“Are you lost now?”

“No, I don’t suppose so. I know where I’m headed. I can’t stop it. Straight into catastrophe, and I don’t even want to stop it.”

He drew her to him. In the kiss there was an extraordinary sense of release. He felt himself sliding away, down a drain, surrounded by warm, urgent, healing liquids. He thought he’d slide until he died. He was also overwhelmed by smoothness. Everything about her was smooth; she was smooth everywhere, he’d never imagined that a person could be so smooth.

The explosion, so long in coming, seemed to build until it could not be held back, and bucked out of him in a series of emptying spasms. He was falling through floors toward solid earth, each one halting him for just a splinter of a second; and then he fell through to another one, and then another. He fell and fell and fell, stunned at the distance of the fall and how far it took him from himself.

“My God,” he said.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

The days passed. She was on the day shift and during it he stayed in the trailer and read what she had brought him from a trip to seven bookstores and every newsstand in Tucson. He told her to get everything. And she did. He read it all, the events of two weeks, then three weeks, then four weeks ago. He read about the Kennedy assassination, about other famous assassinations. He made copious notes and worked steadily, trying to find a line through the material.

When he learned that the hero policeman of New Orleans, Leon Timmons, had been killed in one of those stupid, pointless urban accidents, shot by a mugger during an attempt to prevent a crime, it didn’t surprise him. He just breathed heavily. Timmons had been a link; of course he had to die. These boys were sealing themselves off, leaving no possible leads into their organization. They were pros. This bothered him but it also relieved him; it meant he didn’t have to go back to New Orleans, for now there was nothing in New Orleans. But where would he go? He didn’t yet know.

One night, NBC news did a special on it. He taped it on her VCR, taking notes. He watched it over and over, the diagrams, the interviews, the speculations. But particularly he watched that terrible moment when the bullet came shrieking out of nowhere and seemed to blow the president from his feet, while it had really just been the force of the other man, the archbishop Roberto Lopez, who had gone into him as the bullet opened in him and destroyed his brain.

Bob thought: It was a great shot.

Over twelve hundred yards from that damn church steeple, shooting into a very complicated sight picture, no matter how good his scope, shooting at a downward angle. Lots of problems to solve, and you solved them all.

Oh, my oh my, but you’re a good boy, he thought.

Not but five, maybe six men in the world could hit a shot like that, or have the perfect confidence to risk everything on making it.

Bob realized the shooter was the key.

The whole plan, all the elaborate seduction of himself, the manipulations, the subterfuge, all of it rested only upon the fragile vessel of confidence that this shooter could make that shot.

Hell of a shot, Bob thought.

He thought of the man up there in that steeple behind the louvers just waiting, just gathering himself.

Could I have made that shot? Bob wondered.

He wasn’t sure. It was right at the very edge of what he could do with a rifle. Whoever he was, he was a shooter.

Bob remembered the superb neck-turned.308’s he’d run through his rifle when they were gulling him on in that Accutech thing in Maryland. Those were precision-made rounds. Everything else about “Accutech” was a con, but the rounds were the real thing. Whoever made them knew how to sling a cartridge together for world-class long-range accuracy. It wasn’t something many men knew: it took you into the realm of micromachining, of tolerances so fine most tools wouldn’t register them, of actions worked like the inside of watches, of rifle barrels so polished and perfect they were jewels themselves almost; it was a rarefied part of the shooting world.

Again, only a few dozen men in the world knew it.

And the rifle itself. Where do you get a rifle so tight that you can count on it to send a 200-grain.30 caliber into, say, four inches, from twelve hundred yards? You’re talking about.333 minute of angle at over half a mile. He knew a master gunsmith could build a rifle technically capable of such a thing, if a human could be found to get all that could be gotten out of it. Then he remembered the Model 70 he’d fired at the Accutech place, the last one, late in the day, when he’d fired the exercise that had more or less been the duplicate of Donny’s death with a Model 70 he still yearned for; a rifle with a stock so dense and rigid it felt as if it was manufactured from plastic and an action so slick and a trigger so soft you could breathe on it to make it fire. He remembered: Number 100000. That was such a rifle. There couldn’t be but one or two or three or four out of the millions of Model 70’s that Winchester made that were that fine.

Who would own such a rifle? Then he remembered that somebody told him a man had won a bunch of thousand-yard championships with that rifle.

And as he thought he began to puzzle the one aspect that had so far evaded him, the piece that was somehow wrong.

It was the bullet.

If they were going to hit the archbishop, they’d have to assume the police would recover the bullet. And that the bullet would have the imprint of the bore it had been fired down, as irrevocable as a fingerprint. They couldn’t know the bullet would be mangled; that was a one in a thousand chance.

Why wouldn’t this perturb them? It would screw up their entire plan. When the bullet didn’t match the bore in Bob’s rifle, the whole ruse would collapse. Somehow they’d figured a way to beat it. Somehow he had figured a way to beat it.

The bullet, he thought.

The mystery of the goddamn bullet, just as tantalizing in its way as the famous Kennedy assassination 6.5mm that had passed through one man’s body, another man’s chest and wrist, and yet was undamaged and unmistakably bore the imprint of Lee Harvey Oswald’s bore.

It was as if the two mysteries were mirror opposites of one another, or different sides of one coin.

But they had bullets, he thought. They had bullets from my rifle.

He’d provided them with sixty-four bullets fired from the bore of his rifle, in Maryland.

He sat back.

“Bob?”

“Shhh.”

“Bob, what are – ”

He held up a hand to quiet her.

Then it was gone.

“Dammit.”

“What?”

“Oh, I – ”

Then he had it. It might be possible. He’d never heard of anyone doing it and there was no reason for anyone to do it, but…yes, it was possible.

You dig a fired.308 bullet out of the sand, scored with the imprint of a bore, but otherwise pristine and possessing the same ballistic integrity as a new bullet. You can reload that.308 bullet into a.300 H & H Magnum shell, a much longer shell with a much greater powder capacity and therefore a much longer range. You’d have to protect the bullet somehow, and this puzzled him, until he remembered an old technique called paper-patching, by which a fellow could wrap a bullet in wet paper before he loaded it on a shell; the paper would harden and form a sort of protective sheath. The trick was, you had to fire it down a slightly larger bore, maybe a.318. But even that was so simple: rebarrel the rifle with a custom bore, and refire Bob’s bullet down the bore. The paper patching protects the ballistic signature; then burns off in the atmosphere; Bob’s bullet, fired from this other rifle, arrives to do its terrible damage.

Oh, you were a smart boy, he thought.

But…if you were so smart, how come I had to bird-dog it out for you? I was your legs, wasn’t I? That was part of it. I wasn’t just there to be used as a dupe but I did the thinking, the seeing, the planning. Why? Why couldn’t you do it? Why couldn’t you go to the sites yourself and see what I saw?