"We're doing a PIPER broadcast in a couple of minutes," Mr. Salvador said. "I'd like you to join me and give me your analysis."

"What's up?"

"Cozzano's giving an address to a convention of gun nuts in Tulsa," Salvador said. "It's going to be his major statement on the gun control issue. Which, in this country, seems to be hysterically emotional."

"That's for sure."

"I'm just sick of all this gutter politics," the lady said. She was a solidly built, bifocal-wearing woman with a conservative mid-western haircut, wearing a lavender jogging suit. Fresh off a tour bus from Indiana, no doubt. "I just don't want to see any more of this trash."

"I think you do want to see it," Schram said, "I think you are fascinated by this kind of thing. I think that, when you go to the grocery stores, you deliberately stand in the longest checkout line so that you will have time to pull the tabloids off the racks and leaf through them. And then you put them back on their racks. Because you're not the kind of person who would read sleazy tabloids - are you?"

The woman was utterly dumbfounded. "How - how did you know that? Have you been following me around or something?"

"Stop messing with her brain waves!" said the Post-Confederate Gravy Eater. Contrary to his assigned stereotype, he did not have a southern accent. More midwestern.

"How's that again?" Schram asked.

"You get into people's brains. I know you do. Can't you see you're bothering that woman?"

Schram shrugged innocently and held up his hands, palms up. "Hey. I'm just here having a conversation with her. I don't know anything about brain waves."

"Oh, yeah?" the man said, yanking the cuff off his wrist. "Then what's this?"

"That's already been explained," Schram said.

"Your explanations are all lies and cover-ups," the man said.

"Look," Schram said, "let me be honest. We're done with your interview, sir. Why don't you go ahead and take off. You can pick up your fifty dollars at the desk."

"What about these others?"

"I'd like to talk to them a little bit more."

"Why don't you want to talk to me? Isn't my opinion important?"

"We had a bug in our equipment," Schram said. "It didn't work in your case. So to keep you here any longer would be a waste of time. Thank you for coming in."

The man stood up out of his chair, facing the door, and then hesitated. He had grabbed the zipper pull on his red Confederate flag windbreaker with his left hand and was nervously zipping it up and down. He seemed to be deep in thought.

"Sir? That's all we need from you," Schram said. "You can go home now. Thanks for coming."

"Okay," the man said, finally zipping his zipper all the way up to his neck. "Okay, I think I'll go back home now. Thanks. It was real interesting. I learned a lot."

"You're welcome," Schram said.

The man started for the exit. Then music began to come out of him, as if he were carrying a transistor radio in his pocket. He stopped and froze for a moment.

The music was tinny and compressed, as if coming from a very small speaker. It was a patriotic fifes-and drums number. Shane Schram stared in astonishment.

The man took his hands out of his pockets. One wrist had an Ace bandage wrapped around it. The music became louder. He ripped the Ace bandage off. The sound of applause was now coming from his wrist.

William A. Cozzano stepped to the lectern and waved down the applause and cheers of the attendees at the Tulsa Gun and Knife Show.

"My Secret Service people wanted to provide additional security for me today," he said, "because I was addressing a bunch of gun owners, and for some reason that made them nervous. Well, I have one thing to say to you gun owners: if any one of you really wants to take a shot at me, here I am!"

Cozzano stepped back from the lectern and held his arms out wide. The hall was filled with stunned murmuring for a few moments. Then the gun owners exploded. Peals of cheers, applause, and foot-stomping overwhelmed the sound system on the PIPER watch.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak was staring into Shane Schram's face, sizing him up. Schram's eyes were jumping back and forth between the little TV and his face.

"You're Economic Roadkill," Schram said. "You're Floyd Wayne Vishniak!"

Floyd Wayne Vishniak unzipped his windbreaker and reached inside. "That was a really stupid thing for you to say," he said. Then he pulled out a handgun and pointed it at Schram. Everyone else in the room collapsed out of their chairs.

"I can see that you're very upset," Schram said.

"How many times do I have to tell you," Vishniak said, "to stay the hell out of my brain waves!" Then he fired a single round that entered Schram's head through the bridge of his nose and left through an exit wound, in the back of his skull, that would have accommodated a grapefruit.

"Don't worry," Vishniak said to the five people on the floor, who could scarcely hear a word he was saying because their ears were ringing from the incredible blast of the handgun. "You don't have to worry about these bastards anymore!"

"What the hell was that?" Mr. Salvador said. He and Green were in the PIPER monitor room, watching Cozzano shake his hands together above his head, basking in the waves of applause.

"Nothing," Green said. "Another one of Schram's psychological experiments."

"I thought we were finished with the calibration phase," Mr. Salvador said.

"Believe me," Green said, "this place is like Dodge City sometimes. It's all fake."

Vishniak popped his head into the hallway and withdrew it before anyone could get off a shot. But the precaution was unnecessary. No one was there.

He chanced a second look and saw the fat security guard in the lobby, looking back at him with only mild concern, as if high-ranking executives at ODR got their brains blown against the walls every day. Vishniak drew back into the room, his back to the doorway. He gripped the Fleischacker in both hands, spun around into the hall while bringing the gun downward, steadied his arm against the door frame for a second, and fired three quick shots. The first two hit the guard in the chest and the last one was high.

Now he had to move fast. He ran toward the lobby, spun through the doorway, and took aim at the old guard, who was in the act of unsnapping his holster. He fired two rounds into the man's head and upper body from a distance of about six feet. Then he spun toward the receptionist's desk.

She had already vaulted her desk and was cowering and screaming on the far side. That was okay, she was just a gnome. The key was to take out the switchboard. Vishniak fired a spread of some half-dozen bullets into her computer and her telephone switchboard.

He turned back into the hallway, reached down with one hand, and unsnapped the flaps on the tops of his cargo pockets. He tucked the flaps down into the pockets, as he had practiced many times, so that they would not get in the way when he reached down to pull out more clips.

Then it hit him: though it was a bit early in the day to be getting cocky, he was doing an incredibly good job so far. He had wiped out their pathetic security detail and blown their communications to shreds. Now he'd be able to clean out the remainder of the eleventh floor in a thorough and methodical way.

"Generally good results so far," Mr. Salvador said. "Of course, the gun control advocates will never like this kind of thing."

"Yeah. But check out some of our gun owners," Green said. "Look at Vishniak?"

"Who?"

"Economic Roadkill," Green said, tapping a screen that had suddenly gone brilliant emerald. "He's one of my guys. And you can see how happy he is with the speech so far."

He had gone almost completely deaf from the blasts of the Fleischacker and could barely hear the voice of William A. Cozzano coming from his PIPER watch: "... would go out in the fields with my father, each of us with a shotgun tucked under his arm, and look for the pheasants that would go through the harvested fields for loose corn. Our retriever Lover would accompany us, often staying well back because he had learned that the blasts of the shotgun hurt his ears."