Game of Snipers

47

A day later, the pictures of known American snipers came through via email from Juba’s control. He peered at them and, of several possibilities, recognized one: a sergeant’s face like his own, something clever, alive, even wise. but without aristocratic air or expectations beyond the practical. Not interested in luxury, not softened by too much pleasure, steadfast of soul and devoted to duty, unable to relax but for the company of those who’d earned the right to stand nearby. These men — American snipers, security advisors, Green Berets, and SEALs, men of experience and talent — had all acquired the patina of an Assyrian shield, a certain cast to the eyes, surrounded by a fissure of wrinkles, a stolidity of expression, a hardness to the jawline that extended to a mouth that would never yield to gentleness or humor unless deep in the bosom of family, friends, or co-believers. But this sergeant’s face completed Juba’s nightmare portrait of the American sniper who awaited him in the future. It was the face of his death.

He looked at the name, trying to make sense of it. Since its structural foundations diverged so from that of the Arabic, it seemed incoherent. It was simply an accumulation of sounds squished into a single utterance. It seemed to have no meaning.

“What does this mean?” he asked Alberto. “Bobleeswagger?”

“American names are simply labels. They don’t carry meanings and are not adjusted to celebrate an outstanding individual or origin or heritage. His name is Swagger because his father’s name was Swagger, and that is all that can be said.”

“But I have seen this word ‘swagger’ in texts. I did not bother to look it up. But it exists independent of this man.”

“It does. ‘Swagger’ is ‘a bold walk.’”

“A sniper would not swagger. A sergeant might, an aviator certainly. A general, without doubt. A sniper? Never. The sniper is quiet, calm, without vanity and drama. This fellow would not swagger.”

“They call this irony. Actually, if I understand irony, it’s not irony, it’s coincidence. But Americans love irony for some reason and they misuse the term promiscuously, as perhaps we do ‘honor.’ Irony is saying something but meaning the opposite, usually for the sake of mischief or wit. Thus, they love the fact — those who know him or of him — that his name is one thing and his character and skill another.”

“I suppose I understand. I would not have until I had reached this stage and achieved so many infidel kills. In mannerism: sedate; in action: bold. It is the best way for a man to be. Now I know him a little, know what created the man he is today. Bobleeswagger. He has delivered much death and knows it always sets him apart — even from his children. He knows he is used, sometimes cynically, by his masters for ends of which he has no knowledge and in which he has to believe on faith alone. But he adheres to duty nevertheless and will die doing it.”

“Is it him you are discussing or yourself?” asked Alberto.

“We are much the same, even if our gods are at war. I should have seen it earlier, as I now see its signs everywhere. And it explains everything. This isn’t an operation. It’s a game—the game — to be played out to the end. His death or mine.”

Alberto nodded. “Or both,” he said.

48

Sleep. Dreams utterly incoherent, full of odd scenes, outliers, and rogues. Aches of old wounds and new — the cracked ribs, the spells of dizziness, for example — came and went at random. Sometimes his phantom hip screamed in pain, though in his wakefulness it was perfect. Old man, pins wobbly, struts bent, needs oil, lube, and some adjustments.

But worse: every so often, the face of one of the lost ones — there were so many — and things that went along with them. Regret, isolation, despair, nihilism, memories of pain, memories of the comforting blur of the bottle, memories always of folly, stupidity, cowardice, ugly words, once issued, never recalled, all the times the obvious had been missed and the impossible selected as a goal, the center not holding, all systems exposed, in their illusory nature, the cheapness of their fraud, the tawdriness of their window dressing — a night, really, without much actual rest. Then, almost a mercy, the phone.

He swam toward it.

“Swagger.”

It was Nick. “I want everybody in. We’ve got something.”

That got his attention. “Has it broken?”

“Well, I’m hoping the breaking process has started. Get in here.”

“On my way.”

He struggled through a shower that semi-restored him, and a cup of bad residence hotel coffee, and drove his rental down to Hoover. It was almost five in the morning, but by the time he arrived, most of his functions were functioning, his hands weren’t shaking, and the surrealism of the dream world had helpfully erased itself.

The building operated at about ten percent hum in the off hours, and halls, usually so bustling, were ghost tunnels. Security was sparse, and each individual noise seemed to carry an echo and its reecho with it. Perhaps in the op center things were jumping. Everywhere else, there was too much room, not enough people. He elevatored to the sixth floor and turned in to the deserted hall that led to the task force office, entered, and saw they were all in, except for Gold. Someone had put a pot of coffee on, and Swagger took a cupful, his second of the day.

Finally, Nick looked up.

“Should we wait for Mr. Gold?” asked Neill.

“No, he’s here. Going over his notes.”

“This is his party?”

“The whole way.”

“Is it his clarification?” groggy, gorgeous Chandler, in jeans and sweatshirt, Glock on hip, had to know.

“He’ll explain. Mr. Gold!” he called.

The Israeli entered. Unusually for him, he was not in his daily wear, the jeweler’s black suit and tie. His shoes weren’t even black. The shirt was wide open, there was no jacket, and the slacks were radically gray. He was wearing burgundy loafers.

“Good morning,” he said. “Sorry to drag you all here, but if you agree with me, I think we have to get going on this.”

He sat.

“What has happened is that two unrelated pieces of information — one from Mr. Neill, one from Sergeant Swagger — have suddenly become related. Apart, they are nothing; together, perhaps something. I believe it at least demands a serious effort.”

“Please proceed,” said Neill. “I love it when I’m a genius.”

“You had said that the kind of aerial or drone reconnaissance that led us to Juba in Syria, keyed to the attributes that would identify a long-range shooting venue, were useless in the United States without some kind of limiting or defining function. Not even knowing the region, we were looking for a rowboat in an ocean.”

“True,” said Neill.

“And Sergeant Swagger had said that Juba almost certainly will shoot at living targets, first to acclimate himself to the spontaneous motion of life at that distance through that magnification system, and second — and equally important — to test the killing power of his rounds at that distance, in search of one that causes potentially more damage.”

“Yep,” said Bob.

“Now, I assume that, as a true believer — you never said as much, but I believe the inference was there — I assume that he would use human targets at some time in his journey. He believes them to be infidels, has no scruples against using them, and it is easily within the capacity of the Menendez apparatus to arrange such a thing. Everybody with me?”

Nods and mumbles of assent.

“So a question that can be asked is this: who would he shoot? Where could he get living bodies to hit at long range? It’s not the sort of thing you advertise for, nobody’s going to volunteer for it, not even for a large sum to be left to the volunteers’ benefactors. Those selected would almost have to be of a sort who would not be noticed in their absence, perhaps not even reported. They would have to be from a victim pool about which even the police, in reality, wouldn’t care much.”

He waited. Nobody had a thing to say.

“It seems to me,” he said, “or, that is, it seemed to me all of a sudden two hours ago, that the one source without fail would be any city’s population of homeless men. Nobody counts them, nobody really looks at them, American legalism is such that they can’t be rounded up in a tank or beaten until they leave town. So they find an out-of-the-way place and fester. Under the viaduct, by the river, out with the dumpsters, in abandoned factories, zombie neighborhoods, that sort of thing. And so it seems to me that Menendez might assign men to visit these places, drug an already sleeping hobo, and drag him off.

“You can imagine the rest. He awakens a day later in unfamiliar circumstances and finds himself pinned or in some fashion imprisoned, and, from a long way off, our good friend Juba conducts his experiments. The bullets come closer and closer, and if the man screams or begs, no one is there to hear, because the site is clearly wilderness of some sort. When Juba strikes, the cadaver is examined for terminal forensics, then buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by cartel methodology. I have heard of buzzards.”

“They do use buzzards,” said Nick.

“So it seems to me that as of this moment we ought to begin a national canvas for any localities that have experienced a sudden spike in homeless disappearances. I doubt they would abscond with people too far from what is their ultimate disposal site, it simply would complicate logistics. And they would be confident in their operations because the homeless have no champions, save the odd social worker or nun, and are of no interest to anyone in society, perhaps garnering some municipal social service attention, but even that is apt not to be so tightly applied. And if it were, who would care? Suppose you go to the police with fears that a number of homeless men have disappeared? What sort of response would that generate?”

Silence, of course, for the Israeli had focused on a particular weakness in American society, one that no one seemed to have the knowledge, the will, or the funding to do much about.

“Nobody’s going to win a Pulitzer Prize writing about vanished homeless, that’s for sure,” said Neill.

“You see the rest of it,” said Gold. “If we do locate an area of usual activity, we can program a satellite to search for the attributes in that area that might show up from outer space. We winnow further by drone. We can put the tiny whirlybirds over the most promising areas and, in that way, find the location of such an installation literally right down to the bench on the ground in front of it. And, as in Israel, we raid. Six helicopters dropping off forty of Orwell’s rough men — or Gadi Motter’s — at oh-dark-thirty, and your problem is solved.”

“So let’s get on this right away,” said Nick. “We want to circularize all police entities for reports of such a spike in disappearances. Maybe they have undercover sources in these communities. Maybe it’s right in front of them, they just have never had any impetus to look. So they assign a clerk for an afternoon to go through the records. Maybe there’s one town where, for some reason, the number had jumped.”

“Boss,” said Chandler, “I’d also do charity agencies, social work departments, and university sociology departments. The homeless interest researchers, and we’ve got to tap into that.”

“Good, Chandler.”

“Also, I’d be sure to get the info request read at the daily preduty briefing to beat cops. It’s the sort of thing a beat cop might hear and discount or ignore, but suddenly when it’s put before him and been validated by the process, he gets involved.”

“You might try places where illegals congregate to find work,” said Swagger. “Lots of men could go missing from Home Depots all over America, and nobody know.”

“Good, good, I like what I’m hearing. Any other suggestions?”

“Anyplace stoop labor is hired,” said Neill. “Harvesttime, lots of migrants come in to work the fields. Some — too many, no doubt — end up in those fields.”

“Non-union construction,” said Bob.

“Should we prioritize by area?” asked Chandler. “I mean, we have sort of assumed that wherever Juba is training, that would be the west. Lots and lots of land out there. Lots of land where he could have a mile-long shooting range and nobody would know.”

“That makes sense,” said Nick. “I think it’s a good assumption. This is going to be a hell of a workload any way you cut it, so any help is worth it.

“Neill, you and Swagger get that software to guide the birds setup. Okay, let’s get— Oh, wait. Let me say it formally: Mr. Gold, you are the best. Don’t know where we’d be without Mossad.”

“I only want one thing in return,” said Mr. Gold. “A long chat with Juba. I want to hear his thousand and one tales.”

49

A last man was sacrificed on the altar of accuracy, and Juba was pleased to see that the shooting instrument he had so painstakingly built and tuned over the previous months maintained its efficiency after having been laid down for the other rifle. It killed totally on the first shot at the range required. After putting the target down, he cleaned the rifle exhaustively, and, after that, all its surfaces pristine, he fired one more shot, because cold bore shots, by tradition and experience, were always better out of a fouled bore.

He prepared the rifle for its trip. He shellacked all the knobs on the Schmidt & Bender scope so that they would not vibrate in transit to a new position. To make doubly certain, he marked the settings with stripes of fingernail polish on both turret and turret housing so that the joining of the two stripes in one continuous line would signify that the turret or housing had not been turned. The bolt was removed and taped to the stock. The whole receiver-scope nexus — the heart of it, really — was triple-swathed in Bubble Wrap so that it was suspended midair to avoid being jostled or subject to vibration. Each screw, tightened and shellacked, was also marked so that a quick glance could tell if it had been loosened.

The rifle was the sum of its tensions. It was a mesh of screws tightened to an exact position and no other. Ambiguity, drift, the random and forlorn could not be accepted. So perfectly tightened, it became a matrix of stress. In this respect, it was a musical instrument, all stops set perfectly, all reeds and spit valves dialed to the precise position. It stayed reliable to the degree it retained exact registry. Rifles — all systems — fall apart when individual components go unmonitored and unadjust themselves. Juba could have none of that.

Then he put together a case with all the necessary logistical components: the iPhone 8, with its precious ballistics program; various wrenches; LensPens; a glazier’s key; a set of screwdrivers; and the ten most perfect rounds of ammunition that he had assembled. This too was wrapped and taped to the stock.

Finally, when the whole package was encased in foam and tape — it looked a bit like a mummy — it was secured in the false bottom of a high-end bookcase, invisible to the eye, which was itself skillfully packed in a shipping crate, secured tightly, made inviolate to all but the most violent accidental intrusions. It would survive a crash landing, in other words, but not a crash.

A day later, Juba watched as this object, under the rubric of a well-known custom furniture boutique, was delivered to UPS for delivery to its next destination. It would thereby enter two systems: UPS’s, but also Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, whose supple and proficient professionals would be responsible for its transport from several different destinations via several different shipping agencies. At a certain point, it would become affiliated with a credit card registered, through Iranian subterfuge, to Brian Waters, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and in that way join the train of evidence that was slowly accumulating against the dead man, on whom all blame was to be placed.

The intelligence people would discreetly monitor its progress, taking possession of it intermittently, inspecting it, then shipping it onward. It would reach its destination — only one senior executive knew the final address — at a leisurely pace but still in plenty of time. Juba wanted to be there, in the room with the rifle, facing the target, for a good while before he had to pull the trigger — one day, at least, a full week if possible. The whole enterprise disintegrated if it were rushed or improvised.

Finally, it was done.

He sat in the Land Rover, with Alberto, as they drove back to the ranch. The two Mexican Special Forces troopers, who had handled the transaction at the shipping agency, sat in front, indifferent to the Syrian-accented Arabic being spoken behind them.

“This step is finished,” said Alberto. “It must be a relief. Now, only the journey.”

“That part has been well planned. It will proceed routinely. No one will intercept me.”

“The picture they have put out is quite amusing.”

“It makes me look like a cartoon. It degrades me.”

“Everybody’s a critic. More important, it makes you look like me — like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Harvey Weinstein, John Garfield, Omar Sharif — like any other Semitic with strong features. The dark hair helps. It’s all the same DNA, intermingled by crossfucking over the centuries. That is why there is so much hatred. We’re all family.”

“I do not share your theory of mongrel politics,” said Juba.

“No matter. In the end, the drawing is so stereotypical, it looks like everyone and no one. It can be of no help.”

“As you say. In my journey, in any event, I will remain obscure.”

The Syrian laughed.

Juba showed him a finger on which he had written in Arabic, in ballpoint: “Meet me outside in swamp at 0430.”

Then he rubbed it out, and said, “Who’s Harvey Weinstein?”

50

It was as if her name was Detective. Her last name was Murphy, but people just called her Detective. To look at her was to know why: she had that glare of butch aggression, a face unsoftened by makeup or internal mirth, family, love. If she’d ever had any of them, it was a long time ago. You wouldn’t think life in a city of twenty-six thousand would have eroded her softer components so relentlessly, but it made sense when you realized this was her second department, after fifteen very tough years in Salt Lake City Metro. She’s come to Rock Springs for the landscape and the peace and quiet. She’s found one — the landscape was everywhere — but not the other two.

“Detective, for some reason Rock Springs has the highest rate of homeless depletion in America,” said Nick.

“I’m surprised anybody keeps tabs,” she said.

“I’m not too sure that the figures are reliable, with the single exception of yours. But it’s clear from the report your chief forwarded that you’re the only one paying attention.”

She lit a Marlboro, offered one each to Nick and Bob, who each declined, and took a deep draught. She wore jeans, packed a Smith .357 four-inch on her right hip, a plaid shirt, a five-pointed law enforcement star, boots that had been through fertilizer a time or two.

The three sat on a bench outside Rock Springs’s main station, a nineteenth-century brick extravaganza, from which men with Colts and Winchesters had gone to enforce the law a century before. She would have been happy among them.

“It’s mostly Indians,” she said. “They get in all kinds of trouble. You tell me why. But I’ll tell you how. Meth, speed, coke, Mexican Mud, now opioids. They’re always doing something to fuck themselves up, and if it’s off the res, it’s on us to clean it up. Such beautiful folks too. But you want to hear about our hobos. Oh, wait, can’t call ’em that. Our homeless.”

“You say that of a population you estimate at over seventy-five, at least six have gone missing in the last three months. Not moseyed away, not died in ditches, not frozen, or hit by big rigs on the interstate, but just vanished — one day here, the next day not?”

“Yep, totally. It actually stopped for a while, then, the last few days, another guy ups and vanishes. Then comes your alert.”

Bob and Nick looked at each other. Without having to say it, each man thought of Mr. Gold’s inquiry about whether Juba would refresh his skills with another run-through.

Detective continued. “By my calculations, Rock Springs is weird. Used to be a hard-bitten coal town, but, of late, it’s shared in the tourist boom. That’s why you see all the cornball Old West cowboy shit around. Anyhow, with tourists, you get homeless, as old-school settlers are too judgmental to give nickels and dimes to the scarecrows. But the tourist hands over five-spots just so they won’t have to look at them. So they’re drawn here in the warmer months. Progressive city council, so we can’t get rough with ’em. They hang on somehow. I got to know a few, that’s why I can tell what’s going on. They talk to me. I try to talk for them, but nobody listens.”

“We’re listening.”

“It started about three months ago. I picked up on it fast. ‘Where’s Paul?’ I had to know, because one day Paul was gone.”

“Paul was special?”

“Most of them are self-made wrecks. Paul was wrecked by fate. He had no character flaws. It’s just that God decided it was time to squash a bug, and Paul lost the bug lottery.”

“What was his deal?” asked Nick.

“Paul Finley. Beloved English teacher at Rock Springs High. By all accounts, smart, funny, generous, forgiving, concerned. One day, he backs out of his garage and kills his daughter. I guess some folks can come back from that, but he wasn’t one of them. He just starts falling through pathologies. Drunk, unemployed, suicidal, drug-addicted, divorced, on the streets. We tried hard — and I mean everybody — to help out. But he couldn’t make it back. Last time I saw him, he was sawing away on a Robitussin-and-Ripple high in an alley behind North’s, the restaurant. Maybe if I’d pulled him in that night. But I didn’t.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Gone. I noticed a few days later and asked. Nope, just gone. No one knew where.”

“Is that odd?”

“It is. These folks don’t have homes, but they do have a kind of community. They talk. Nobody leaves without good-byes, advice on where it’s better, towns that are softer, the weather easier, blue less inclined to hit. But Paul was just gone.”

They waited. She took a few puffs.

“Jerry was next. Followed by Husky. Finally, Frank. Same deal, just gone. No one saw a thing. I got an old wheezer named Big Bill to talk. He said he saw three guys come into the alley — the homeless bomb out most nights in an alley that runs two blocks behind the North Street restaurants — give Frank an injection, and load the guy into an SUV. It took about thirty seconds. They’d done it before. Then it stopped.”

“And you say it started up again?”

“Charlie Two-Toes. Lakota Sioux, proud when sober, a mess when drunk, which was most of the time. Gone, no trace. I keep trying to tell people. I sort of want to get a night watch set up, or something, but there’s not much interest. It’s a ‘Good riddance’ sort of thing.”

They were silent. She lit another cigarette. Over the buildings, mountains filled the day with snowy grandeur and cheap irony.

“Say,” she finally said, “what is this all about anyway? Nobody gave a damn, and suddenly big actors from the FBI come to town, including this one here who doesn’t say a thing but has SWAT eyes.”

“I do talk,” said Swagger, “but not this time.”

“So you can’t tell me a thing?”

“We’d love to tell you the Bureau had opened a new project to examine crime against the homeless on a national scale,” said Nick, “but that wouldn’t be true. I can only say, this touches on a national security issue that demands immediate attention. Yours is the best break we’ve gotten. Thank you for paying attention and caring.”

“It’s just such a downer to see the waste. Most of them were something, could still be something, but they just somehow lost whatever will it takes to play the game. They floated until they went under.”

“Can you give me a little insight on the area?”

“Sure. Glad to help.”

Swagger said, “We’re looking for a certain place. It would be big and private. Someone rich would own it. It would be way out of any town. The owners would probably keep a real low profile. You could drive by it a hundred times and never notice it.”

“All the big rich are up 191 in Sublette country toward Jackson Hole. Forty miles up, maybe. Some historic spreads, like the Hanson Ranch. It’s now owned by some Southern California corporation for executive retreats, but it was built on coal-and-railroad money. Huge. Goes on and on and on. You could do anything there, and nobody’d know a thing.”

“Does the region have a name?”

“It’s called Pine Valley. Little town at the center, some posh restaurants. There’s a private airport where the haircuts jet in from their other places in the Caribbean or the South of France. They don’t hang out much at the 7-Eleven, so I can’t tell you too much more.”

“That’s very helpful, Detective. I’ll send your chief a letter.”

“He’d just throw it away. I’m a pain in the ass.”

The drones, flying at sunset high enough to disperse their engine noise, always out of the direct rays of the sun so they didn’t sparkle, came back with the goods, from five thousand feet that looked, under magnification, to be more like five hundred. Swagger went through the images at Hill Air Force Base, in Ogden, Utah, just west of Salt Lake City, which was the nearest spot with the necessary technology.

“Do you see it?” asked Neill, who’d masterminded the aerial recon with his usual nonchalant genius while making smart-guy comments the whole time.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Swagger. “I’ve got it down to two.”

He gave his two selections. Neill punched buttons at a keyboard, the two images came up side by side on a giant screen more usually given to the display of Russian bombers on Siberian tarmacs. To the uninitiated, it was just a blur and smear in odd shades, imprimatured by a digital display at one corner that expressed latitude and longitude, altitude, time, weather. But Swagger got it, homed in on one, homed in further on a specific area and requested the blowup.

“I’m seeing what looks like, um, a post? It’s not a natural structure. It’s clearly man-built. Is that what everybody else sees? Can you bring it up more?”

Neill diddled—clickety-click, clickety-clack—and selected the piece of picture in which the post-like thing was featured, brought it to center screen, and blew it up nice and big.

They were in the darkened theater of an air force room, decorated with photos of supersonic fighters, gray-haired generals, and flags. The screen was the only thing that differentiated the chamber from a Kiwanis Club.

Nick said to Colonel Nickel, who was the USAF representative at the meet, “Colonel, wouldn’t you have some guys who can read these things at a high level? Any chance you’d loan us their eyes for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” said the colonel. “Always happy to pitch in.”

He disappeared quickly, leaving the hard core alone.

“If we can get NSA on them hard,” said Nick, “maybe we can pick up some commo linked to a foreign intelligence service. With that, we can go to FISA. If we get a FISA warrant, we can go prime time on their asses.”

“That works,” said Neill.

“It better, because that’s going to be your job. Bob, tell me what you’re seeing.”

“The post is at the end of a meadow that’s over a mile long. It’s situated east-west, to make the sun less a problem. The trees and gentle incline work as a natural wind barrier. There are car tire tracks all over it, signifying recent activity. Somewhere in the far trees, there’s got to be a shooting platform. That’s key, because if we can measure the range from platform to target and weigh that against the possibles, we can find a match and identify the target. But I’m sure it’s a mile-long shooting range with a post at one end to mount targets.”

“So if your read is verified, we might raid.”

“You’d need two elements, in coordination. A chopper insert of aggressors and a simultaneous penetration off the highway, with backup, communications, more ammo, medical, all the necessities. It’s straight SEAL work. Too bad we can’t get ’em.”

“Sounds like Mogadishu,” said Neill.

“I hope we do better than Mogadishu,” said Bob.

Nick was thinking out loud. “We’ll start with Counterterrorism’s teams and fill in with SWAT people from a lot of field offices. Once we get FISAed up, we’ll get an okay to drop the airborne raid out of Salt Lake City, where we have the assets. I’ll get Ward Taylor involved, and, with Counterterrorism behind it, it’ll get moving. But it can’t happen tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or even—”

Staff Sergeant Abrahams arrived, in tow behind Colonel Nickel. Briefed, he laid his extremely gifted eyeballs on the two-dimensional imagery stolen from up above. He looked hard at the first image, then directed Neill to take him through the sequence so he could see it in the context of the larger plat of land upon which it was situated.

“Abrahams is the Da Vinci of photo interp,” said the colonel as Neill zoomed in on the image and then out. “He can tell you if the rubles in the bad guys’ pockets are heads or tails.”

“Sir,” said Abrahams, a rather dapper black NCO who looked like the leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, “not knowing what you’re looking for—”

“By design,” said Neill.

“I get that. Okay, I’d call that identified structure a post of some sort, apparently of wood — wood has a unique reflect pattern, which I see here. Relating its shadow to the time of day, I’d make it about six feet tall. I can even make out what I’d call some kind of cement at the base. The tire tracks are SUV weight; I’ve seen that same tread all over the Mideast wherever service Humvees and Agency Explorers do their work. Too deep, too wide, for regular passenger vehicle.”

“Anything else?” said Swagger. “Assume we’re dopes and have missed everything.”

“Well, there is some reflect in the center of the meadow. Meaning wet. Meaning marsh. Meaning mud. Meaning moisture. Meaning humidity. If this is where they put it, they put it in such a position where access to it — visual, ballistic, laser, infrared, radar, whatever — dealt with differing air densities, the humid air over the marsh being heavier than the dry air over the prairie. I don’t know if that was something intended or just happenstance, but my guess is, given the amount of drier land available and the many other possible access angles on the target, that it was on purpose. For whatever reason, they wanted to track the effect of the heavier air on their effort.”

He’s shooting over water, Bob thought.

51

It was a tangle of trees artfully positioned to give definition to an exquisitely landscaped garden that lay behind the main house, perpetually damp from water seepage, giving it the nickname The Swamp. Tactically, its great advantage was that it could be accessed on the crawl, unseen by any of the night sentries who roamed the property on predictable paths, which Juba had noted.

Thus, when he saw Alberto approaching, even on a night without a moon, he knew that the transaction went unobserved. And before the man reached the edge of the brambles, Juba attracted his attention with a small snort, diverting him yet again to the lee of a small tree.

“Nobody saw you?” he asked.

“No one. I don’t think there are security cameras in my wing of the house. His fear is, people coming in from the outside, not betrayal from the inside. But he is a very paranoid man.”

“Indeed,” said Juba.

“What is this about?”

“Your future.”

“Meaning?”

“That I suspect you want one. If that is so, you will have to perform certain tasks. Otherwise, you will be dead, cut to ribbons by the freak in the sock.”

“I have done nothing to—”

“It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you know. They will kill you within seconds after they kill me.”

The Syrian-Mexican could make no sense of this.

“What? Why would—”

“He cannot let me go on my mission. It’s too big a risk. Wichita changed everything. Suppose I am captured? Suppose the Americans offer me a deal to testify against him and identify him as the instigator of the Wichita thing? They offer me a new life, as opposed to sending me to some black site where Serbian mercenaries blowtorch my secrets out of me. That is now a more serious problem for him than any damage my people will do to him in suspicion of a betrayal. And, in any event, my murder will be disguised as some kind of mishap, a chance encounter with a policeman, an auto accident. He will pay an indemnity, but in that lies survival for him. He knows it. I know it. He just doesn’t know I know it.”

“I am only half Arab, so I lack your gift for cunning.”

“I need two things from you. First, I have to know when that screwball in the sock is out of the picture or indisposed in some way.”

“Easy. Two Mexican women come to him at six each evening. He must either have sex or kill somebody every single day or it is said he becomes irritable.”

“Six, then. And second: tunnels. These Mexicans, they make their living in tunnels. Illegals, drugs, whores — what have you — they move it underground. They are also escape-obsessed. They worry about the Americans, they worry about their competitors, and now that they’re involved with us, they worry about us. They fear surprise attack at any moment. When Menendez took this place over, the first thing he would have done is move his engineers and construction people in and had tunnels dug. Do you know about them?”

“I know areas I have been advised to avoid.”

“I need more than that.”

“And I need an incentive.”

“How about this? If you don’t help me, I’ll behead you.”

“Or, how about this? You take me with you. This whole thing is beginning to feel more and more fragile. When it collapses, many will die. I have no desire to be among them. Only with that in mind can I act… heroically.”

“I appreciate your lack of grandeur. No false idealism for the translator.”

“Call me what you will, I understand that translators have a short life expectancy around here.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

“No. Too soon. My explorations must be tomorrow. I will have no results till the day after, maybe the day after that.”

“Work swiftly, little man.”

52

The NSA intercept, a garbled satellite pickup in which someone called a number in New Jersey, which was shunted to a serving station in Manila and on to a receiver in Gstaad, Switzerland, and appeared to be confirmation for “picking up a package” three days on, at “the ranch,” was pay dirt. It became an imperative, actionable at the utmost dispatch, when the ultimate address was linked via a computer deep-mining operation, with a drop site for Iranian Ministry of Intelligence operatives in Europe. It came together fast after that.

Nick got Counterterrorism’s number one and number two assault teams, plus the Bureau’s SWAT from L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis, and Minneapolis to augment them. As a bonus, Ward Taylor himself was on the operation, so that the assaulters wouldn’t fidget taking orders from someone they didn’t know. Briefed with extremely revealing drone photos of the ranch, they put together a good plan, modeled on the SEAL raid on bin Laden, which was the gold standard. Nobody mentioned Mogadishu.

“Expect resistance,” Nick briefed them. “It will be hot. His security people are drawn from Mexican Special Forces. They are hardened professionals and, in the past, have fought to the death. Check the reports from Wichita, if you doubt. That’s why the full body armor, especially helmets. That’s why it’s shoot to suppress from the first encounter of fire and, if necessary, full automatic. Take a lot of ammo. Waste bullets, not men. That’s why night vision, for all tac advantage. But I say again, the point here is to take down one guy, not even Señor Menendez, though he would be a very nice bonus. Our guy is Arab, early forties, another extremely capable character. But he’s the bonanza. Prefer him alive, but I’d rather kill him than lose any of you. The point is to stop him, not interview him. That’s a good day’s work.”

Afterward, Nick and his team gathered at a National Guard Armory in Jackson Hole. Here, he’d assembled his ground component, mostly personnel from Salt Lake City and Denver. They would engage simultaneously with the air assault, crashing the fake gate, then the real gate, and hitting the compound as the commandos moved through the structures. Their task was perimeter containment, to stifle any escape, seal the place off and put it out of business in a hurry, under mandate from FISA, which allowed “any and all law enforcement activities deemed necessary to halt a terrorist threat.” A U.S. Attorney was along with them to issue legal advice on the fly, if need be, and to help move stretchers to ambulances.

“Have I forgotten anything?” Nick asked Bob.

“Yeah, me,” said Bob.

“Sorry, pal. You’re sitting this one out. Explicit orders from Washington.”

“Come on, Nick…”

“Nope. Believe it or not, they treasure your brain over your trigger finger. A first, I’m sure.”

Bob didn’t lose it marine NCO style, but his his gray face, his narrowed eyes and slit mouth, his measured breathing, all equaled rage.

“I am going along.”

“I guess you are. In a government sedan. We will need you to examine and make identification fast. I’m told he looks just like Dr. Zhivago, so that should be easy. Have you seen it recently?”

“I never saw it in the first place.”

“Maybe you’ll get to interview him. I hope, at least, that you get to ID the body. And following that, you’ll provide assessment on any sniper activities found in place and begin to assemble data for the after action report.”

Bob nodded without enthusiasm.

“Anyhow,” said Nick, “you will hold well behind the perimeter and will be reached by radio and notified to come forward when the area is secured. Tomorrow, at first light, we’ll be traveling to the shooting area to see what we can see. Hopefully, that’ll be more like a picnic than a mission, and we can draw on that for the after action report. Hopefully, it’s all over by tonight.”

“Sitting out the big fight don’t make me happy,” said Bob.

“You will hold on the perimeter until notified. Do I need to put a three-hundred-pound babysitter on you?”

“No.”

“That’s a good boy.”

Disgruntled, he didn’t bother to listen to the radio commands tying the whole op together. He just climbed into the backseat of the last vehicle in the convoy, one of three sedans following the SUVs and armored assault trucks with FBI emblazoned on them. His driver was a rookie agent out of Denver, the guy next to him in the front seat was the U.S. Attorney, and not one of them had a thing to say to the other two, as each was in his own private stew. All wore body armor and Kevlar helmets and were linked by radio, and only Bob had his set to OFF.

The convoy left at 1715, proceeding south on Wyoming 193 from Jackson toward Rock Springs, by way of Pine Valley, where there were no pines. On the other side of the road, western scrub seemed to roll away, showing nothing, hiding nothing. To the west, farther, the crags of the Tetons could be seen, magnificent and artistic, the perfect ideal of The Mountains, as many art directors of the American western movie had discovered. Bob did not pay much attention. He was the eternal wallflower at an orgy, feeling both frumpy and invisible at once. The fun would be over by the time he got there. He didn’t even have a weapon.

The convoy did not proceed under siren or at high speed. It poked along, opening and closing like an accordion, trying to stay under the speed limit, though any passersby knew that it represented government action at its apogee of force. That was the information truckloads of men in armor carried.

It took about an hour of stop and start, and when they approached, Wyoming State Police set up the roadblocks to halt civilian traffic just before and after the ranch entrance.

“Should be any second now,” said the FBI driver, pulling to a stop on the road at the rear of the convoy, which had halted.

Bob flicked on the radio just in time to hear a last-minute checklist run by Nick, each vehicle okaying its position and status.

“Hammer Fifteen, green for go,” said the young driver.

“You got it, son? You pull up at the inner gate, and we hold there, waiting for the all-clear.”

“Mr. Swagger, my orders are to bring Mr. Heflin in by foot two minutes after the airborne drop.”

“That your understanding, Heflin?”

“That’s what they told me. I brought a gun in case there’s a gunfight.”

“Don’t hurt yourself with it.”

“I’m actually pretty good with it,” said Heflin.

“Well, leave it in the holster. If you’re shot at, that’s when you draw it.”

“Got you.”

“Here they come!” said the driver.

And come they did. Black Hawks, Wyoming Air National Guard, six of them — low, loud, and fast — in well-crafted delta-assault formation, altitude about one hundred and fifty, low enough to rip a column of dust from the earth below so that, in the settling gloom, it looked like they led the apocalypse toward the target.

Helicopters! Bob thought. I hope I am done with helicopters after this.

The birds disappeared over the crest, Nick announced, “Green, green, remember your positions and your assignments, safeties off only after disembarking, green, green, green!”

The accordion of vehicles again opened itself up, only this time at speed, as Nick’s Command truck led the way, screeched out, yanked hard right to the ranch entrance and went cascading down the road toward Hell or Glory. Three more armored trucks, riveted turtles in black with FBI in white painted on every flat surface, followed, in turn, by the SUVs and the other two sedans.

“Okay,” said the young FBI driver. “I guess it’s time.”

“You up for this, son?” asked Bob.

“Yes, sir,” said the driver.

He accelerated gently, not being part of any speed brigade, followed the column of dust ahead of him, entered the ranch, and proceeded through a mile of rolling plains before reaching the actual security gate. It was deserted. He pulled over.

Bob was first out. He waited for the sound of the guns. There was none.

“Okay,” said the agent, “I’m taking Mr. Heflin into Command now.”

“No guns,” said Bob. “Announce yourself to the assaulters so you don’t get shot up.”

“Yes, sir,” he snapped, and the two men set off at a half run, leaving Bob leaning on the fender under the dark sky, a bit beneath the last crest, feeling a whip of wind but no sense of human activity.

He heard the raid happening via radio.

“Hammer One, have entered house, no resistance.”

“Hammer Two, entering from rear, some civilians in the kitchen, have cleared them, no weapons, they’re just a mess.”

“Barn clear, this is Hammer Four, barn clear, no hostiles, no fire, deserted.”

“Hammer Five, in garage, all quiet, nice cars, nobody here.”

“This is Hammer Six, I am in the kitchen, moving through the basement, coming up the stairs. Hold your fire, Hammer One. No tangos, no incoming fire, it’s just your buddies from Minneapolis.”

“Got it, Six. Yeah, see you. Hey, everybody, just waiting on upstairs report. Okay, getting signal, no tangos upstairs, upstairs clear.”

“No incoming, no movement?” asked Nick, holding at his Command vehicle.

“Nothing, big dog. Oh, well, yeah: lots of bodies,” said Hammer 1. “What is this, Jonestown?”

53

No signal from Alberto the next day, nor the next. Juba was just waiting. He made his call to his own control, making certain the schedule was still set, his pickup would be on time, all things were in place, and there were no imminent signs of aggressive action against the operation. It was all subterfuge, of course, as he had no intention of leaving that way. That way, he knew, was death.

But he was also certain no attempt against his life would be made here. It would raise too many questions and lead to too many difficulties. He thought, instead, when he had been picked up — he himself did not even know by whom — that the vehicle would be followed, perhaps by a drone, and when it was far away, in some state disconnected by miles of highway from Wyoming, some police incident would be arranged so that the true perpetrators could claim utter innocence.

Juba passed the time working out in Menendez’s elaborate gym, went for a long run each day, and otherwise spent his time in his shop, reading reloading manuals and classic ballistics texts, if only to enjoy privacy in the world he so enjoyed. If he imagined a future — it happened occasionally — he saw himself on a large estate with a shop full of interesting rifles and, outside, a mile of free countryside into which he could shoot. It would not be shooting for purposes of politics, history, or faith. It would be shooting as shooting, an end in itself, a kind of subreligion of the larger commitment to Allah, demanding the same rigor, stamina, commitment, and vision. It would be a paradise on earth well-earned.

On the third day, a nod from Alberto told him that the tunnel entrance had been located and that things were set, to the degree that they could be. A nod in return was all that Alberto needed.

“I will see you in the big room at six-thirty,” Juba said to Alberto. “Tonight, I will say my farewell to our extraordinary host.”

“I will be there to perform my duties,” said the old man.

At 6:30, Juba, freshly showered and dressed casually in slacks and sweater, ambled to the vast room to find Menendez by himself, reading a book in front of the fireplace. The room was a museum of images and objects from cowboy movies. Sculptures of wild animals, their muscles ripped in strain as they galloped or reared or fought. Massive paintings of the knights of the plains at full gallop across the sagebrush, dust a-rising, neckerchiefs a-fly. Buffalo and elk heads, all with massive spans of knurled, polished horn. Tapestries in tribal patterns, gaudy colors in zigzags like lightning bolts. Polished wooden tables of thick oak, wrought-iron lamps, two sofas and four massive chairs, all in burnished leather and swaddled in tribal blankets. It was a cowboy fantasyland.

“How nice of you to visit,” said Menendez, rising. “I understand why you must remain solitary — it’s for your concentration. You must shoot even more precisely than you did at Wichita, though that was breathtaking. But I appreciate, now that our relationship is ending, the pleasure this last time of your company. I know you do not drink, but perhaps just his once. It’s a very fine Spanish wine, Sierra Cantabria Teso La Manja Toro.”

He spoke so fast, Alberto had trouble keeping up.

Juba shook his head.

“No? That is fine. A man as hard as you can make no concessions to appetite, I understand. Your true test is upcoming. I feel mine has passed, with the elimination of the witness. It is time for me to relax for a bit. Soon, I will leave here — one cannot stay in any one place too long, alas — and go to houses perhaps in the Caribbean or the South of France or in Cancún. I have always said my true headquarters is, literally, my head — ha — and I can administer my responsibilities from anywhere, which is the one pleasure of the modern age and all its communications genius, though I do think, my friend, that you and I might have been better suited to an earlier age, you as a general, in silk caftan and turban, mighty scimitar in its sash, ready to go against the Crusaders at Acre or Tours or wherever, myself a king of Old Spain, as our humble peninsula achieved domination over the world, due to the guts of her conquistadors and her admirals.”

He seemed flushed tonight, a bit florid, pausing now to sip while Alberto caught up. Maybe he was tipsy. Maybe he was blotto. The fire crackled, sending flickers of light and shadow into the room, which, in any event, was lit from behind ochre shades so that the illumination everywhere was gold. He smiled. He drew his arm around Juba, pulling the sniper closer.

“You know,” he said conspiratorially, “this has been such a pleasure for me, so much more than mere business. I feel that we are brothers. We are both men of the dark skin, our forebears were swarthy, and only a little polish hides our true nature as men of color. I feel our alliance is determined by nature. It is time for those of us of the darkness to take over. The world has too long been dominated by los gringos or les blancs, or whatever one chooses to call them. I have lived among them, I know them. I was educated at Harvard, you know, and have studied them. It could be said I majored in White People, ha ha. You know them too. You have hunted and killed them. Such entitlement they have, such a sense of nobility and position and grace, not knowing how they are loathed among those of us who are not of them. Really, it is about race—la raza, as we call it — and how they have assumed for centuries our inferiority and how that time is coming to an end. And you and I, my friend, we are on the front lines — you in your way, I in mine — not just to bring down an entity known as the United States, with its capital in Washington, D.C., but an entire culture, a civilization, and the assumptions upon which it was built. They consider themselves superior because freak chance awarded them custodianship of the Industrial Revolution, but to make it work, they had to steal from us at a rate beyond calculation. Their wealth and power was built on our flesh and sweat and death. They thought they built a thing when, in fact, it was our muscle and our lives that paid the price. And, from that, they assumed possession of all material goods and all spiritual succor. It was, I tell you, the greatest crime in history, and only now are we beginning to understand the extent of the white man’s thievery, not just from Africa, not just the labor of the Negro, but from the world over. From all the peoples of color, they looted and pillaged and alchemized our tears into their gold. It is my deepest pleasure to be a weapon in the war against all that.

“That is the point of the narcotics: they are weapons, not pharmaceuticals, their mission to eat at the structures and disciplines of these pretenders, so stupid in their ways that they do not see the larger picture and understand that we are rotting out their infrastructure from beneath them so that it will collapse upon itself. And, in the end, all men will have the character bred out of them or softened by the pleasures of the chemicals that we sell, crippled by their need, desperate for the effect. They have no strength left — not physical, not moral, not even metaphorical — and so they too shall pass, and the world shall become the communion of ‘we,’ of color and blood, well bound by the intensity of our co-struggle and our—”

“Can I see the gun?” Juba said.

“What? Why, yes, of course. Yes, what a beauty it is. A perfect symbol of our struggle. How appropriate it is at this moment.”

He walked to the gun case, unlocked it, and removed the gold-plated AK-74.

“This is not a toy,” he said, “or a fraud. The plating is genuine twenty-four-karat, the rubies and diamonds that encrust it are all real. It is said to have a value of close to three million dollars. It was given me by a consortium of Mexican gentlemen who understood the nature of my struggle and my commitment to my race. See how it gleams and sparkles?”

The weapon indeed gleamed and sparkled in his hands.

“It is a monstrosity to some tastes, a work of art to others, a kind of melding of fifteenth-century aesthetic drawn from the treasures the conquistadors had come to the New World in search of, as applied to the fist of the twenty-first century, that expression of guerrilla will and courage as perfected by Sergeant Kalashnikov in the workshops of the old Soviet Union at the end of the Great Patriotic War as it prepared, planned, and plotted for its next Great Patriotic War, men of the East, men of small stature, who would end the rule of—”

“May I?” asked Juba.

“Of course. I do go on, don’t I?”

Juba removed the magazine from his belt, where it had been tucked under his sweater, and, with knowing hands, rocked and locked it into the mag well of the weapon, smiling mildly all along, hit the bolt latch with a strong palm, so that it flew back, admitted a cartridge to the chamber, slammed forward with the system’s prototypical klak. Menendez watched this brief ceremony with fascination, as it was the last of all things he imagined happening, and he, normally so sure, could generate no policy toward it but instead fell into a sort of numbed enchantment.

Juba stepped toward him and rammed the muzzle of the rifle into his throat, the angle upward and just to the right of the larynx, so that the barrel pointed into the cerebral vault.

Menendez made sounds like a thirsty frog requesting water, finding it difficult to form words with the cylinder of the flash suppressor shoved an inch into the flesh of his throat.

“Gk… Gk… Gk…” he said, eyes opening wide in realization of what was happening.

“You should not have required me to kill my friend,” said Juba.

Bang, said the AK-74.

La Culebra liked to do certain things to Rosita at one place, while Rita did certain things to her at another. Then they would change positions, and he would work there while Rita came up here. There was always a lot of delightful sound involved. It was moist, yet fricative, and seemed accompanied, if one listened hard enough, by a chorus of droplets landing everywhere. Wetness was general over the three of them, including the slide and slurp of fluids, salty, even fishy, flavors, dribble tracks zigzagging this way and that, and the skin upon which these phenomena played out was so prehensile — theirs and his — that it always found some new way to lie or arrange itself. It was so very interesting. Sometimes, comically, his mask slipped, rising or falling from the dynamics of the action, and his eyes were covered. That had become quite enjoyable because, at that moment, both women went down below and began to work on him while, at the same time, they were working on each other, all of this in warm darkness. The energy developed could be quite astonishing.

He heard the shot.

He immediately knew something terrible had happened. But he was naked with two naked women. He disengaged, reached for and pulled on his clothes.

He hated to be so unprepared. He straightened his mask, tightened his belt buckle, and slid into the harness that contained, in different locations, seven different blades. A black guayabera shirt went over it.

“What is—” began Rita.

“Shh,” he hissed, hearing more shots, all single taps, suggesting careful aiming, and knew that some kind of catastrophe was occurring.

“Stay here,” he commanded, and went to investigate.

The bullet killed but the gas destroyed. Roaring at supersonic speed and energy, it vaporized all before it, scalding a funnel-shaped zone of vacancy, an eviction notice from the high lords of physics to Señor Menendez’s skull, emptying it of matter, which it distributed artfully on the ceiling, on supersonic zephyrs, forming whorls and pinwheels and lone dazzlers of abstraction. Droplets of crimson goo were flung everywhere, and Juba had to do a quick wipe on his eyes to clear them of the mess.

He turned to discover Alberto, standing, as if encased in amber a billion years ago.

“Stay with me, old man,” he said to him, and gave him a playful smack on the shoulder.

The sounds of footsteps arose, from the main passageway, and Juba fired quickly at the shapes that suddenly filled it, not a burst, as only fools fire bursts, and placed 5.45×39s into thoracic cavities as they became available. One shot, one kill; three shots, three kills.

He turned back.

“Okay, now lead me out of here. I don’t want to have to fight his whole fucking army.”

Alberto came out of his shocked stupor, realized what had and was happening, and said, “This way, quickly, the library.”

They ran, and, here and there, encountered terrified random household staff, who melted before them and did not require killing. They passed the foyer, and Juba called a halt, opened the front door, spied three armed men racing toward him from the sentry house, and, with three shots, delivered languidly but with smoothness, he dropped them.

Then an amazement: the stairway upward. Who was halfway down it, barefoot, but the man with the sock on his head.

Yet Juba did not shoot him as he could have. Instead, he smiled, nodded sportingly, and the fellow drew back.

Alberto pulled Juba along to the library. He knew where it had to be, a section of shelving with faux books, but did not understand what mechanism would spring it.

“There,” he said. “Do you see? The books are fake. It has to be a door.”

“And suppose it leads to a wine cellar,” said Juba, but pushed hard, and indeed the shelves moved backwards on ball bearings, far lighter than its weight should have been, and revealed an alcove and a spiral staircase. The two stepped inside, pulling the door closed, and descended into darkness. Alberto saw a light panel, hit a switch, and the lights came on, revealing a well-engineered tunnel leading away from them.

“There you have it,” he said. “Escape. Is this where you kill me, now that my use is over?”

“I am not a murderer,” said Juba. “I am a jihadi. I have honor. Besides, you are not important enough to kill.”

“Then let’s get out of—”

Even inside the bowels of the house, they heard the roar of mighty engines and shivered as the wave of vibrations poured over them.

“What is—”

“Helicopters,” said Juba. “I think Bobleeswagger is here. Won’t he be surprised?”

La Culebra returned to his room, finding the two women, still naked, terrified on the bed.

Suddenly a roar arose from outside.

What on earth—

He rose and watched as six large machines settled out of the sky amid columns of dust whipped up by invisible rotors. As each landed, men poured from them, armored in the commando style, with all kinds of automatic weapons, shields, lights — the entire modern war-making trousseau. Serious customers, now running hard and low to the house, which they’d broach and penetrate in seconds. Everything was happening at once! The world was ending!

“Boots,” he said. “Get my boots.”

They pulled out a pair of splendid boots and set about putting them on their master’s feet.

“Excellent,” he said. “Now I will depart.”

“What should we do?” asked Rita.

“Ah — tell no one a thing. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Here, this will help.”

He cut her throat. The five-inch slicer, seriously curved to yield but a single, murderously sharp edge. It cut through flesh like butter, especially when guided by a sure, strong hand.

She fell, bleeding, choking, dying.

He turned to Rosa.

“Why do you do this?” she asked.

“Shh,” he said, and cut her throat too.

54

Nick got to the ranch house as soon as it became clear nobody was doing any shooting. Mostly, he found guys dressed like frogmen at a gun show poking around curiously. They had the aspect of children at a new amusement park. Maybe there was a method to it, but chiefly it was guys who thought they might have gotten into a gunfight coming down to the realization that the gunfight had been canceled.

He went to the SWAT commander — Ward Taylor, of course — got a quick summary of the action.

“Those are the bodies?” Nick could see them in the position of the recently extinguished — that is, helter-skelter, limbs awry, grotesque and utterly still, beyond care or menace, pretty much scattered all over the place.

“We got six DOA in the big house. Three more outside. Maybe more as we check more closely. One you gotta see to believe.”

Taylor led Nick into the famous Hanson Ranch’s big, beautiful main room and pointed out a sack of man flaccid on floor in an elegant gray suit, silk shirt, ascot, perfect white teeth, and no upper skull. This sector of the room had been redecorated in Early American headshot.

“You sure this guy Juba isn’t secretly working for DEA?” asked Taylor. “I’m pretty sure this one is, or was, Menendez, the cartel big shot. That’s him. Look up and you’ll see his brains. Now, looking over here, we got a batch of high-speed operators, all with snails in their ears, good tac gear and high-end assault rifles, mainly M4s, with all kinds of flashy optics. The optics didn’t do ’em any good. All look single-tapped, center chest.”

“That’s Juba,” said Nick. “He’s that good a shot. Any sign of—”

“No, but we’re running another, more thorough search. Here’s the odd part. Two women, upstairs bedroom, lookers, naked, throats cut. Cowboy boot tracks in the blood. Not sure who that guy would be, but it definitely wasn’t our boy Juba who took out Menendez and the security people. The tracks led to a closet, the closet led to a secret alcove, which led to a spiral staircase which led to a tunnel. I’m betting this place is honeycombed with tunnels.”

“That’s how Juba made it out too. Goddamn, he’s a slippery eel. Let’s get the dogs in here and see if we can find a track.”

“They’re coming in with the next relay.”

“Okay, everybody,” he said to the room. “Sorry, the night isn’t over yet. We have to get on Juba. Maybe the dogs will bring him down.”

He turned to Chandler, off the walker, still hobbling, but game enough to tag along.

“Where’s Swagger? He’s tracked before.”

“Boss,” said Chandler, “you left him on the perimeter, remember?”

“Yeah, I forgot. Okay, we need him.”

He went to radio.

“This is Command. All units clear and secure?”

One by one, each Hammer element reported in, all objectives taken, no casualties. The street agents had begun to process the bewildered survivors, but that info wouldn’t be collated into a coherent picture for some time.

No Swagger on the ’Net.

“Swagger? Swagger, this is Command. Swagger, report please, give me your sitrep.”

“God, I hope he hasn’t taken off again,” said Chandler.

“I knew I should have left somebody with him. Where the hell could he have gone?”

La Culebra slipped down the low corridor, hunched, tracking his way by flashlight, smelling dirt, feeling along the timber shoring, feeling the fragility of the underground passageway. It seemed as if it could collapse at any second. There were seven tunnels out of the house; this was not the best of them. It didn’t matter. What mattered was, getting out, somehow commanding a vehicle, and fleeing the area under the cover of dark. Like a vampire, he could travel only by night, for the mask made him too obvious. In rural Mexico, daylight travel was possible, but here in el Norte it was beyond question.

He knew he had to escape the raiders. Who were they? Again, it didn’t matter. The Tijuana Cartel? Colombians? Russian gangsters out of Vegas with commando experience? Or any of a dozen other outfits who wanted to extinguish Señor Menendez from the earth and take his place as El Supremo. La Policía? Maybe state operators from a country that wanted the cartel business for itself. Rogue Green Berets? It didn’t matter.

Only one thing mattered and that was escape.

He came at last to the end, climbed up a ladder, pushed aside a flimsy door, and climbed into night air. He blinked, checking. He was alone, over the crest from the big house, oriented toward Route 193. He had to veer toward it, somehow get out of the zone of police activity and get himself a car. If he had to, he would kill everyone who stood a chance of preventing him from doing that.

He waited a bit for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, feeling a night wind against him, though it was still warmish out. Above, low clouds, the air heavy with the threat of rain. A front was said to be coming in from the west. Good, it would cover his smell and melt his tracks. He looked back in the direction of the house, and though the crest obscured it, he could see the pulsating illumination of the red-blue staccato rhythm lighting the low clouds, confirming that the raiders were indeed police. He thanked God for the good luck that got him on the run before, rather than after, the attack. Juba may have killed Menendez, but his shot had saved La Culebra from the raiders. So it goes in the mad world. He was alive now, or at least free, with a good shot at escape because of it.

He tried to reconstruct in his mind the lay of roads and fields on this side of the house and came to the conclusion that if he trended north, which he could determine by glimpses of the highway a mile or so away, he would intercept the entry road to the property, could follow that east off the property to 193.

He knew he had to move fast. These raiders would soon be organized, and, once organized, they’d call in reinforcements. They’d organize search parties, forensics teams, interview the staff, and put together a picture of who was there and what they had done. Of course, they’d discover Rita and Rosita and understand that the Arab wasn’t responsible, he was too busy killing Menendez and the bodyguards to bother with putas. So the staff would know another player was responsible and they would soon give up information on the man in the mask, and the search for him would begin. The raiders would be provoked by a man who liked the knife so much. And, sooner or later, they would find the other bodies and realize that his hobby was essentially killing young women, and he would shortly become a high priority for them. How could they care so much about putas? They lived to serve and die. That was reality. To care was more gringo madness.

And then — was this evidence that God had not forsaken His most wayward of children? — he saw it. A sedan, on the entry road, in the midst of the blackness. Its headlights were on. In the next second, he made out the languid shape of a man lounging against the bumper. Now, what was this strange hombre doing here? He didn’t appear to be a sentry and was on no kind of guard duty, not from the position he had assumed. He wasn’t dressed like a raider, instead basically wearing the clothes of an American at the mall, jeans and a light jacket. And he had no machine gun or helmet. He wasn’t smoking, he wasn’t on the radio, he just seemed sort of disgruntled, according to his posture, a bad boy exiled from the main action by a stern authority.

The Mexican reached under his shirt, selected his seven-inch, and withdrew it. Bone grip, tight, thin, and checkered by the bladesmith, a dagger meant to kill by thrusting deep into the organs, but sharpened on both edges so that a quick, strong slash would open the body, perhaps fatally, certainly enough to paralyze by shock so that he could get the point into the chest and puncture the heart. It was a good blade. He loved it. The Toledo steel whispered as it came from the leather. He began his slow approach, though he could see that the man was old, perhaps some kind of cranky derelict or local law enforcement senior citizen moved out of the action for everybody’s safety and disarmed. In any event, he would die quickly under the blade, and killing him would be, as it always was, a supreme pleasure. Another one! The two women, targets of opportunity, and now this lanky, stupid gringo. God was bountiful tonight.

He drew close and closer, amazed at how uninterested the man was in everything around him.

It was not Swagger’s best moment. He stood there, fulminating in the dark, occasionally going on the ’Net to learn that there had been no gunfight, and they were trying to get things sorted out.

What am I supposed to do? he wondered.

He went off ’Net again. Somehow, he hadn’t been figured on this possibility, much less figured it out. He didn’t want to go in on foot alone. The boys were still nervous, not quite sure what they had uncovered. Yet at the same time, Nick had said he’d send an all-clear and he hadn’t. He didn’t want to interrupt the radio transmissions with his own questions, because they had too much to do and didn’t need interruption. He could drive in, but some hotshot might empty a mag into a strange vehicle appearing from nowhere. His best bet, obviously, was to wait it out just a few more minutes. The secondary convoy, with forensics people and other crime scene processors, medical personnel and equipment for the anticipated casualties, as well as dogs to track escapees, was said to be on the way. He would latch onto that. It couldn’t be more than five minutes or so away.

And just to fuck things up even more, a cold rain began to fall. If the skies really opened up, the rain could turn things to mud and destroy any tracks or scents left behind, assuming that, as it now appeared, the sniper had in fact again evaded them. The guy had more lives than a cat.

These things filled his mind. That meant he’d totally given up on tactical awareness. That meant he’d made the old man’s most likely mistake: not paying attention. So his reflexes were shut down, and if there was a footstep, a snap of a twig, the brush of legs sprinting through bush — anything at all — he missed it, and the man hit him hard, filling his brain with chaotic flash and infinite regret, and he lost another second, wondering, Huh? What the fuck? and he was down and pinned.

It was too easy. The strike of the keen predator against the unaware prey. La Culebra drove his left forearm hard into the old man’s head, knocking his baseball cap awry, scrambling his mind, while his full body weight, propelled at near maximum burst speed, sent the old arms akimbo and broke him fast to the earth. La Culebra knew the tricks, and, with killing speed, he laced his left arm through the old man’s, pinned it, achieving maximum leverage, and put his full strength against the enemy. The old man flattened, gulping, perhaps grunting, even as he understood he hadn’t the strength of his own to defy the attacker. In another second, the old man was helpless.

“You should pay attention, old one,” La Culebra said in English, for he recognized him as a gringo, noting that he looked like an old-time cowboy, a marshal or town sheriff, all crags and wrinkles.

“Now it is time for you to go,” he said, rather enjoying the moment and the intimacy between killer and victim.

He put the dagger point into the man’s neck, below the ear, and the glare from the headlights showed the blue blur that signified the carotid just a quarter inch under the white skin, which even now picked up the gossamer reflection of the rain drops beginning to crash against it.

“But you should see he who slays you and know at whose dispatch your fate has arrived,” he said, and, with the tip of his dagger, plucked off his mask so that his full face was bright in the beam of light.

Swagger was gone and knew it. Though thin, his assailant was extremely strong, far stronger than he was, and, more important, clearly schooled in the darkest of all the martial arts. The man had him pinned and stilled. He was the pig hanging on the hook as the slaughter boss leaned in close, with a smile on his face and no fear in his heart, and with the throat cutter in his hand.

The man seemed so happy. He seemed joyous. Swagger tried to think of something to do, but there was nothing. Of all his very bad moments, this was the worst, as death toyed with him, the knife danced quicksilver in the light. The force against him was so strong that his arms went to sleep, and his hands, even though useless, lost their grip. Now, at last, after so much. A wet field in the rain in Wyoming, some orangutan-strong screwball with a knife and a ski mask.

“But you should see he who slays you and know at whose dispatch your fate has arrived,” said the man, and it struck Bob, through it all, as rather ridiculously overstated.

The mask came off and there it was, in the light: the Snake.

Inked bright green for slithering through the Garden of Eden, nose surgically reduced to a button, scales surgically etched into the leathery skin, nostrils buttonholes in the slope of facial plates, jawbone reduced to a flange.

No eyebrows, no ears, eyes vivid with the reptile’s vertical yellow pupil against the green upholstery of the physiognomy, much of the cheek flesh drawn off so that the shape of the face was purified toward the primal trapezoid, the mug of he who strikes, he who preys, he who oozes, which excites in all mammals, whether bi- or quadruped, a deep shudder of revulsion and fear of dark places and things without arms or legs but which still are fast as greased death.

The Snake smiled, showing the red tattoo ink that turned his lips and gums the color of blood, all the better to show off the two gleaming reptile fangs that hooked downward from above. And, of course, the tongue. Out it came, red as the candy cane’s stripe — and when he flicked it out, Swagger saw that it too had been altered by a surgeon and was split and spread, a tip going north, a tip going south.

“El Serpiente, amigo!” said the man, on the crest of the best laugh of his life. He leaned, and the tongue flicked out to lick Bob’s forehead, almost caress it. Bob felt the dagger point sink deeper into his flesh.

The face rearranged itself around the .355-inch crater that appeared without ceremony beneath the left eye, a pucker like a chancre that brought with it vibrations of terminal penetration. Black brain blood drooled from the new orifice, spreading randomly as it cascaded downward and outward in accordance with the laws of gravity. Another bullet, less acute in angle, hit and tore out the bridge of the nose, ripping a gaping wound that destroyed any semblance of the monster and replaced it with an image that conveyed merely the banal data of what damage flesh could sustain, including eye burst, temple eruption, facial deconstruction, and a cloud of gray matter thick as July bats in the night heat. Swagger didn’t even hear the second shot, much less the first.

The man toppled, hitting earth so hard, he seemed to dig his own grave.

Swagger lay flat, hungering for air. Rain pelted his face.

Then he heard his savior ask, “Is it dead?” and turned to confront someone lowering a Glock from a two-handed grip seven feet away. The rain fell like a shroud, billowing in the wind, turning reality all gray and smeared, but Swagger saw nevertheless that it was Mrs. McDowell.

55

They crested a hill but saw no relief.

A train of taillights choked the highway as it entered a valley, crossed it, and climbed the slope on the other side. There was nothing to do in the pouring rain except show patience, forbearance, and fortitude.

“Agh,” said Alberto.

“Easy, easy,” said Juba. At the end of their tunnel, they had found a small shed enclosing a Honda Civic, with all necessary documents, twenty-seven hundred dollars in cash, and a full tank of gas. Menendez had plotted well, knowing that if flight became necessary, a car and money were equally necessary.

Now they were on I-80, in traffic, in the rain, headed east. He was on the tail of an 18-wheeler whose trailer dwarfed him, while behind, pressing in, another 18-wheeler threatened to devour him. There was no passing, as the lane to the left was as jammed as his was. There was no exit. There was nothing to do but wait, as they crept along. Top speed: eight miles an hour.

“It must be an accident ahead,” said Alberto.

Juba said nothing. The situation was self-evident. The rain crushed downward, smearing the lights into fragments, while the old windshield wipers tried gamely to scrape it away, though to not much avail. The only reality was rain distorted, turned kaleidoscopic and fractured by diffusion. Whacka-whacka-whacka, went the blades. The old Honda coughed alarmingly now and then.

“Suppose…” said Alberto, almost as if he were frightened of an answer. “Suppose it’s a roadblock. Suppose they have your description. Suppose they know of me. Suppose they are looking for two Arabs heading as far away from Rock Springs as possible.”

“Suppose we spend the rest of our lives in an American prison. Suppose the FBI sends us to the Jews. Suppose we are killed. Suppose we do not go to Heaven. Suppose Allah is without understanding of our failure. And without empathy.”

“Everything you say could be true.”

“And everything I say could be untrue. Pray, brother, even if you don’t believe. That is all that remains. You are in the hands of God.”

“You are said to be a practical man. Perhaps the practical thing to do would be for you to jump out and head cross-country on foot. We can pick a rendezvous site, and if I clear the roadblock, I will head there and pick you up.”

“Outside is the one place I am not going. I have no idea where we are. I hardly speak the language. I am being hunted by all men and women with badges. No, it’s much better to wait this ordeal out, and if indeed we get to a police blockade, to bluff our way through on the strength of our excellent credentials, all of which are professional. You have a glib tongue in Arabic and Spanish, I’m guessing that you speak English as well.”

“I do.”

“Then our weapon will be your charm.”

“Right now, I feel as charming as a goat.”

“You will astonish yourself as you rise to the occasion. I know. I have been hunted as many times as I have hunted, and under the duress of being the prey, one is capable of amazing feats.”

They reached the crest of another hill. As before, what lay ahead was a long, slow transit by a barely moving convoy through the rain and the dark, across a valley, and up another hill, beyond which, no doubt, lay exactly the same.

Alberto saw it first.

“God be praised. Or cursed! Look, do you not see it?”

Juba squinted, trying to focus through the smeared light.

It was a blinking light at the top of the hill.

“Roadblock,” said Alberto.

It seemed to take hours, when, in actuality, it took hours. Finally, they edged up to the crest and could see the light just over it, casting an intermittent blaze against the low clouds, illuminating the slanting rain and the engine vapors and the tire spray.

“All right,” said Alberto, “should I drive? Should we switch?”

“No, this is fine. If it goes bad, and we have to make some kind of escape attempt by auto — we’ll almost certainly die, of course — but if that happens, we have a slightly better chance with me driving than you. I have taken many advanced courses in tactical operations, and high-speed driving is part of them. My skill might let us escape, where yours definitely would not.”

“Fair enough,” said Alberto. “I can hardly see in this rain anyway.”

And now it was here. They reached the crest, and, over it, just a few dozen yards, the commanding sign, even if its message was blurred in the cascade of water. Beyond, on the downslope, they could see the traffic speed up and separate.

Juba began to calculate the strategy he would take if escape became necessary. This old car, with its worn tires and problematic acceleration, trying to outrun speedy American police cruisers! The only chance would be to veer across the median, head in the other direction, look for a soft spot where he could get off this highway, and perhaps onto a smaller country road, and, if far enough ahead, abandon this car and head cross-country. But he didn’t like the chances at all.

“O Jesus, please show mercy,” prayed Alberto.

“You are not even of the faith!” exclaimed Juba.

“I never said I was. My father was Catholic, my mother Egyptian. I studied for the priesthood!”

“God laughs at me,” Juba said. “He sends me to death with an infidel.”

“I am, at this point in my spiritual life, quite flexible. If you want me to pray to Allah, I will happily do so. O Allah, I beseech Thee—”

“Shut up.”

With a lurch, the 18-wheeler ahead pulled free and began to speed up, and Juba knew police would be on him with their flashlights in seconds.

But there were no policemen.

There was nothing except the sign, by the side of the road, blinking furiously as it beamed its message to the traffic it had slowed to a jam in the rain and dark.

“What does it say?” asked Juba.

“It says ‘Welcome to Wyoming, Speed Limit 75.’”

56

Almost instantly, four FBI SWAT members emerged to take over the scene. They had been dispatched by Nick to follow the tracks of the bloody cowboy boots through the tunnel. Emerging, they caught his footprints to the north before they melted in the rain, followed, and there came upon Mrs. McDowell and Swagger.

At almost the same time, the long-anticipated secondary convoy, with its med technicians, forensics teams, interrogators, dogs, and locals, showed up — a long, well-lit convoy pouring in from 193, and its commander stopped to be debriefed about where the shooting had taken place. And finally the rains really let go, falling in slanting, pelting anger, turning dirt to mud, and warm to cold, and set the breeze to howling. Time to get under cover.

So it was not for a few hours before Nick and Bob — somewhat recovered from the verge of death by a carotid puncture at the hands of a man who thought he was a snake — settled in with Mrs. McDowell, herself soaked, but somewhat warmed by coffee from the kitchen that one of the cooks had started running. Why not? Nobody was working for Señor Menendez anymore. Nick ran the meet, Chandler took notes for the after action report.

The story Mrs. McDowell told: her ex-husband’s sister was married to a colonel in the Maryland State Police, and one of his responsibilities was to oversee liaison with FBI, with whom he was on very good terms. When all the news about the killing and gunfight in Wichita broke, not only had she concluded Juba was the triggerman, she’d caught a glimpse of an agent she knew from the coverage on CNN.

“Agent Chandler. She’s so beautiful, the CNN cameras had to show her.”

So she knew that Juba was in play, and she asked her ex-husband’s sister to ask her husband for any news or info. He responded by saying that all the feds were agitated because an urgent directive had come out requesting certain SWAT teams to report to Salt Lake City for possible deployment in a big raid. Baltimore’s field office was all ticked off because they hadn’t made the list, though they regularly came in first or second in the FBI SWAT Olympics held every year.

Figuring that action was coming up, Mrs. McDowell had flown to Salt Lake City, where, at a Radio Shack, she had bought a police scanner, with which she quickly found the FBI Clear Channel and was able to follow the assembly of a major raid task force in Jackson Hole. She also had her Glock.

“It’s completely legal,” she said. “I’ve owned it for five years, and I have one of those crazy Utah licenses that let me carry in thirty-three states. I can’t carry in Maryland, but I can carry in Florida, Texas, Wyoming, and a batch of others. I declared it and flew out with it. I drove out to Jackson Hole, monitored the FBI channel, could tell you were setting up to jump, and just followed the raid in. I parked on 193 and walked down the access road. I see this fight, I run to it, and this snake monster is on top of someone — I couldn’t tell it was Bob Lee Swagger — but it didn’t matter. I could see his blade gleaming in the light, and I sort of assumed if he had a snake face and was about to stick a knife in somebody’s throat, he was probably a bad guy.”

“So?”

“So? So I shot him in the face.”

“Twice,” said Swagger. “The first got his attention, but the second made sure he was listening.”

“I’ve got guys lined up in the rain to see this guy,” said Nick. “He was a piece of freak pie.”

“Janet, by the way,” said Swagger, “thanks for saving the bacon. Between you and Chandler, you’re going to keep me alive until the next century.”

Chandler said, “You want backstory on the Snake?”

“Sure,” said Nick. “I haven’t had a laugh all day.”

“We ran the prints, and I got some preliminary info from DEA out of the Mexican State Police. Called La Culebra, Spanish for ‘the Snake,’ he was born in Mexico City as Antonio Jorge López and was known from the age of fourteen as a knife fighter. Very colorful teenage years. Worked freelance; his specialty was cutting out the hearts of snitches. He was so good, he signed on permanently with the late Raúl Menendez. He started this reptile bit a few years ago, since he was no longer on the road. Obviously crazy, but useful in cartel culture: when Menendez met with other cartel big guys, he liked to have the Snake standing close by, in his mask, which is a play on lucha libre, a form of Mexican professional wrestling where everybody’s masked. Anyhow, DEA suggests that there may be some sexual dysfunction as well, since a number of prostitutes have disappeared everywhere La Culebra puts up for a bit.”

“Janet, you couldn’t have picked a better candidate for your first kill,” said Nick.

“I had hoped to find you guys drinking beer over Juba’s corpse,” Mrs. McDowell said.

“And we’d hoped for the same,” said Nick. “But the bastard seems to have given us the slip once again.”

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” she asked.

“Nope. I am legally enjoined from doing so. You have no security clearance.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“It isn’t. But I have to play very much by the rules, for now. I can’t say a word, except to officially express the Bureau’s appreciation for saving one of its delinquents. And promise a nice letter for your Glory Wall.”

“I don’t have a Glory Wall.”

“It’s your letter, do with it what you want. Now, I’m going to have you give a deposition to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, have them buy you a big, hearty Wyoming breakfast, and put you on a plane back to Baltimore. When it’s over, maybe Swagger can brief you unofficially. He owes you that much.”

“I can guess most of it already. Juba’s here to take a really long shot. We all know who it’s got to be.”

“See, that’s what I can’t have,” said Nick. “If we assume we know, we fall into the trap of confirmation bias, where we only see what supports our interpretation because we want to be right. I purposely haven’t addressed the target issue yet, and I’m not ready to without hard evidence. Speculation is counterproductive. That’s the real reason I’m chasing you out, Janet. I don’t want you tearing down the weeks of professional discipline these guys have shown. That may be their best attribute: the ability to keep an open mind.”

“Janet,” said Chandler, “Nick’s right. We can’t go in all oriented to something. This is too important. That’s also why nobody on this team is political. We’re professional, we’re trying to solve a problem, that’s all it is.”

Like a guest star brought in for a flashy scene or two, she was indeed gone the next day, driven off by two junior agents to Salt Lake City and put on a late flight back to Baltimore. It really was the right decision, cruel as it may have seemed, because much had to be done and there wasn’t time to bring anybody new up to speed.

The various teams went to work. Nick spent a long, awkward time on the phone with the Director and an assistant attorney general, but somehow managed to survive. And, gradually, some sort of intelligence picture emerged.

Meanwhile, Swagger accompanied a crew of agents to the meadow where the drone pix showed that the shooting range was located. Fresh from the rain, it looked like Paradise Found — a sunny roll of lush land sparkling with droplets that had collected on the grass — a pure mile of open space. Above, of course, azure sky, clouds like melting vanilla, piercing late-summer sun, and, rimming all this glory, the Grand Tetons.

“He chained ’em here,” Swagger said, pointing to the four-by-four-inch post sunk in a wad of concrete and impervious to human influence, immobile even when subjected to the desperate energy of approaching death. The post bore grisly signs of struggle. It was smeared with the dark ochre of dried blood, and a few frags had blasted through the bound bodies and ripped shreds from its surface. One high miss left a perfect pucker drilled into the wood, at the bottom of which lay the expended and battered .338 bullet. Forensics would recover and analyze it.

“Mr. Swagger, we’ll also look for latent prints on this post. We’ll run chemical tests on the ground for blood, and if we find it, we can extract DNA.”

“That’s great,” he said. “You got corpse-sniffing dogs?”

“No, sir, but we have methane probes that are very efficient at locating buried cadavers, if we can just find some recently disturbed earth.”

“One more thing,” he said. He took out his iPhone and quickly prompted an app called My Altitude. Preset to southeast Wyoming’s general elevation as a baseline, it quickly placed this spot at 1,505 feet above sea level. He wanted to save that for future use.

“Now, the shooting platform?” he said. “This bird is so careful, and so committed to preparation, that he’ll have the distance down perfect.”

“Yes, sir.”

It took an hour.

“Got it!” someone cried, as all had moved a mile to the east and began to pick their way carefully through a scattering of elms and oaks, before it gave way to denser pines.

The men congregated at the site of the announcement, and indeed there it was, maybe seven feet up, a stout platform, well-braced and well-built, hammered into the vee of a giant tree. Branches had been clipped to allow for clear lines of fire to the faraway target, and a few wooden slats had been nailed into the trunk as steps to get up and down.

“Do I mess things up if I go up there?” Swagger asked.

“I don’t see how. There’s probably no prints on the bark, as it doesn’t take to prints. DNA? Maybe, but I’m guessing it’s more important to get the distance data than prove that a guy we know was here was here.”

Swagger was gloved and masked, and with a little help, managed to haul his old frame up to the platform. There, he saw what he couldn’t from below: a shooting bench, solid, built at the edge of the platform to provide stability for the rifle as the shooter oriented toward the target. That told Swagger that wherever Juba would be shooting from, he’d be sure he was solidly anchored.

From this position, Swagger looked out across the meadow. He had never made a shot at anywhere near that distance, only an eight hundred and fifty in Vietnam with his .308—so long ago, it was impossible to recall details.

But a mile was different country. It was way the fuck out there, practically on a different planet, with winds that played on the bullet’s flight, humidity that thickened or thinned the air, a trajectory like a rainbow’s arc but without the colors, and time in flight of more than five seconds. Its execution demanded the rifle be placed as if embedded in rock, while, at the same time, administered with so delicate a touch that a heartbeat, a tremor, a microscopic twitch in the trigger push, or a moment of doubt or broken concentration, and the whole thing was off. Even with a 25× Schmidt & Bender, the finest optical system in the world, the human figure was but a dot. For its part, the post was impossible for him to pick out, even if the image was clear. It was just too small, too blended into the jagged background of trees. Through his binoculars, he saw nothing.

First move: the iPhone with the Altitude app. That drill revealed an altitude of 1,572, a difference of sixty-seven feet. He noted that figure as well.

“Okay, hand the thing up.”

The thing was a Tecna LH40 military-grade range finder, borrowed from the FBI sniper school and good out to twenty thousand yards. Oddly enough, it didn’t have the Star Wars look, with dials and buttons and all kinds of sci-fi stylistics. Instead, it resembled a slide projector from the ’60s, with which the family’s trip to Disneyland was documented for the neighbors. It took Swagger a bit of fiddling to get it set up on its tripod on the bench, then some more fiddling to get it on the target and focused, but finally he was ready.

Nothing.

“Can you get a guy to stand by the post. I can’t see it to take the reading,” he called.

He heard the team commander on the radio, and in a few seconds somebody — presumably, one of the men of the cadaver team that was looking in the area near the post for buried bodies — walked out and stood by the post. Swagger put his eye to the device, put the red dot on the tiny figure, and pushed the button to shoot a laser beam that far. The device would measure how quickly it bounced back and, in that way, solve the distance algorithm. He did it five times. The distance consistently turned out to be 1,847.5 yards.

He wrote the figure on the back of his hand in ballpoint under the altitude recordings, as insurance against a seventy-two-year-old memory.

“You get it?”

“Yeah, a little over a mile. Hell of a long way.”

It also might do, he figured, to find out from the household help what times of day the shooting took place, as those could be run against average wind speed, so he would also shoot when the speed of the wind was closest to the speed of the shot he’d come all this way to make. The position of the sun was another issue; he’d shoot when it most precisely matched the position it would be on the day of the shot.

So: he had direction, distance, the difference between the shooting site’s elevation and that of the target, the presence of water between himself and target, the wind speed, the position of the sun. All of these factors Neill could magically enter into a computer program and test for real-world matches, particularly at places, as yet to be determined, where likely targets would likely be. In that way, perhaps they’d unlock the secret and could deploy in time to prevent.

Anything else?

He racked his brain, came up with nothing. But of course Mr. Gold had yet to run his fine mind over the data. The Israeli was back in Washington, not being a necessary raid component.

“Mr. Swagger?”

“Yes.”

“Just heard from the cadaver team. The methane probe has turned up a batch of bodies. We have forensics on the way.”

“Got it. Can you have the guys do a fine-tooth-comb search of this area? Maybe there’s something here worth looking at.”

“They’re already on it.”

“And I guess they ought to do the same to this shooting platform.”

“Just waiting for you to come down. Be careful, now.”

“I’m fine,” he said, then slipped and fell down the seven feet and landed on his rear.

Men rushed to him, hands helping pull him to his feet, urgent faces projecting worry that he’d hurt himself seriously.

“I’m fine,” he said, flexing, stretching, bending. “I only hurt my dignity. And my ass.”

57

There it is,” he said.

It was a building new to this ancient neighborhood, glassy and still clean, and full of optimism, when around it were so much blight, sadness, desolation, and dismay.

It was night in the city. In this far zone, separated by a river from the storied downtown, there wasn’t much in the way of nightlife, street activity, vibrancy. In fact, the glory of the building had exactly the opposite effect that its designers had hoped for. Instead of livening up the street, by contrast it pointed out the tragedy of urban decay that surrounded it. Maybe it was a new start, maybe it too would lose its glamour and go the way of the sad brick and peeling paint that had claimed all the other structures. Who could know?

“Is our trip over?” asked Alberto.

“No. We will make a circuit of the block, then head out, find someplace to put up and stay the night.”

It had been a long, dull trip across the United States. There wasn’t much to see from interstates at night, and they never entered cities, only the fringes, staying in cut-rate motels, eating fast food picked up from drive-thru windows. So to Juba, America was a blur of lights smeared by night, neon-basted plastic eat joints, and the ever-present cop fear. The last was misplaced, as, over the week of travel, no cop had paid them the slightest attention. Now, finally, chunk by chunk, five miles under the speed limit the whole way, they were here.

“Tomorrow,” continued Juba, “you will take public transportation here and spend three hours in the neighborhood. Your job is to look for signs of police or FBI observation. Maybe, somehow, they already know, maybe they are just waiting. Maybe Bobleeswagger has figured it out and he’s up there, waiting for me to walk into his trap.”

“I doubt it. It seems to me you have accomplished the impossible. You have been trapped three, four times, have escaped each time, and have left behind exactly nothing. They could know nothing. Menendez knew nothing, not that he could have told anyone anyhow, not with his brains on the ceiling.”

Juba nodded. “We know that they have studied the ranch, studied the remaining evidence. They have found the shooting site, measured the distance to my targets, examined my shop, seen my dies, my powders, the bullets I acquired. They know what rifle I am shooting.”

“What can they know from all that? Nothing, it seems to me.”

“They know the range, they know that I will shoot soon, because my data is only good as long as the weather here is similar to the weather on the ranch. They will try to infer from that my target, my shooting site, and my schedule. Their computers will help them in all this, which is my biggest fear. A computer could put something together in a second that no human could in a century. That is why Bobleeswagger could conceivably be up there, waiting.”

“He is just a man. And not as good a one as you.”

“Maybe. But to underestimate him is to court catastrophe.”

Juba drove around the building, which occupied a whole block. He could see nothing that indicated observation. Other than a random police car manned by two listless officers, he saw no signs of authority.

“Maybe drive around again?” asked Alberto. “Just in case?”

“No,” said Juba. “You are not thinking like a pursued man. What if, unknown to us, there have been burglaries in the area. So those two sleepy policemen aren’t as sleepy as they seem. Instead, they are carefully watching for cars that are performing reconnaissance for an upcoming robbery: orbiting blocks, parking and watching, hanging out in nearby stores. If they see a vehicle, sirens sound, and other cars arrive out of nowhere in seconds. No rifle, but they find your little bag of diamonds and rubies from the rifle, they check the wires and see that the authorities are desperately searching for two ‘Arabic-looking’ men our age, and, by morning, I am on a plane to a country I’ve never heard of where certain men with blowtorches await. You see, you must account for the unaccountable as well.”

“You must be the most careful man who ever lived,” said Alberto.

The next day, Alberto took the subway to the area, spent time in a coffee shop, had lunch at a sandwich shop, bought a T-shirt and a ball cap at a souvenir shop, and, through it all, kept his eyes open for unmarked sedans sitting idly by, dull, thick men on the lookout, chats into radio microphones, odd rendezvous where one unmarked car pulled out to be replaced by another. Of those phenomena, as charted out for him by Juba, he saw nothing.

Back in the low-rent suburban motel, he said, “I saw no movement, no action, no sign. The building is completely unguarded and unobserved. I went into the lobby and found it without attention. I watched the people come and go. They were black, most of them. It is safe, I tell you.”

“Tomorrow, you will go to one of those big stores and buy a disposable phone. I will make one call on it and it will be destroyed. The chances of an intercept are minimal, but we will take all precautions. If I am satisfied that all is well, I will arrange to take delivery of the key that admits me to a certain apartment in the building, and then I am where I must be. You and your little bag of diamonds and your junky little car — you will be free to go.”

“I could stay,” said Alberto. “I feel now as though this mission, whatever it is, is my mission.”

“No, go far away. Return to your life. Or buy a new one, if you want. Do not get involved in cartel affairs—”

“I wasn’t, to begin with. They dragooned me. I am lucky to be alive.”

“Yes, you are. So am I. You go, you disappear. If I am successful, you will read about it in the newspapers. If I am not, you will not hear a thing. If you hear nothing, tragedy has occurred.”

“Is there a date for all of this?”

“Yes, but I cannot tell you. You see why. Still playing against the tiny chance that somehow you’ll end up in deep conversation with the FBI. They’ll have the rubber hose, and you’ll want to cooperate.”

“I would die first.”

“Everybody says that. But the hose always wins. The only issue is, how quickly.”

58

The Theater of Insane Security continued into a second act. Mr. Gold remained in the lounge below Cyber Division, talking by phone with Memphis, while Swagger and Neill were nine feet away through the floor. It was feared by someone important with not enough to do that Mr. Gold would identify the brand of computers the FBI used and share it with Mossad. It never occurred to anybody that Mossad already had its own computers and wasn’t looking for new ones.

“Okay,” said Neill, “this is what I’ve got.” He ran through the attributes listed by Swagger. “Everybody’s in accordance? That’s it, from 1,847.5 yards at a westward trajectory, in a south wind of four to six miles per hour, with sixty-five percent humidity, over a significant body of water…” And on and on, through all iterations of the attributes Swagger had determined were in play with Juba’s upcoming shot.

“Can you think of another one, Mr. Gold? Any breakthroughs?”

“Not a thing,” said Gold, from nine feet straight down.

“Anyone else? Chandler, you have anything?”

“I think we’ve got it covered,” she said.

“Okay,” said Nick. “So now we are going to run these attributes against the locations of appearances of high-level officials over the next three weeks, as recorded on the highly classified Secret Service master schedule. We begin with the Cabinet and the Executive. We assume any Cabinet or Executive officer to be the high-value target that would incite a plot. But we will move on to talk-show hosts, movie directors, star athletes, best-selling authors — whatever — anyone whose prominence might incite elimination with grievous consequences, not merely to morale but, really, to everything. We’ll come up with—”

“It occurs to me,” said Mr. Gold suddenly, “shouldn’t time be a consideration?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we first became aware of this possibility upon acquisition of Juba’s south Syrian location, courtesy of Mrs. McDowell, where, after our raid, the intelligence indicated he was preparing a shot in America with an ultra-long-range rifle. That was fifty-four days ago. Since he was in preparation for the shot for some time before then, it means that their plans were suppositioned on something that had to be on the schedule and immovable for at least fifty-four days, and almost certainly longer. So does it not make sense to limit the inquiries by focusing on those few dates that were in place early enough for them to be planned against?”

“Excellent,” said Nick.

“Got it,” said Neill. He sent an email to his staff of programmers and analysts in the bay who were the actual mechanics of the cyberoperation.

“I hope that cuts down on the possibilities,” said Mr. Gold.

“Absolutely,” said Neill. “The name of the game is winnowing. Winnow, winnow, winnow. When we are down to what cannot be winnowed, we ought to have something.”

The time passed—tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. In the big computer bay, people did what they had to do, lights blinked, strange whirring noises were raised by hard-drive fairies beating their wings furiously, a giant cleared his throat, printers yawned and printed in vacuum-cleaner-like hum, and the inquiry proceeded.

“Our program will examine all the potential sites for the shot attributes, as observed from the national satellite recon database. They’ll bring the matches to us — that is, satellite recon images of potential shooting sites where the target will be accessible that fit the attributes. That’s when sniper genius Swagger puts his brain to work, and let’s hope he’s still not cuckoo from the kick in the head Brother Juba laid on him, or the fall out of the tree.”

“No problem, Bill,” said Swagger to Jeff.

Nick laughed.

“The program can only do so much,” Neill continued. “That’s where human intelligence comes into play. The computers are as literal as a German schoolmaster. They don’t do ambivalence. But when we look at the results, maybe we’ll see ways in which something the computer is not impressed with might nevertheless be in play.”

A young woman came over from Machine City.

“You’d be surprised at how much stuff we’re getting,” she said, “but here is the initial output.”

She put a stack of heavy printout paper in front of them.

Nick looked. “Wow,” he said. “Well over a hundred.”

“The field is too large,” said Neill. “We’ve got to find a way to trim it down. The more attributes, the fewer the possibilities.”

“We’ll start with these, though,” Nick said. “Meanwhile, somebody smart thinks up some new attributes. I see long-set appearances by the big guy nine times, the secretary of state five, the secretary of transportation — why would anyone target the secretary of transportation? Swagger, who is he?”

“No idea,” said Swagger.

“A she,” said Chandler. “And extremely unlikely.”

Nick resumed: “The secretary of the treasury four times, and on and on—”

“It’s pretty obvious we should go straight to President Tr—” started Bob.

“Stop right there,” said Nick. “We’ve moved on to target possibilities, but I don’t want to hear any names. Names carry connotations — history, backstory, political biases — all of which we must put out of our process. Thus, the gentleman you were about to call by name shall henceforth be known by his Secret Service code name, which is Mogul. To us, he is not a man, he is a cipher standing for an office only incidentally occupied by a human being. We are protecting the office, that is all. Is that understood?”

“Since you brought it up,” said Bob, “it seems like I ought to ask something everybody’s been thinking.”

“Been waiting for this,” said Nick.

“If you read the papers, or breathe, you know in some quarters Mogul is not popular. What if in all our digging and probing and chasing, we come upon some evidence of Americ—”

“Again, stop,” said Nick. “I don’t want to hear that. It is groundless speculation, and in this part of the forest, groundless speculation is poison gas. That is why we are proceeding on this one totally as a criminal investigation, not as some kind of coup. That is why I have tried to keep the Agency out of it and stay as low-key as possible with the Secret Service. That is why I have not made overtures to the White House. We need clarity, not a drunken-monkey orgy. If — and I say ‘if’—you come across any such thing, it is only to be discussed with me, not among yourselves. I will make a determination whether to take it to the Director. But if it gets out — if even the possibility gets out — that, using foreign assets, someone, somewhere, with influence and connex here in D.C. has set up the elimination of Mogul, you know as well as I do that a drunken-monkey orgy is definitely in the cards. Not good for anybody except the drunken monkeys. So, barring hard evidence of that scenario, noses down, eyes locked in, small picture, not big. Understood?”

The lack of comment and response meant yes.

“Okay, handing these out, look hard and see what you’re getting. Sorry, Mr. Gold, can’t show ’em to you.”

This was the real work of the day. Swagger ran his eyes over the photos, which were hazy, blurry sky-down views of unknowable zones, each with a circle centered on the executive’s appearance location, the circle being 3,694 yards in diameter, putting anyone on the circle the required 1,847 yards from the center — that is, the target. That meant the shooter could be hiding anywhere on the circle.

He tracked directions and angles without regard to identified targets. The best shot clearly would have been on the secretary of transportation, where Juba could have perched atop what looked like an oil storage tank in Illinois and gotten a bullet across the Mississippi into Busch Stadium, where she was slated to throw the first pitch at a Cardinals game. But it just made no sense.

The Mogul sites were less promising, but not without a whisper of possibility. Of course, Mogul was so improvisational in his day-to-day, the long-term aspects seemed problematic. He might take off for golf in Florida that morning. He could do anything he wanted. He was the president!

The best shot would have been at an appearance in Baltimore, where he was more or less slated to appear at a luncheon at The Center Club — prominent, big-money businessmen — in the USF&G Building. He might be accessible from a mile-plus out from the Exelon Building across Baltimore Harbor, but that would involve shooting through glass, which hadn’t been in the specs. Could there be another shooter who could fire at a raking angle from closer and shatter the glass, and in that frozen moment, Juba could take his long shot on the target? Well, theoretically, but… so many moving parts.

At a certain point, it was time to break for dinner. But they didn’t break for dinner. Then it was time to break for coffee. They didn’t break for coffee either. They didn’t break for anything.

Finally, it was Chandler who said, “Everything we’re coming up with is vaguely possible but, for this reason or that, unlikely.”

“And your point is?” asked Nick.

“Maybe there’s a fundamental error at a crucial spot.”

“Did you hear that, Mr. Gold?”

“I did, and I think she has a point. But the question would have to be, at what crucial spot?”

“Well,” Chandler said, “the servo mechanism that puts possibilities before us is the Secret Service master schedule, right?”

“Yes.”

“Of all the attributes, that seems the most fragile. I mean, Swagger measured the yardage. That’s a hard figure, empirical, unarguable. All the other things — the weather, the wind, the angles, all that stuff — is hard data. But the master schedule is assembled by people acting on information from other people. People talking to other people often have motives in the mix, even unconsciously, and there’s miscommunication, it’s imperfect, any of a dozen things can go wrong.”

“All this is true. Do you want to call Secret Service and lean on them to recheck the schedule?”

“Here’s my thought,” she said. “Maybe what’s upcoming isn’t considered a Secret Service enterprise. You know, requiring special planning, the movement of assets, additional personnel, ground recon, prior coordination with local authorities. It’s not special. It’s normal, run-of-the-mill activity. So it’s not on any schedule.”

“How do we find out about it?”

“Do what Mr. Gold said: assume that it has to be something locked in early. It’s been on the sched early enough for the bad actors to plot to it. So, chronologize the data by the length of time on the schedule. Not the master schedule of appearances, just daily operations.”

“What have we got to lose?” said Nick.

He made the call, getting his Secret Service liaison out of bed. However, that guy was good at the job, got on the horn to SS operations — a 24/7 shop — and the larger schedule was emailed over to the FBI in a matter of minutes.

The data it contained hardly needed a program to be analyzed. It was just a matter of finding the earliest date of entry. That happened quickly enough.

“New York” was all it said, and ID’d a date a week further on, the next Thursday, the eighth of the month.

“So Mogul is going to New York on the eighth,” said Nick. “Why? And why would he know so far in advance? And why would it be ho-hum to Secret Service?”

Obviously, nobody had any knowledge.

The next call was to the FBI — White House liaison. It took a little longer because the guy was at the movies, he had to get home, go to his monitor, bring all this stuff up, check his numbers, call a good source in the White House, before he got back to them.

Nick took the call, listened, nodded, and looked up.

“Okay,” he said, “we have a date. We also have politics, ego, vanity, media manipulation, and personal enmity in the mix. In other words, any day in D.C. since 1784. On that date, Renegade is scheduled to give a speech here in D.C. At some Arab — American Co-Prosperity function, funded by the Saudis.”

“Who’s Renegade?” asked Bob.

“Think hard,” said Nick.

“Oh, I get it. The predecessor. Number forty-four. The—”

“You got it,” said Nick. “So Mogul knows Renegade’s talk will get a lot of attention and press. He doesn’t like it. So he counterprograms. He learns that on that day a certain newly constructed building is being officially opened. No, Mogul doesn’t own it, his company didn’t build it, but he’s pals with the guy that does and did. It’s in the East Village, overlooking Roosevelt Drive. The guy’s a big contributor, but, more, he’s a deep and abiding enemy of the mayor of New York City, who definitely won’t be at the ceremony. He hates the mayor, Mogul does, so it’s a New-York-in-your-face-schmuck kind of thing as well as a Renegade-in-your-face-schmuck kind of thing. So it’s been widely known for some time in New York political circles that Mogul would make a day trip up there, unannounced, and say a word at the ceremony. Maybe make a major announcement and pull the spotlight off Renegade.”

Everybody looked at everybody else.

“The building overlooks the East River,” said Nick. “Can someone go online and find an address?”

It took Chandler about seven seconds.

Neill called to one of his long-laboring computer techs, who came by and got the info and went off to run it against the shot-attribute program.

“Okay,” said Bob, “is this just a party for geniuses like Mr. Gold and Chandler or can a country boy get a word in?”

“Go ahead,” said Nick.

“I just thought of another attribute. Sorry I didn’t think of it earlier, but it’s crucial.”

“Does it help us winnow?”

“I think it does. It just come to me like a kick in the head. See, there’s been a key component missing. My fault, nobody else’s.”

“Go on.”

“Most folks think you point a gun at someone, pull the trigger, and down he goes. Instant, like in a millionth of a second. But it ain’t that way.”

“Go on.”

“The bullet takes some time to get there. The farther it travels, the longer it takes. If you’re shooting at over a mile, it would be somewhere in the five-second range. It’s officially called time in flight. Could figure it out more precisely, but trust me on this.”

He waited for the import to strike them — but it didn’t.

“That means the target has to be still. The shooter has to be assured he ain’t going to leave to get a Coke between the pull of the trigger and the arrival of the bullet.”

“So he’s stationary?”

“Totally. He’s giving a speech, he’s sitting on a chair, he’s at his desk. He’s sitting down or standing still.”

“We could cut out three-quarters of the possibilities by that test,” said Neill.

“On the dais at that New York opening, he’d be still,” said Chandler.

The young woman came back with a new sheet of paper.

“I think you’ll like this,” she said. “It’s fourteen for fourteen on the attributes.”

They all clustered around and saw about half a mile’s worth of circle arcing through the dockside real estate across the East River in Brooklyn, and, 1,847 yards away, across a broad expanse of river, the docks, Roosevelt Drive, the building at which Mogul would be in place, still as a posed portrait.

“So that’s got to be it, then,” said Nick. “Next Thursday, the eighth, at three o’clock in the afternoon, shooting from an unknown site in Queens a mile out, Juba’s going to kill Mogul.”

59

The key pickup was without incident, and Juba said farewell to Alberto. He understood that the man now had a chance to turn him in to the FBI and become a hero. But he simply had to bet he wouldn’t. Alberto was Arab where it mattered: in blood, in heart, in mind. He could be trusted.

The apartment to which the key admitted him had been rented, again by elaborate ruse and considerable bribery, to get him where he had to be, in a building subsidized for lower-income families by no less than the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Everything was seemingly legal and had been handled by a completely innocent contract employee of Iranian intelligence on money supplied by — well, that was unknown, even to the most intimate of conspirators, but by somebody with an interest in havoc, mayhem, anarchy, and collapse, especially in the United States of America.

The apartment was sparsely furnished with furniture, also rented. The dining room table could be shored up for stability and used as a shooting bench upon which he would execute his mission. Nothing else was memorable, except for a crate that had been delivered a few days before he arrived: it was from a boutique furniture craftsman in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Examined carefully, it revealed no signs of tampering. He disassembled it, first the crate, then the bookshelves themselves, reducing both to wooden slats neatly stacked against the wall. The process revealed the rifle.

Accuracy International Arctic Warfare model, 338 Lapua Magnum, Schmidt & Bender 5.5×25×56 scope calibrated in MOA. He pored over it, checking the fingernail polish marking on each screw to make sure that they remained tightened exactly to the torque he had applied in Wyoming for maximum accuracy. In the kit of tools, he’d packed, along with the ten rounds of ammunition, dedicated wrenches, a lens-cleaning pen, his iPhone 8 with the FirstShot app already calculated to zero on the rifle at eighteen hundred yards, a Kestrel Pocket Weather Meter, and, among other shooter knickknacks, a bore sighter. This instrument allowed him to test for the scope setting for inadvertent alterations against the valuations he’d made in Wyoming. Again, it was unchanged, perfect.

Juba slept on the floor without a problem, took all his meals out, bought a few clothes with cash left over from the trip and washed them out every night, to dry overnight, so that he didn’t attract attention due to shabbiness. Occasionally, he met other tenants in the lobby or in the elevator, but nobody here cared about anybody else’s woes, much less existence. The tenants were in their own world.

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

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

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

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

He prayed the required five times a day. It was pleasing to be back to such discipline. That was of great benefit. In speaking to Allah, in beseeching His holiness, in putting his petition for assistance before His greatness, he calmed himself. Was he speaking to God? That wasn’t the point. The point was, his brain thought he was speaking to God, and Juba’s respiratory system, his musculature, his digestive track, even his subconscious, felt subdued by the rigor. A great calm spread through him, and his limbs and veins thrummed with energy and confidence. No man in the world could do this thing, save him — not even Bobleeswagger — and his prayers enabled his effort.

Of course, he made sure to be on the rifle, eye locked on the scope, at the same time each day as the shot so that he could learn the play of the light in different weather conditions. Snap! went the dry trigger, over and over again. Maybe the day would be cloudy, maybe bold with sun. Snap! Shadows would cut the image, maybe not. Trees and the rills on the river would describe the wind, and he would have to understand how to read them. Snap!

Each day, afresh, he ran the program on the FirstShot ballistic calculator, and, each time, the solution came up the same for the preset eighteen-hundred-yard zero, arriving at the setting to which the scope was now set, 48 MOA elevation and 24 MOA right windage, which took it all into consideration — the wind, the temp, the humidity, the air density.

In the afternoons, after a brief lunch at a fast-food place and a cup of god-awful American coffee, he walked down as close to the river as he could get. Various barriers prevented actual riverside visits, and he couldn’t risk violating them, for if nabbed by security or police, how could he explain the Kestrel?

He ran the Kestrel to record the exact weather conditions. He marked the waves in the water to match them to wind speed and learn it. There wasn’t much variation, only in the cloud cover. No rain expected, humidity not ominous, wind tepid. It was as if Allah were sending him the ideal conditions. He looked across the river at the cityscape, the skyline. It was, as he expected, majestic, with proud towers and soaring structures, alive with the reflection of the sun off a million windows, humming with power, the dynamo of the West in one image.

He loved it. He hated it. It beckoned him. It sickened him. It mattered so much to him. He mattered so little to it.

Your buildings tell us our place, which is in their shadow, bent and craven. We reject that, and you declare us monsters. We fight that, and you call us murderers. Your airplanes drop bombs guided by technical magic we could not understand and smash our children to jelly, and yet we are the beasts.

Tomorrow, I will destroy you.

Snap!

60

Nick was back from the big meeting, and all waited for his account and direction. He’d worn his best suit, blue with banker’s pinstripes, peaked lapel, white shirt, red ancient madder tie, black Alden Long Wings. He looked like a Washington power player.

“Good news, bad news,” he said. “Anybody want to pick the order?”

Nobody did. Maybe the game wasn’t appropriate for them, as they were tired from the hours spent on The Problem, and eager to move on, and had no need for Nick’s charm, though on many other occasions they’d appreciated it.

“Boss,” said Chandler finally, “whatever.”

“Okay, nobody cares,” said Nick. “So I’ll start with the good. And it’s really good.”

He paused, smiled.

“Congratulations to you all, and I suppose to me too. At the top levels, they are extremely pleased and extremely eager. They believe your work represents a major victory over the threat of jihad in the West and the opportunity for a major victory. Not only have we saved a life and prevented the political and cultural chaos that would ensue from a terrorist event against a high-value target, they see a chance to be proactive and turn it into a major advantage. Even as I speak, that response is being organized. There’s just enough time to set the trap, and the people involved are talented and skilled enough to bring it off.”

“We ought to be on the Acela for New York right now,” said Neill. “I’m packed, and I’ve told my wife — hmm, what was her name? Wendy? Susie? Something like that — anyway, I’ve told her we’re going.”

“Neill, we’ve all worked long hours and gone without spousal visitations,” said Nick, “but the point is taken: you want it done fast so you can get back to normalcy. Me too. But that brings me to the bad news.”

He paused. “We’ve been fired.”

He let it sink in.

“I don’t see this as an insult, a gesture of contempt, a reaffirmation of the principle that no good deed goes unpunished. It’s not ‘Thank you very much, but what have you done for me lately?’ It’s simply the way the system works, and I should have prepared you better for it.”

“Is it politics?” Swagger asked.

“Well, I’d rather not speculate on meaning,” said Nick.

“Does this kind of shit happen in Israel?” Swagger asked Mr. Gold.

“Never. Except every day. And twice on most.”

“From a management point of view, I see the issue,” said Nick. “If we’re up there, we’re another layer that has to be briefed, kept in the loop — and, worst of all, listened to. We just get in the way of the Incident Command staff and turn it all murky. We think it’s our turf, and we’re hardwired to protect turf. Maybe we make different calls than they do, maybe we know too much, which can be as destructive as knowing too little. Maybe — and they’re right on this — Nick Memphis doesn’t have the experience to run something this big and complicated, and maybe the loyalty his people feel toward him clouds their judgment. Not saying it’s so, just saying that’s how it could be seen. And, once seen, it has to be avoided.”

“And maybe some Bigfoot wants the credit,” said Bob. “And maybe someone has a debt to be paid or wants to advance a protégé up the ladder. Or maybe someone thinks Nick’s shoes ain’t shiny enough or he should have worn cotton socks instead of wool ones, which he would have learned if he’d gone to a university that didn’t have ‘State’ in its name.”

“These are silk,” said Nick. “My only pair. So it’s not that.”

“So what happens to us?” asked Chandler.

“We stay here. We are copied on everything but asked to comment on nothing. If questioned, we answer to the best of our knowledge. On operation day, we will set up in the Command Center and will be able to follow the action by uplink to the New York Field Office in real time. We get a front-row seat, watching it all go down. That’s what everybody wants — and I do mean everybody.”

Again silence, as each tried to work his or her way around what was deemed necessary by upper management.

“I smell the White House,” said Neill. “I smell Mogul.”

“Okay,” said Nick, “maybe you do. Off the record, this was always in the cards, we just didn’t see it. But upper floor reads the Juba operation as a win-win. You all know there’s a cloud over the Bureau, and maybe a big triumph helps it go away. That’s the first win, and you better believe the Director is hot for that one. Then there’s the White House. You all know that elections are coming up, and if Mogul can get a victory over Islamic fundamentalism, that’s another big win. If he looks like a hero, it’s big enough to get him that second term. So everybody’s salivating, and intelligence concerns, strategic implications, and plain old justice just go out the window. Too much to be gained, in that superficial Washington way, with no downside. The best I can offer is, you’ve really pissed off the CIA, and they want in. But since it’s our baby, Mogul won’t let them in. So in the eternal war in Heaven between the angels, our side has won a big one, and you are the angels that did it. Recompense will come in many forms — promotions, Glory Wall photos and letters, commendations, everything that should make good little boys and girls happy. Swagger gets a new BarcaLounger at Bureau expense. And when it’s all over, Mr. Gold, maybe there’ll be enough Juba pie left over to send to Israel. Wouldn’t that make you and the boys in the black cube happy?”

“Indeed,” said Mr. Gold.

“It should even make Mrs. McDowell happy,” said Nick.

“What have these geniuses come up with?” asked Swagger.

“It’ll be run out of the New York Field Office, with a lot of New York SWAT and aviation thrown in. Real big, but I think it’ll work out.”

“Are you afraid to tell us?” asked Neill. “Is that why you’re buttering it up?”

“Neill,” said Chandler, “show some respect. Nick has been with us and behind us every fucking step.”

“You’re right,” said Neill. “Sorry, Nick, I misspoke.”

“Emotions running high. Everybody, please drop down into second gear, okay?”

He waited a few seconds.

“Okay, there’s a countersniper technology that turns on luring the bad guy to shoot through a microphone pickup field. It’s called Boomerang II, much improved from Boomerang I, from the folks at Raytheon. Maybe Swagger can explain it better.”

“I can’t,” said Bob.

“Anyway, the microphones yield data that the program can solve, and, in one millisecond, get you velocity, caliber, weight. But, most important, it can source the bullet. I mean, fast. They’ve used it hooked to artillery in the sandbox, and they can send a flight of 105 howitzer shells to point of origin inside a second. Takes care of the sniper and the city block or village in which he was hiding.”

“How do they get Juba to shoot in the right spot?” asked the annoying Neill.

“They’re arrayed, under camouflage, around the podium. They look sort of like a ball with spikes sticking out of it. The hardware isn’t gigantic or obtrusive, and it flashes the data back to the receiving station, in the Incident Command van.”

“So they’re going to get Juba to shoot over the microphones, then track him and blow him up?” asked Neill. “Bye-bye, Queens.”

“No. They get the read back to origin, and instead of sending 105s after him, they send assets that were put in place the night before — that is, NY SWAT teams airborne in choppers. They feel they can get them on-site inside a minute or two from various hidden locales, rappel the boys onto the rooftop while squad cars beeline in from just outside the zone, and, in that way, take him alive.”

“Meanwhile,” asked Swagger, “is Mogul dead?”

“No. The heavyset blond guy isn’t Mogul. He’s career Secret Service, in a blond wig, said to bear a pretty good resemblance to the real thing. Under his blue suit, white shirt, red tie below his zipper, and Elvis rug, he’s packed in enough Level IV Kevlar to stop a truck, no problem with a bullet that’s traveled eighteen hundred yards and whose velocity is way down, under a thousand pounds, like a handgun. From a hundred yards out, he’ll convince — let alone a mile out. First shot, he goes down, behind the armored podium. He’s risking a headshot, but that’s the name of the game. He’s a stud.”

“I’ll say,” said Swagger. “I wouldn’t do that job for all the money in the world. Or all the glory.”

“Anyhow, maybe Juba goes down hard, and it’s just a kill and a great success. But, Jesus, if they get him alive, what a bonanza. A live terrorist with a long and interesting past tasked with and almost succeeding at taking down Mogul. Everybody looks great, the Bureau looks fabulous, our real enemy, the CIA, looks pitiful, Mogul gets to strut and brag and do photo ops with the head of NYPD SWAT and the blond guy in Kevlar. Meanwhile, the interrogation and trial go on all through election season.”

“Too many moving parts,” said Swagger. “Wrong goal. Goal should be to stop him — first, last, and only. ‘Capture’ is overambitious bullshit. If you don’t fixate on ‘stop,’ it can go south hard and fast.”

“Our masters have spoken,” said Nick. “It will be as it will be.”