At this point Cozzano paused in his speech as the audience laughed indulgently. It wasn't really that funny, but he had delivered it in the cadence of a joke, and they knew their cues.

Vishniak kicked open an office door and saw nothing but a desk, and the knees and elbows of a man in a suit who was cowering behind it. This was not much to go on, but he was able to use his mind's eye to reconstruct the approximate shape and position of the owner of those knees and elbows, and pumped several rounds into the probable locations of his vital organs. When he saw what looked like an appropriate quantity of blood on the floor, he left the office, leaving the door ajar as a reminder that he had already visited this particular room.

"This is a bit excessive, wouldn't you say?' Mr. Salvador said. "I shall have to speak with Dr. Schram about this. It's too late in the campaign for these distractions."

"There is an incredible amount of gunfire," Green said, a little nervous.

On the central TV screen. Cozzano continued: "On one of my first trips, after Lover had flushed a pheasant, I swung my gun in its direction, as I had practiced so many times with clay pigeons. But suddenly the barrel swung up in the air and I held my fire. My father had suddenly reached out and pushed the barrels up in the air, ruining my aim, and I was very upset.

"By way of explanation, he pointed to our neighbor's house, which had been directly in my line of fire - almost a mile away from us! I protested that there was no way that birdshot could travel for such a distance. 'Better safe than sorry,' he said."

Vishniak moved on to the next room. This one contained half a dozen TV screens and an equal number of computer monitors. One of the computer monitors was dead and the other five were glowing a brilliant red color. He put a bullet into each. This clip was running low, so as long as he was in a safe room, he ejected it, put it in his trouser pocket, and put in a fresh one. Cozzano's voice was still coming from his wristwatch. "When I first learned that there were some people in Washington who wanted to take our guns away from us, I were more astonished than offended. The idea seemed ludicrous. My father - and all the other gun owners I knew - practiced firearm safety, and were at pains to pass those practices on to their children. The notion that some person in Washington could come out to Tuscola, Illinois, and take our guns away from us, because we were not, in their view, fit to own them, was completely baffling to me. And it still is."

The audience laughed; the laugh deepened into a cheer.

"Something's definitely going on out there," Aaron Green said. "I'm going to lock the door."

"Good idea," Mr. Salvador said, picking up the phone, holding it to his ear. "It's dead. The phone's dead."

Aaron had almost reached the door when the knob rotated and it opened. A man with a gun was standing in the hallway looking him in the eye.

The man's eye was drawn to the enormous racks of computer monitors that covered every wall of the room, the banks of computer systems. His jaw dropped open as he took it all in. While the man was gaping, Green had time to recognize him: it was Floyd Wayne Vishniak with a haircut.

Vishniak's gaze finally returned to Aaron's face. And it was clear that the presence of Aaron Green, here in this room, was the final piece in some kind of mental puzzle that Vishniak had been assembling in his head. "This is it," Vishniak said, talking way too loud, as if he was deaf. "Isn't it?"

Never argue with a man with a gun. "Yes," Green said, "this is it." He turned to Mr. Salvador for support. "Isn't it?"

"Yes, this is it," Mr. Salvador said, climbing very gingerly out of his chair, holding his hands together in front of his chest, fingertip to fingertip, in an attitude halfway between contemplation and prayer. He had the presence of mind to look over at Vishniak's monitor screen; it had gone pale and colorless.

Then it turned brilliant green.

"You're the Big Boss of it all!" Vishniak said. He stepped forward, shoved Aaron out of the way, leveled his gun at Mr. Salvador, and began to pull the trigger. He pulled it over and over again and the muzzle flashed like a strobe. Mr. Salvador was backing across the room with his hands dangling numbly at his sides, and before long he collapsed against a window.

But the window wasn't there anymore; it had long since been blown out of its frame, and the only thing there was a closed Venetian blind with a lot of holes in it, flopping outward into the wind, betraying the warm Virginia sunshine. Suddenly, Mr. Salvador was no longer in the room.

"Jesus, where'd he go?" Vishniak said. He stepped forward into the room, looking around suspiciously. He went over to the window, pushed the blind out with one hand, and looked down.

But by that point, Aaron Green was already in the elevator.

The lunchtime crowd in the foodcourt at Pentagon Plaza had first been alerted by a loud rattling noise on the glass overhead. The roar of conversation mostly drowned this out, but a few perceptive diners looked up to see fragments of broken glass sparkling in the sun as they bounced on the greenhouse roof.

Then the body came toward them in a smooth silent arc and punched through the ceiling without any perceptible loss in speed. When it hit the glass it lost its sharply edged silhouette as a lot of stuff was forced out of it by the impact. It continued through the central atrium of the mall, now more a cloud of loosely organized

remains of a corpse, and burst across four separate tables. A couple of seconds later, the broken glass came down in a hailstorm.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak, esq.

Parts Unknown

United States of America

Letters to the Editor

Washington Post

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. (Or Miss, Mrs., or Ms.) Editor: I have a bone to pick with you. Your coverage of my shooting spree (your way of describing it, not mine!) was the most biased and inaccurate piece of newspaper reporting I ever saw. All this year I have been reading a lot of newspapers (more than $300 spent so far) so that I could be an informed voter come November. But when I read a piece of garbage like your articles of 14, 15, and 16 September it makes me wonder if I have been informing myself at all. Or was I just filling up my head with all kinds of trash that your reporters just made up when they decided it was too much work to just go out and find out the Real Truth?

It was not a "bloodbath," as you have called it over and over. Only five people got killed. And the injuries to the diners in the food court do not count as this part was an accident. Just today you had an article about a car accident on the Beltway where five people got killed, but you never said it was a bloodbath.

You said I "roamed through the office suite firing indiscriminately." This is totally biased. I was not roaming. And I was not firing indiscriminately, or else why didn't I kill the five people who were in the brain-washing room with me? I will tell you why: because these five were average all-American citizens who I was trying to protect, not kill.

The part about the "spray of gunfire" really made my blood boil. There was no spraying. I decided what to shoot and I shot it.

Then in the article on 16 Sept. you said that I calmly and methodically went through the office suite executing people. If I was so calm and methodical then why did you write all that stuff about roaming, spraying, firing indiscriminately, etc. This shows the bias that is in your writing.

I am not a reclusive loner. As you would understand if you had to WORK for a living, it is cheaper to live out in the middle of nowhere. This does not make me a loner, just a poor honest working man.

Finally (this is the BIG POINT of my letter), every single word of your coverage makes me out to be a psycho. Like you would never even consider the idea that I might ACTUALLY BE RIGHT!