.

42

At precisely 1410, a black SUV pulled up. The first team, six of them, were dressed as priests — if priests were weight lifters, had MORIR EL CABRÓN!! tattoos in 48-point Bodoni Light Gothic showing under their clerical collars, and wore earphones with foam-encased mics. They were highly professional, all veterans of 1st Brigade, 2nd Special Forces Battalion, Mexican army. Many fights had they seen, many operations had they prevailed in, all over South America’s raw and violent regions, and many cartel members had died at their hands. Now they were on the other side, and that is why Menendez so treasured them, and so overpaid them. For their part, they got the bargain and had made friends with it: if you take El Patrón’s salt, you must obey his orders, unto death if need be. Actually, they liked to fight so much that the outcomes didn’t make that much difference to them. Everyone dies; their preference was to do it in battle.

Black-frocked and solemn, they found the exquisite interior of the domed cathedral largely deserted. They strode down the nave like Becket’s murderers, piously genuflected before the mounted cross when they passed in front of it in the chancel, for they had no urge or need to commit blasphemy, only murder. There was no need to be disrespectful. They strode quietly, for such big guys, amid the shafts of sun and the flickering of candles and the orangish old bulbs that had been burning since 1923, and began, as discreetly as possible, the process.

It didn’t take strong-arm stuff to control the building. Merely a brief opening of robes to display each fellow’s AK-74 Krink, the lighter-caliber, short-barreled version of the world’s most famous and prolific firearm. That made the point, and without sound or fuss the authentic clerics followed their captors’ instructions, gathered in the nave of the cathedral, where they were made to kneel, were flex-cuffed and ball-gagged.

The sergeant in charge spoke quickly in Spanish, then English.

“We mean you no harm. We are true believers ourselves, and ask the Lord Jesus Christ to bless our endeavor, for its outcome favors la raza over the usurpers and represents the reconquest. You will remain silent for another few minutes, and, presto, we are gone, and someone from the police will arrive to free you. Do not look carefully at our faces or attempt to commit details to memory. It could haunt you at some future time.”

That said, the perimeter established, a sign placed in front of the entrance reading NO ENTRANCE/NO ENTRADA, he spoke into the microphone held before his lips, giving the signal.

Another black SUV pulled up, and out of it climbed Unit 2, three more men in priest’s robes, a fellow said to be an expert on the workings of glass, a stout and dedicated load bearer, with a gun case wrapped in a bright Navajo textile and a tripod simply wrapped in brown paper, and Juba the Sniper.

“This way,” said the husky man. He was Special Forces as well, had reconned the site personally, and knew exactly where he was going. He led them into the structure.

The church held no magic for Juba. His mind was fixated on purpose. No sense of grand importance came to his mind, no urgency, no care, no anxiety. All that mattered was the shot; in the moment, faith would be a distraction. He didn’t notice the vaulted grace about him, the shafts of holy sunlight, the dust floating in the air. He didn’t observe the designed serenity of the place, made no comparisons between the busy beauty of Christian religious ambience and the severity and simplicity of his own faith.

He followed the man in front, who knew exactly where to lead him, which was down the leftmost aisle, around behind the altar, to a stone stairway rising into darkness, blocked by a chain and yet another sign reading NO ENTRANCE/NO ENTRADA. He stepped over the chain, following the route upward into the dome, spiraling up its circumference as he climbed. He reached a higher catwalk that circled the base of the dome, followed it as it curled around until a ladder availed itself to him. Since he was strong, he had no difficulty, though he worried about the glazier, who might not be up for such an ordeal. But the glazier was a monkey, the Special Forces trooper with the load now strapped to his back was a gorilla, and all made it without oxygen debt.

They were now in a land of spiderwebs and darkness, illuminated every sixth of the way by radiance pouring through ancient windows set into the stone a century before. It smelled of coldness, perhaps of the tomb or maybe just cellar stuff, both moist from the stone and dry from the dust. Esteban put a headlamp on to show the way and led them halfway around the dome.

“Here!” he said in English.

They had reached a particular window, and Juba peeked out, saw that it afforded, over another roof, a clear angle to target: the parking lot and steps into the rear entrance to the federal courthouse at 4th Street and Market.

“Señor?” asked the glazier — meaning, I am here, let me do my job. Juba moved down the catwalk a bit to make room while the soldier set out to open and deploy the tripod.

The glazier’s work was highly professional. First, he affixed a large suction cup to the pane, then he took a Dremel tool, battery-powered, and drilled a smallish hole in the old glass to achieve purchase on the window’s edge for what came next. That was a glass-cutting key, and with strong, deft strokes, he inscribed the border of the pane without difficulty. A second later, with a little scraping sound to add to the drama, he gently eased the pane out, removed it fully, and stepped back. The window was cleared of glass.

The soldier hustled into position, quickly erecting the tripod. He opened its legs as wide as possible, for maximum stability, de-telescoped the shaft to its highest position, and, with a snap, locked it solid. Skillfully, he screwed a small flanged platform to its apex, upon which could be mounted a camera or a rifle. Juba chose a rifle.

Like the surgeon he and other snipers were often compared to, he drew on close-fitting rubber gloves, while behind him the trooper tied a mask to the lower part of his face, slipped a surgical cap over his hair, and slipped a pair of Bausch & Lomb yellow shooting glasses over his eyes, hooking them over his ears. Now he was ready for the computations.

He recognized that what lay before him was a fairly simple hunting shot, but it was far enough away and precise enough that it couldn’t be sloppy. He’d been told the distance and height of tower, but he was still going to check. So, since the rifle had a Leupold scope on it, he had chosen and programmed a Leupold laser range finder, the new one designated RX-1600I TBR, the TBR standing for “true ballistic range.” He ran through the functions. The range finder’s inclinometer verified the angle at about forty-two degrees. This meant the actual straight-line distance to the target would be about twenty percent farther — call it three hundred and fifty-seven yards versus the sea-level distance of two hundred and ninety-seven; that would seem to make a big difference with a 6.5mm Creedmoor. But the counterintuitive reality was, the shot was still two hundred and ninety-seven yards, regardless of angle and distance. Gravity is picky; it doesn’t care about angle, it only cares about the sea-level distance. So, since he was zeroed at three hundred yards, his data was validated.

Now verified, he knew it was time for the instrument. He put the range finder in his pocket, bent over as the soldier opened the gun case and removed the rifle. It held four rounds of Hornady’s superb 140-grain Match ammunition. Sleek and graceful, its proportions refined toward the sublime, it was, like any firearm, a weird blend of the charismatic and the mundane. It was tan through the stock, dappled with abstractions conceived to blend against someone’s idea of a desert landscape. The barrel, receiver, and trigger guard were all finished in a kind of dun, somewhere between gray and tan, as neutral and invisible as any color could be to the unsophisticated human eye. The scope was black, simply because most scopes were black, and there hadn’t been time or interest to find a Leupold 10 that matched the rifle.

He removed the suppressor from the case, put it to muzzle, and screwed it on. It just looked like a big black tube squashed onto the end of the smaller khaki tube of the barrel, extending its length by perhaps eight inches. It added but a few ounces weight, and although it could not by any means silence the sound of nearly 45 grains of smokeless powder igniting in a ten-thousandth of a second, it could diffuse it. If it registered at all, the noise would come from everywhere.

He hefted it, experiencing the ten pounds as just enough to be responsive yet at the same time just enough to be steady, slipped behind the tripod, and bedded the rifle forestock on a small sandbag that lay between it and the steel platform at the tip of the shaft. He fit himself to it, his eye coming to the scope and finding the right distance between scope and eye, and settled in.

The rifle was, of manufacturing necessity, generic in its dimensions and design. It was not adjusted to him, he adjusted to it. He knew exactly where to place his cheek to find dead center of the scope, he knew where exactly to place his hand on the comb to pull it stoutly to shoulder, he knew where he’d place his off hand — on top of his firing hand, just behind the thumb — for maximum control.

Meanwhile, behind him, the soldier slipped a radio to Juba’s belt, ran the wire to his head, and ensnared it in the earphone-mic crown. Juba heard crackling, some Spanish chatter, followed by the clear Arabic of Alberto:

“Guardian”—using the ludicrous code name that the Mexicans had insisted upon—“are you there?”

“I am,” he said into the microphone.

“Are you on target?”

“Yes, a few adjustments to make. What is the time situation?”

“Ah, they’re telling me it’s still six minutes until he’s due. We have spotters, and—”

“I know.”

“Yes, they will alert us when the vehicle is spotted, no matter from which direction.”

“Yes.”

“All right, now, they’re telling me he’s about two miles away, no traffic, ETA about four minutes.”

“I receive,” said Juba.

Now he was ready. He flicked the safety off, opened the bolt to reassure himself by a peek of brass that the cartridge still rested in the chamber — though, by no stretch of the imagination, could it have been removed — locked the bolt down, and began a series of microshifts and — adjustments toward perfect comfort.

“Last check through,” said Alberto from wherever it was the operation was being run, presumably a nearby apartment.

“Everything is perfect,” said Juba.

“Yes.”

“And the distraction detonation?”

“He is on the circuit. When you say go, he will blow up a garbage can down the block. Lots of smoke and noise.”

“Good.”

Another voice came on.

“All units now, radio silence for the shooter. May God be with us.”

The Marshals’ Dodge SUV led the way, behind which was the FBI party in a nondescript Bureau Ford, and, behind them, in honor of local participation, a Wichita city police squad car, holding two sergeants, seven doughnuts, and two cups of heavily sugared-up-and-creamed coffee.

“At least it ain’t a circus,” said Bob.

“Their plan is discretion, not a show of force,” said Nick. “Chandler, how are you doing back there? Okay?” She was alone in the backseat.

“I’m fine,” she said. “No State cops are asking me out for a drink.”

Around this tiny convoy, the mild and pleasant streets of the Kansas city passed, and Bob for some reason kept his scan running hard, his concentration cranked up to eleven. Of course he had no firearm, so what good would it have done if he’d spotted anything anyway?

“Okay?” asked Nick. “We’ll catch him after testimony. He’ll have thought about it. He’ll see what being a stand-up guy will cost him and he’ll come home to us.”

“Hope you’re right,” said Bob, eyes catching on the sudden spurt of a Dodge Charger, but it signaled, then turned left, as it passed the Marshals’ vehicle.

“He’s a kid,” said Chandler. “Behind the bravado, he’s scared and fragile. Plus, he misses his mom. He’ll see the light.”

The courthouse was a New Deal monolith, all vertical lines and right angles, art moderne by way of a let’s-build-shit-to-get-the-economy-going zeitgeist. It was built to withstand tornados and angry peasants with pitchforks and torches. The Marshals’ SUV pulled through the gate, obediently opened by a guard, eased into the lot, and pulled up to the curb, which accessed the six broad stairs, which, in turn, accessed the double-wide brass doors. Two more Marshals stood at the doorway, like sentinels. So much drama.

Nick parked in a precleared nearby space, and the cop car closed the gap on the SUV, nudging up to it, fender to fender.

As he exited, Bob scanned for threat. Nothing, no movement, no parked cars on the street, no suspicious traffic on 4th Street. Just America: trees, sunlight, a bit of a breeze, a few folks across the street, meandering their way through errands and visits, nobody paying any attention to anybody’s business but their own. Swagger did notice one tall structure on the horizon, the dome of a church or some kind of sacred structure, off to the northwest, three hundred or so yards away. He marked it, but it was too far for his eyes to pick out details. It occurred to him that he should have had binoculars, but he also should have had a pistol, earphones, and a link to the ’Net, body armor and more comfortable shoes, and been twenty years younger.

The FBI folks reached the SUV, which had remained closed until they got there. Now the front door opened, a large man in a blazer emerged, miced and phoned up, Sig bulging over his right kidney, regulation-issue crew cut, and, like Bob, did his own threat scan. Satisfied, he nodded, and the back door opened.

Scrawny Jared got out, the puppy at the center of all this arranging. He was dressed as if for his English class at Princeton, in jeans, sneaks, and a sweater, sleeves rolled up. No cuffs, no shackles, since for this part of the operation he was a cooperating witness, not a felon. He had a pair of wire-rimmed glasses on, and he seemed like a feral beatnik cat next to the two Marshals, who quickly fell in beside him. In comparison to his boho insouciance, they were like Kansas football coaches. He did not look at, nor did he receive any acknowledgment from, the FBI party that waited for him to walk up the stairs and fell in behind him.

The stairs were gentle in incline, low in height, broad in depth, and ceremonial in execution. Everybody covered them easily, and up the party of six went.

Okay, on Fourth Street,” said Alberto. “You should have them any second.”

Juba gave the focus ring of the Leupold a last tweak, and it brought the scene into startling clarity, much bigger, because he was so used to tiny dot-like targets at over a mile through the Schmidt & Bender 25×. Now it seemed like a movie, blazing with color, crisp to the edges of the frame, and he saw the steps, the terrace up top, the two Marshals flanking the doors, the ornate bas-relief pictographs of Labor and the Eternal Prairie etched lovingly into the building’s walls seventy-odd years ago.

“Okay, on-site,” said Alberto. “Do you have them?”

“I do. Now, shut up,” commanded Juba. “Wait for my command.”

He didn’t care to track them, preferring to let them rise as they ascended the steps into his crosshairs.

At the bottom of the perfect circle that was his field of vision, he could see motion: heads, as the party assembled itself outside the black vehicle. It seemed to take some time, as if it were a parade being set up, not a mere trudge to an appointment. But finally they arranged themselves as they preferred and they began the climb.

Three in front, three in back, the target obviously in the middle of the first rank. They moved without hurry or ceremony, totally unaware they were being observed by the predator from afar, not even in step or cadence, just an unruly batch of people heading inside.

“Now!” said Juba.

Somewhere someone pushed something — phone key, TV remote button, professional wireless detonator, whatever — and half a block down the street a KEEP WICHITA CLEAN garbage can, placed a foot off the sidewalk in a gilded frame, exploded. It was not a destructive blast — perhaps two ounces of Semtex or C-4 crushed into a Dixie cup, with detonator and signal receiver, as the point wasn’t to destroy but to stun. The can, plastic, shattered as it rose upward, propelled by a plume of energy and oxygenation, and for however tiny amount of damage the detonation did, it indeed produced the sound of a world ending, in one one-thousandth of a second.

And it stunned totally. All six principals froze, as their human brains, being hardwired and acculturated to the noise of any blast, reacted as threat messages overcame all mental processes.

The Marshal on the left and one of the three trailers had begun to recover already, but Juba, without tremble, tremor, doubt, or reluctance, had his crosshairs square on the right-hand edge of the Marshal’s haircut as his target, but, by the incomprehensible unpredictability of spontaneous movement, the Marshal had shifted slightly to the right at the noise, and his head was now obscured.

Time moved in atomic increments. Juba’s finger lay into the trigger, and he felt it move, move, move, yielding a tenth of an ounce by a tenth of an ounce, but he still had no goddamned target — Allah, help me! Allah, do not forsake me! — and, in a nanosecond, the man’s face began to clear, and the crosshairs exactly defined the edge of the Marshal’s head and about a third of his emerging face when the trigger, obedient to its administrator’s beliefs, went.

Blur and whirl, the odd no-noise of the suppressor turning the muzzle blast into generic muffled obscurity, the rifle rising off the tripod as it drove back just a bit by the recoil, and then falling again to stability, and since he had not come off the stock or out of the eye box during the recoil cycle, it restored the movie that was this chaotic event, and at that second Juba saw the face of the man in the flash of an instant before the great destruction.

43

There is no sound quite like the sound of a high-velocity bullet striking a human head. It’s wet yet solid, repulsive, and full of odd aural subtexts: some cracking, some sibilance of the spray phenomenon, some twisted mach-speed splats. Of the people standing next to Jared as the bullet, sliding off the skull of the Marshal, took him dead-on flush beneath the eye, only Swagger had heard it before.

He wasted no time. The sound carried terminal information. No need to look at the results, though he involuntarily snatched a glimpse of the Marshal, also toppling, also issuing copious outflow, to determine that that man was probably not fatally hit but had a year of headaches in store for him.

In the moment of suspended animation that followed, it was Swagger who screamed, “The Dome! The Dome!” and, without a whisper of pause, bolted toward the police car behind the Marshals’ SUV, yanked open the rear, piled in, and shouted again: “The Dome! The Dome!” The absurd smell of sloshed coffee filled the automobile, but indeed the sergeant at the wheel bumped into drive, squirmed out from his slot, went hard left, peeled around the lot, hit the exit gate, blew through it, sending spars and splinters of yellow-and-black-striped wood flying, cranked hard left down 4th Street and put pedal flat to floor, and the power drive of Dodge Charger Pursuit’s best 370 hammered its way through the atmosphere.

“Headquarters 10–35. Shots fired, shots fired, Fourth and Main, need medical fast,” said the other cop into his mic. “Officers down. We are proceeding to Immaculate Conception, shots may have originated there, all units, 10–35, Immaculate Conception, proceed under siren.”

“Tell ’em, suspects heavily armed, expect to receive gunfire,” Swagger said, as the two blocks of 4th Street went to a blur outside the speeding vehicle, and the g-forces tugged its occupants back.

“Be advised, all units, may encounter gunfire at site.”

“Got a gun?” Swagger said.

“There’s a shotgun in the trunk. I’ll pop it when we bail out.”

“Roger that,” said Swagger, as the car reached its destination, yielding the sudden image of two SUVs halted at the curb in front of the cathedral just as a batch of priests were scurrying toward them.

“Watch it, goddammit,” yelled Swagger, as one of the priests dipped and came out with an assault rifle.

All three of the occupants went down as a fleet of small, angry missiles nailed the windshield, reducing it to sparkles, veins, and glittering spray. Nobody was hit, but the car itself slid out of control, sideswiped a parked vehicle, came to a hard stop against another, throwing each occupant forward and into shock against whatever was ahead of them, dashboard or the back of the front seat. Swagger felt a bone crack, a rib twist, his heart go flat as a pancake, his lungs nearly split, and a rocket of bad pain go vertically from the center of his body. More fire splattered against the car, filling it with the sound of metal shearing, vibrations like a ripsaw, and the pungency of fried paint and gasoline. But at the same time, more sirens rose, meaning that the guys were incoming, and maybe there’d be enough of them to close this thing down.

Juba lost a second to amazement, then his combat brain took over. He turned, knocked the glazier to the ground, and said, “Stay for police.”

They were halfway out of the dome, on the long catwalk trek to the last remaining flight of stairs, when the dry snap of outdoor gunfire began. How could there be gunfire? How could people have gotten here so fast? How could they tell where the shot had come from, as the suppressor had diffused its origin? Was this a betrayal or some kind of terrible stroke of bad luck? He knew he could mull these issues until capture or death, but got over them in one second. That was the soldier in him: built to confront the wretched here and now.

He and Esteban reached the stairway, two-at-a-timed-it down the steep incline from the catwalk, found themselves behind the chancel, and ran down a side aisle to the west door. They stepped into firefight city. Before them, four of the first-teamers were draped over the two SUVs, all gone to full hammer on the Krinks. The sound of the guns eating ammo came as ripping, as if huge canvas shrouds were being pulled apart by mechanical devices. Around them an ever-growing crescent of squad and sheriff’s cars had arrayed themselves clumsily, and each by this time had its own assortment of sheltering law enforcement, most with pistols, some with automatic weapons. Everybody shooting at everybody, ducking, finding a new spot, shooting some more, twisting back to hasten through a reload. A shooter went down, tried to crawl away, and, halfway through his second extension, bled dry and went still. The others kept the fire up.

It was chaos. Just men with guns shooting at men with guns, trying to maneuver under fire, and, when frustrated, unleashing bullets into the crisp air at vehicles or earth to no tactical advantage. Police flashers exploded, tires went flat, steam burst from engines, lakes of oil oozed like slime across the pavement.

“Back,” yelled Juba, who, absent the abandoned sniper rifle, had no weapon.

He and his companion pulled back, even as someone noted them and sent a burst to gouge a furrow of splintered wood in the west door.

“You go,” yelled the soldier. “I’ll hold them.”

“Jihadi hero,” yelled Juba, kissed him fiercely on the lips.

“Here,” yelled the soldier, handing over the Krinkov.

As he turned back out, he pulled a Beretta and started to fire at oncomers.

Juba ran down the nave to the transept, amid slanting beams of holy light, in full view of the tortured man on the cross. He pushed his way through a crowd of frightened, bound priests, but none had the nerve to try to block him. He twisted into a hall, heard shrieks and screams from civilians in the rooms on either side, came to a corner, took a quick look back down the hall over his gunsight and saw no one. He kept moving and came to a door, pushed it open, tasted sun and air and the glories of a garden, negotiated it forcefully and saw a street before him through an archway. He put the rifle to his side, after folding the stock, and set out. Trying to walk naturally, though breathing heavily, he hit the sidewalk, was about to turn right down the street, and then a man crashed into him, the rifle clattering away, and the two went down, tangled in each other’s arms, strength on strength.

Swagger had no gun. What good was he? And each arriving officer seemed more eager to get into the fight than to pay him any attention. The FBI Ford pulled into the formation, Nick rolled out, Chandler the other way, and Neill from the rear.

He scrambled low and hard to them.

“Gun!” he yelled.

“I’m using mine!” said Nick, not really paying much attention, and leaning over the wheel well to put several Glock .40s out into the generalized target area thirty-five yards away.

Fire everywhere. The cars trembled as they were hit, the noise of the shots hit eardrums like driven spikes, the smell of burned smokeless drifted all over.

Swagger, in his quest for firepower, kept sliding car to car and reached the last of them in the barricade around the enemy position and found two Marshals blazing away with .45 automatics. They wouldn’t relinquish a gun either.

That’s when he saw Juba.

The man wore yellow shooting glasses, and had just emerged from the entry to the cathedral. Heavyset, intense, muscular under the priest’s robes, no fear in him. Bob decided to charge. Somehow he felt that his aged body could outrun the bullets that Juba’s bodyguard sent his way and overcome them both with well-executed punches, bellicose profanity, and hard-steel U.S. Marine Corps attitude. But he saw the error of his ways when the companion saw him and raised the rifle to kill him. However, in the next second, before his death was enacted, Bob saw a burst of shots riddle the huge door, drive the two back. He took this as God’s belief in his mission and continued his charge after the momentary lull.

He quickly saw it was indeed a stupid thing to do, as the companion emerged again, this time with pistol, which he put toward Bob. As his trigger finger almost went into full press, someone just behind him shot the guy six times with a Glock. It was Chandler.

“Get back!” he screamed at her.

“You first,” she replied.

But something knocked her flat. This burst, probably from a gunman behind a car, spared Bob. No one would kill him! It seemed so wrong!

He ran to her.

“Where are you—”

“Vest,” she wheezed. “I’m okay. Just… ribs…”

He got behind her and dragged her behind the Marshals’ SUV.

“Stay here!”

“Take this!”

It was her Glock. But it was locked back, empty.

“Mag?”

“Gone.”

“Shit,” said Bob, and flicked the slide lock so that the gun clacked shut, even if empty. An empty gun could be better than no gun.

“Stay down now!” he yelled.

If she had a riposte — and she almost certainly did — he didn’t hear it, for again he took off. But this time instead of running to the building, he ran to its side, reasoning that Juba would cut through the cathedral, find a way to reach the other side, and make his break into traffic, where he’d hijack a car or maybe just hot-wire something parked nearby. Juba would know what to do, that was for certain.

Bob came around the rear of the immense building, stepped out of its shade into sunlight, and noted that on this street traffic had stopped, pedestrians had disappeared, but all the cop cars with flashing lightbars and still screaming sirens were half a block away, clustered at the intersection. He slowed, but not much, negotiating the far side of the cathedral complex, and came to an arch, out of which, at that precise point in time, came a husky priest. As priests don’t normally wear mics, yellow shooting glasses, or carry Krinkov assault rifles, he understood, in supertime, who it was. His reactions were appropriate. It was an open field tackle, low into the hips, no arms wrapping around, and, as the two crashed together, Juba’s rifle flew. Each endured a moment of spangled confusion, but each came up fast.

“Freeze!” yelled Bob, the Glock locked on Juba’s midsection.

“No shoot, no shoot!” yelled Juba, in English, his arms flying upward. “Please, sir, no shoot!”

But then, unaware or not caring that it was an empty gun that tethered him in place, he moved so fast, Bob could not keep up, even if he squeezed on an empty chamber. It was Systema Spetsnaz, the Russian Special Forces fighting system, which is not built of memorized elaborate moves — they break down under pressure — but the natural physics of the body relative to strength, balance, practice, and experience, the latter of which he had plenty. It began as a wave, a crest of energy, rushing through the body to accumulate at the point of contact, accelerated through the universe in warp drive, and was delivered at a speed that has no place in time, the limb going so fast, so soon, it rendered itself invisible. The hollow of Juba’s foot hit Bob in the head so hard, it knocked him straight to Wonderland, and Alice and the White Rabbit played chess on his ruined skull for one or two seconds, and, when he recovered, the fight was over, and Juba, having recovered his rifle, stood over him to finish things off for good and all.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he spat something in Arabic, turned, and, fleet as a deer, amazingly fast for such a big man, headed down the street.

Bob tried to rise, to look about, to yell for backup, but all the squad cars were clustered halfway down the block at the intersection, lightbars pulsing red-blue distress, men scuttling for shooting positions, though the shooting seemed to have halted.

Bob’s knees went as a new wave of dizziness came over him, and he realized he had been hit so hard, he might die, as the pavement came up in a zoom shot to smash him in the nose, setting off more lights and frenzy.

44

He came to once in the ambulance, alone, except that his brain felt as if it had nails hammered into it. It was not pleasant, and he decided to lie back and, somewhere between the lying and the backward part, he went to black again.

The next time he awoke, it was a hospital room. Nick was there, but so were the nails.

“Welcome to the world,” said Nick.

“Ahh,” said Bob, “not sure I want to be here.”

“No, the news is not good, but I expect you’re man enough to take it.”

“Chandler?”

“She made it. Broken ribs, but the vest saved her.”

“Thank God,” said Swagger. “Tell her to sit the next one out. You’re her boss.”

“You try and tell an American woman anything these days, let me know how you do.”

He lay back, and didn’t slide under. Meanwhile, a drip passed something medicinal into his veins, his vision was somewhat lazy in its mission to put edges on things, the smell of hospitals was its own special ordeal. A nurse leaned in to perform vital life-giving tasks, the last of which was holding a cup up for a long drink of water.

“Juba?” asked Bob after the last gulp.

Nick’s expression told enough, but as a stickler for details, he then provided them.

“He got into a parking lot, hot-wired a car, and got out of town. Where, we have no idea. The report on the car didn’t come in till last night—”

“It’s the next day already?”

“Afraid so.”

“Christ.”

“Anyhow, we haven’t located it yet, though now there’s an APB out.”

“That won’t help. He’ll dump it — he’s already dumped it — and pick up another. He’ll always be a car ahead of the APBs.”

“No doubt. Smart operator.”

“And fast. I never saw anybody so fast. He put that leg into me at light’s speed. So give me the score.”

“Not as bad as it could be. No police KIA, four wounded, not including you and Chandler. Four bad-guy KIA, including their NCO, who blew his own brains out rather than be taken. Six surrenders. Counterterrorism Division people are all over them, but since they were hired by a cutout in Mexico, and handled by cutouts all the way through, there’s not going to be much. Universal soldiers, Mexican variation. Special Forces, good operators; as long as someone pays their life insurance, they’ll shut up and wait for a chance to break. Also, some guy who’s a glass expert, cut the window for Juba’s shot. He doesn’t know anything either.”

Bob nodded.

Then he said, “Anyhow, when do I get out of here?”

“There’s some recovery time up ahead. You’ve sustained a heavy concussion and skull fracture. They say not for a week.”

“By then, Juba could have whacked—”

“Not your department. Your department is, tell the artist what this guy looks like. You’re the only one who’s seen him who’s still alive and not afraid to talk.”

“Jesus, Nick, it was just for a split second before he whacked me out.”

“You’re a trained observer. When you put your mind to it, you’ll be surprised what you can recover.”

“I’ll try.”

“There is no ‘try,’” said Nick. “There is only ‘do.’”

But there was no do. There was only try.

“I admit, it’s not much,” said Swagger.

A square-faced, rather generic Arab stared back at him from a universe of deft charcoal strokes. Whatever subtle nuance of geometry, weight distribution, underlying musculature, bone slope, and eye radiance that make a face a face was not there. Nothing was there.

He was still abed after three long days of working with a very decent guy billed as the best police artist in the world, but it came to only this.

“He looks like a cross between Saddam Hussein and Dr. Zhivago,” said Swagger.

“You mean Omar Sharif, the Egyptian actor,” said Nick. “Well, it does have a certain standardized, even idealized, quality to it. We’ll put it out, but if it draws in over seventy-five thousand suspects, we’ll know it’s not really working.”

“He’s not a face. He’s motion. He’s speed, grace, battle talent, remorseless will. The face is nothing.”

The door opened, and Mr. Gold appeared. He looked tired because during all the time since Juba’s escape, he’d been sitting in the temporary FBI working room in the Wichita Hilton, going through reports, looking for patterns, reading the transcripts of interviews with the captured shooters and the glazier, trying to infer from the grade Z material something grade A. Again, plenty of try, no do.

He shook Swagger’s hand.

“You have survived again,” he said.

“Dying is above my pay grade,” said Bob.

“The bravery is just this side of insanity,” said Gold. “No man on earth would have launched himself at this fellow without a weapon.”

“If it was about heroism,” said Nick, “we’d win every fight.”

“While you’re here, Mr. Gold, I’d like to run my take on the shooting by you. Maybe you’ll see something I missed.”

“Doubtful. But please proceed.”

“I have been thinking about his shot, because I never made one so good. Nobody has, not even Craig Harrison, the long-distance champion of Afghanistan. Hitting a dime at three hundred ain’t the deal, so it wasn’t just marksmanship. It was, I don’t know… They didn’t teach no words for what I mean in 1964, which was my last brush with formal education.”

“‘Spatial imagination’?” asked Nick.

Bob chewed it over.

“Sort of, but not quite. What I mean is, the understanding in a flash of the forces at play and understanding how they must go a certain way, anticipating that, being ahead of it, and putting the shot where the target is going to go, not where it is.”

“Magic?” said Nick.

“‘Dynamic projection,’” said Gold.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s the bull’s-eye. He saw that the kid’s head was invisible behind the Marshal’s but that it was tending to emerge. By the time it emerged, other things might have happened, and if he fired on it while emerging, it might have moved too far when time in flight finally put the bullet there. But, simultaneously, he couldn’t put the bullet through the Marshal’s head because it might not make it all the way or it might get deflected. So he put it on the edge of the Marshal’s skull, above the ear, beneath the cowboy hat, knowing that it wouldn’t impact straight on and explode, deform, deflect, whatever. Basically, he shot on the deflection, like putting the cue ball off the edge to hit two walls, knocking the eight ball on the other side of the table into the sock. He deflected the bullet about fifteen degrees, and it caught Jared just as he turned and emerged, under the right eye of a target that was probably only a quarter visible. Nobody but Juba hits that shot. What does that tell us?”

“It shows that on top of everything else, he’s creative in real time. A difficult man to outthink,” said Mr. Gold.

“Hope I’m up to it. One other thing. You speak Arabic?”

“No outsider really speaks it, not fully and fluently. But in the shallow sense, then, yes, I speak it.”

“He said something to me, even as he didn’t shoot me.”

“You must have impressed him. He doesn’t seem the loquacious sort.”

Swagger spit out clumsily the sounds that Juba had uttered as he stood over him with the recovered Krink.

“Majnun jiddo,” clarified Mr. Gold. “It means ‘crazy grandpa.’”

45

The jet landed at 0345 and quickly went to blackout as it taxied toward Menendez’s private hangar. Juba had sat almost inert during the trip back, seemingly gathering strength after expending so much in the ordeal of shooting and evading.

But when he climbed down the jetway, Señor Menendez himself awaited him and quickly escorted him to the Land Rover. La Culebra, in his sock, and of course the translator, Alberto, necessary to the grandee for many reasons, hovered close by. All climbed into the car and it pulled out, with Mercedeses, fore and aft, full of security.

“Ah, my friend,” said Menendez, “you were superb. What talent, what skill, what a jihadi warrior you are. My god, you accomplished the miraculous, the impossible. I owe you all.”

“I do not want all,” Juba said. “I want safe transport to my shooting site, myself by one route, my rifle by another. I want a new target to shoot, because I have to resharpen reflexes and protocols ignored for too long. All now must be to my task. And if I succeeded with your problem, it was because Allah willed it.”

The last was a simple declaration. By inflection, it suggested that no theological disagreement could be permitted. It also suggested that further conversation could not be permitted. But Menendez was not good at picking up cues from others. He had things to say and would say them, regardless.

“I should thank you also for exposing a traitor in my midst, and, in consequence, I have directed an intense security review. Such measures are extreme, and innocent people, alas, will die. But if we have been penetrated, the whole apparatus is at risk. The traitor must be found, and the capture and deaths of those soldiers must be answered with justice, no matter how sloppy.”

“You infer from the law enforcement response that there was a traitor?”

“I do. How else could—”

“There was no traitor,” said Juba.

“Then how were they upon you before you had even descended the dome? The newspapers were so proud of the police arrival before your escape and the subsequent gun battle. I presume that is cover story to mask the presence of a rat. There’s no way they could have—”

“Yes, there is a way,” said Juba. “I saw it. Or him, as in this case; the way is a man.”

“Who would—”

“We’ll find out. After I’ve rested, I’ll contact my people, and, through them, I’ll access the intelligence files of every agency in the world that keeps records on the Americans. I’m looking for the identity of a senior sniper — sixty, seventy. He was there, and it was through his experience that he understood where the shot had to come from, and it was through his reaction that the police were so quickly on scene. He led them, and he alone understood as the action unfolded where I had to be. And, he was there. This has only happened once before. In Baghdad, when the Americans understood my strategy, they quietly countered it and destroyed it in one afternoon. In both cases, brilliant thought. And I’m guessing in both cases, though the men were different, the agency was the same: the United States Marine Corps. They are shooters. They still understand shooting, and can read it and comprehend its meaning, when so few others can.”

He paused.

“I saw the sniper. Weathered, from a life spent outdoors. Lithe, quick, spry, even though he was so old. Without fear. What crazy grandpa assaults an armed weight lifter thirty-five years younger than him? Only one who has been in many fights and always prevailed and believes himself invulnerable.”

“You showed him he wasn’t.”

“No, I showed him I could evade. That is not a victory. I should have killed him, as I believe it will save me a great deal of trouble in what comes next. But if I’d fired, the sound of the shot would have drawn police in seconds. If I’d paused to strangle him or to smash him with the gun, I would have extended my vulnerability. So even after knocking him to the ground, my first instinct was to evade. I made the right decision, but it feels very wrong.”

46

Swagger was released on the third day and got to the morning meeting on the fourth day.

It was the first get-together for Chandler, Neill, Nick, Swagger, and Mr. Gold in over a week, and, as usual, Nick had Chandler — hobbling on a walker but game — go through the APB responses and other communiqués from the police net, particularly those provoked by the circularized police artist portrait of the fugitive, under Swagger’s direction.

There were summaries from the interrogations — to no effect. And, as per usual, no possibilities from monitoring bus stations, the airport, the train station, even taxi, Uber, and Lyft drivers. Of the six or seven stolen cars reported, only one had been recovered, and it was almost certainly not Juba’s, as forensics found no trace of him in it.

“Sooner or later, one of the commandos will disclose where they staged the operation, and we can bust and vacuum that site,” said Nick. “But everyone on the other team is operating at a very high professional level and will probably not make the kind of stupid mistake that brings down most criminal initiatives. These people are first-class. Everything is done through cutouts far from the order giver and his inner circle, always using laundered money, accounts that lead nowhere. No wire intelligence, and nobody monitored radio transmissions, so clearly they used sophisticated masking. Neill, anything in cyber? Any little thing?”

“Sorry, no intercepts. Even put NSA on it, and they went through all their satellite stuff. I have a tech full-time in D.C. going after their fall guy. If and when a phony Brian Waters email or Dark Web site or blog hits, we’ll know.”

“We’re fucked,” said Bob. “He’ll do that just before he shoots. Whatever he wants the world to know about Brian Waters will hit then, you can bet on it.”

“Anything else?” asked Nick.

“Did you find the other rifle? Meaning the rifle he used here in Wichita?” Bob asked.

“How did you know he didn’t use the Accuracy International?”

“No point in risking the weapon dedicated to his big shot for some sideshow.”

“Well, you’re right — yes, a different rifle. He dumped it behind the chancel,” Nick said. “I looked at it pretty carefully before we sent it off to Firearms Division. It appeared to be straight-out-of-the-box standard, which is to say, without information.”

“What about all the science magic you do? DNA, hairs, atoms, that sort of thing?”

“Nothing yet. Again, it’s doubtful any microtraces will be found to lead anywhere. Maybe once we get Juba, we might be able to DNA trace, but as of now, since we don’t have any DNA on him, DNA is pointless. In all other respects it was just standard Remington 700, Police Model, with a standard Leupold in standard mounting hardware. No gunsmithing required, no trip to custom rifle specialists; ergo, no information. Firearms Division is running the number, and they haven’t come up with anything yet, but if it follows the pattern, it’ll be a straw man’s purchase in some faraway state that proves to be a dead end. Meanwhile, the rifle just sits on a rack in the Hoover Building.”

“It’s a .308, I assume?”

“No. It was something called 6.5 Creedmoor.”

Bob nodded, considering.

“Does that tell you anything?” Nick asked.

“The fact that he’s onto 6.5 Creedmoor is an indication of how up-to-date he is. It’s the big new thing, on all the magazine covers. Supposedly more accurate than .308. The boy don’t miss no tricks.”

“So it looks like no progress,” said Nick. “But it confirms what we know: money is behind it, big money. Again, that tells us the target is major, and we ought to get going or something bad will happen.”

“Should you go to the White House?” asked Neill. “It seems that his target—”

“No,” said Nick. “When you go there, it gets all sticky politically, and other agendas beyond law enforcement come into play. That is why I would prefer if you keep speculation on the ultimate target to yourself. If you make an assumption, we’re in a world of confirmation bias, and clarity is the first casualty. I want us to work in the complete context-free abstract until it’s not possible. Don’t you agree, Mr. Gold?”

“I do entirely,” said Gold. “In Israel too, politics beclouds our efforts all too often.”

“So, what’s next conceptually? Tell me how to use Counterterrorism’s manpower to flood a zone and flush something out. Tell me some way to aggressively proact, not just wait to pick up the pieces and hope we identify a piece of DNA or Juba’s credit card.”

Silence.

Gold then said, “Sergeant Swagger, his shot will be at over a mile, you think. But at a certain point, he is required to divert, and he goes on this mission, the distance being three hundred yards in a crowd. He requires a new rifle, new ammunition, a whole new program. This involves a whole new set of problems to solve. He solves them — and barely escapes. But does that mean, assuming he is back on safe territory, he’ll have to reacclimate himself to the longer shot?”

“He will if he can, if he has time. It’s not necessary, but he’d want to do it. Do you see anything in that?”

“Ah, there’s something in there, but it has yet to clarify.”

“Mr. Gold,” said Nick. “Please clarify! Clarify! We need clarification!”

“I shall so instruct my subconscious. But it seems not to work regular hours.”

“One interesting thing,” Nick said. “Wichita Metro tells me that the AK Juba left behind, it didn’t have a magazine. That is, he removed the magazine and took it with him. Maybe to use it as a blunt-impact weapon. He could fit it under his jacket, in his belt, and it would fit flush. Of course, that would preclude commercial flight, yet another indicator he had private means out of town. But — why? Any thoughts?”

Swagger said, “He don’t do nothing on a whim. He’s a careful bird. He’s got a use for it, and I hope I ain’t around when he comes to it.”