"Don't we turn here?"

They had just sailed by a sign that pointed to downtown off a left-hand turn.

"Huh?"

"I'm staying at the Hilton. Weren't we supposed to turn here?"

"Oh, uh, no, Howard, not that way. That'd get you there. But this time of day, it's faster to stay on Sixty-one, then cut over to Ninety. See?"

"Oh, all right. It's your town. But I would have turned there," Howdy Duty said. He didn't mean to sound displeased, Nick thought; but he did anyway.

Chapter TEN.

In each of the four cities, he presented the same phenomenon: a tall, lanky man in boots and a blue denim shirt, pressed and buttoned to the top. He wore a down-filled field coat, suede Tony Lamas and his black, wide Stetson but in Baltimore he felt out of place with the hat and left it in his room.

In each city he checked into a middle-range downtown hotel after taking a cab in from the airport; he ate modestly and never drank and when he wasn't in his room, studying his maps, he discreetly toured the shooting sites, taking notes, walking off the distances, watching the fall of the light and the way the shadow angles changed as the sun moved across the sky; feeling the temperature, the push of the prevailing winds, looking at the traffic patterns in and out, at the theaters or stages where the president would be speaking when the shot was to be fired; he walked endlessly around the buildings, into their lobbies, but he never pressed his luck, and made no attempt to get into places where he was not permitted. His only eccentricity most people mistook for an elaborate camera. In fact, it was a Barr & Stroud prismatic optical rangefinder, with two lenses eighty centimeters apart. It enabled him to measure distances with unerring accuracy.

In each city, he learned things no map or guidebook could tell him. He discovered small discrepancies in the elevation grids of the Cincinnati hills, not much, but just enough to throw a shooter off. He'd be higher than he thought he was and his bullet's trajectory therefore more subject to the pull of gravity.

In Baltimore, he noted the persistence of wind off the harbor; he'd never associated Baltimore with wind at all and the information irritated him. The guidebooks never said a damned thing about it, but the gulls hanging like helicopter gunships over a burning village told the story. He imagined a bullet riding those winds, drifting this way and that in their grasp, perhaps true to its aim, perhaps not.

In Washington, he saw the trees. The shot indicated in the picture of the Soviet shooting mock-up would have to pass through trees. Admittedly, this time of year the visibility was fairly good. But Bob thought the problem was a bullet-deflecting sprig of limb; it would be like firing through a labyrinth, and even the smallest of obstructions could send a heavy-caliber bullet moving at close to three thousand feet per second spinning off in the craziest ways.

Then, too, in Washington the shooting platforms were exceedingly iffy; Justice was closest but the angle into the back lawn of the White House was extreme, and if he were shooting from there -- about 450 yards -- T. Solaratov would have a quarter profile as a target, always the hardest angle into major body structures, a devilishly hard shot, though Bob had dropped a few that way. Almost a full mile out, from the Department of Agriculture, the sniper would have a much wider target, and presumably a much stabler one, as bodies don't move laterally during speeches nearly so much as they moved up and back. Still...shooting through trees a mile out from atop a government building -- this said nothing of the extraordinary deception operation that would have to be mounted to get him in and out -- seemed the longest of long shots, purely from a technical point of view.

New Orleans was a Southern city, which he appreciated; the air was balmy, the breezes mild. Of all the cities, he liked it the best, and quickly found that only a sliver of it was the fabled block or so of Bourbon Street where all the movies were filmed. The place itself had a sleepy, nondescript way to it and the black people still carried themselves with that elegant dignity that is only possible in the true South.

But the problem with New Orleans was the air, which was heavy with the tang of salt water and the acrid, dense musk that miles of mushy swamp produced. It was almost a jungle climate, and though it could be shot through with accuracy -- Bob had done it, after all -- it produced the sort of accuracy warpage that would have to be planned for and practiced in. This was most interesting; if they were going to go for a .50 caliber shot a mile out in New Orleans, it occurred to Bob that they'd almost have to build themselves a mile of range here, because each swampy ecosystem has its own peculiar climate, depending on the density of the salt water, the gassiness of the swamp, the prevailing winds. You couldn't prep a New Orleans shot in Iraq or even Russia, except in its most inconsequential aspects; you'd have to do it over a period of days in a period of weather conditions to see what hob the moisture would play on the bullet.

Might be interesting to check out, he thought.

His travels finished after ten long days on the road, Bob flew back to Arkansas and returned to his trailer. Again, it was as he left it, unentered; again, Mike's slobbery love greeted him and he took some time to work with the dog, to pet him and make him feel wanted, to rub those velvety ears. You didn't want to spoil a creature with too much attention, but Mike had such need it moved Bob. It was the longest time he'd ever been away from the dog; the dumb love poured up to him from the eyes and the hot breath. Its paws were flung upon him as Mike went nuts in bliss.

"Hey, boy, your old man's back," he said, again surprising himself with a kind of laugh. Truth was, he felt pretty damned good. He'd been in The World, tested himself against it, and come back in one piece, not destroyed. The work was fascinating and what he'd found pleased him; he was eager to get on with the next bit.

He went to the icebox, found some chili frozen in a square like a brick, and set it to warming on the stove; then he showered quickly, changed into clean jeans and shirt and boots. Then he took Mike for a good four-mile walk. By the time he was back, the stuff was hot and red, as he liked it. He ate it quickly and economically, with large glasses of iced tea, only momentarily missing the beer that had once been his chief sensual pleasure with hot food.

Then, though tired, he felt nourished. He went over to a typewriter that had been in the family since his grandfather was sheriff of Polk County back in the twenties, and began very slowly and carefully to write.

Bob always surprised people with his literacy; they expected an ex-Marine gunnery sergeant from Arkansas to be a complete fool when it came to letters, not knowing, say, capitals from small letters, or what a paragraph was about, or the difference between a period and a colon or the meaning of that great puzzler, the apostrophe. But he knew all that; more, he knew he had a small, quiet gift for expressing himself clearly and it always pleased him to do so. And he did so now.

He wrote a twenty-two-page document explaining his analysis of the four shooting sites and his prediction of T. Solaratov's preferences. He knew, of course, where he'd shoot from himself; it scared him a little, because he saw how easy it would be, how in spite of all the advances since 1963, how despite the extent to which everyone had entered the era of maximum paranoia and security, it was still nearly impossible to stop a man with a rifle and the will and the skill to use it.

It was not an eloquent document, but it was direct, after the military fashion.

It is my feeling that the subject will most likely attempt his shooting of the President on 1 March of this year at Louis Armstrong Park in New Orleans. He will be shooting a 750-grain copper-sheathed .50 caliber round from approximately 1,200 yards out. The bullet will be traveling, when it strikes the President, at over 1,500 feet per second, and that should, with the bullet weight, defeat any body armor the President is wearing. The time of the shooting will almost certainly be near the end of the President's speech, which is scheduled to begin at 11:30 and last 45 minutes. There are three reasons for this. First, a shadow falls across the podium of the shooting site between 10:30 A.M. and 2:15 P.M. on that day (give or take a few minutes) and the President will be deepest into it at the end of his speech, which will mean that the glare from the contrast between the light and the dark will be at its minimum during the time of his exposure. This would not be a factor under normal ranges, but the extreme distance of the shot will make even the most incidental considerations important. Second, midday is by weather bureau records the calmest time of day; the prevailing winds tend to be at their gustiest during the morning hours. The Russian will almost certainly know this, if he's studied carefully. In fact, of the four shooting sites, only New Orleans puts the President in the zone of exposure during the calmest part of the day, with Cincinnati a distant second. And finally, the New Orleans site offers at least three escape routes. If he shoots from the steeple of St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, which is located 1,200 yards from the site of the speech, and he uses some kind of external (by that I mean nonballistic) noise suppression system, he can very easily retreat down the (closed) stairway, step into the crowds on the square and melt away. It is unlikely that discovery of the site would be made for several minutes, perhaps hours, because the site is so far from the bullet strike. From the church he could very quickly walk to the Mississippi, which is less than half a mile away, and flee by boat down into the bayou system, and it would be almost impossible to locate him in there. He could also depart down Decatur, a major thoroughfare unlikely to be burdened by heavy traffic at that time of day. Or finally, in desperate straits, he could be picked up by helicopter in the open space of Jackson Square, just in front of the Church.

Then Bob made his recommendations.

1) Secret Service should be informed at earliest possible date of the Soviet attempt and brought in on our side. But they have to be made to understand that the point of the operation is not only to safeguard the President's life but to apprehend and interrogate the Soviet-Iraqi shooting team and its support units.

2) Radio networks should be authorized and interjurisdictional limits set, so that SS knows exactly its responsibilities and this agency knows what it can do too.

3) Monitoring of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans should begin immediately; almost surely the shooting team will begin to modify and adapt it prior to 1 March. At the same time surveillance should be extremely discreet, so as not to scare away "the bird." As enemy investigation of the site will almost certainly be thorough, it is further recommended that no direct observational devices or planted listening devices be employed. They would be onto those in a second. A very good way might be to observe from above -- F4Js at 20,000 feet orbiting in circle -- with infrared cameras for heat signatures, in the way the Air Force did in Vietnam when it was interdicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

4) An aerial search of greater New Orleans bayou and swamp area should be commenced immediately in order to locate the site of Russian preparation. In order to adjust to climatic conditions in late winter/ early spring, the shooting team will almost certainly hold several live fire run-throughs under circumstances as exact as possible so that Solaratov knows exactly what to expect as to load performance and so forth.

5) The President should of course be warned, but if he is as courageous as he proved to be in the war against Iraq, he will insist upon taking part in the exercise to lure the shooting team onward, rather than using a double or canceling the event. His earliest participation is necessary.

6) On day of event, counter sniper teams should be stationed concentrically from the President's speaking position as indicated on map. These positions are located roughly 600 yards out and are oriented away from, rather than toward, the President. Each unit should be equipped with one Remington Model-40A1 rifle with Unertl 10x scope and carry duty load of M852 Match Accuracy Lake City Arsenal 7.62mm NATO cartridges, in order to engage the Soviet-Iraqi team in the event of actual shooting. (I would like to lead one of these units, and I prefer to locate myself at the starred site on the map on the day of the event; if necessary, and given the proper command authority, I can take out the Soviet -- Iraqi team before any harm is done. I'll shoot the shooter through center mass and the spotter -- if there is one -- in the left body quadrant; a quick reactive team can almost certainly get to him before he comes out of shock and begins self-destruction procedures. He should be an interesting intelligence source.) 7) Debriefing of captured Soviet and/or personnel should begin immediately so that we may act on their intelligence immediately; in Vietnam, interrogation information was sometimes squandered when we reacted too slowly.

He stopped typing.

That was it.

What else was there?

Well, of course there was one other thing and it was the thing that no man could plan for. Luck. One only prayed for it, and maybe it would be there and maybe it wouldn't.

He looked at his watch. Time to sleep; tomorrow he'd send the report to the people he now believed represented the Central Intelligence Agency.

He stripped and crawled into bed. Mike bounded up too, for the big soft stupid dog liked to touch him ever so slightly through the covers in sleep.

But at four he awakened and went back and read the document over. It seemed good. He couldn't sleep however. He knew it was absurd but he felt he was being watched or something. He sat back and tried to work out his feelings about his new employers.

He didn't trust them. But they were all he had.

And then he thought: I need an edge. I need a way to keep these boys from turning on me if things go wrong. He tried to think of what that might be, but he couldn't come up with a thing.

Chapter ELEVEN.

It was humiliating. Nick had become a complete and total gofer, a clerk, a fool. He bustled through the corridors with files and coffee and doughnuts like Hazel the maid. Howdy Duty hardly let him talk to the Secret Service people at all, leaving that delicate task to himself; Nick had been appointed head eunuch.

"Hey, Memphis, your slip is showing," his ex-partner Mickey Sontag yelled out as Nick raced from the file room to a former storage room now bearing the important title on the door JOINT SECRET SERVICE/BUREAU MEETING GROUP, where the federal bodyguards and the sanctimonious Utey had set up shop.

"Yeah, yeah" said Nick helplessly, knowing he was running late, pissed as hell that Ginny Feany, mistress of the files, had not found the dope on one Clark Clarkson, White Knight of the Lafayette Parish Ku Klux Klan, quite fast enough.

"Boy, they running you ragged, old Saint Nick."

Nick was thirty-four; this old shit had to stop.

But "Yeah, yeah" was all he could think to say.

In the meeting, the senior Secret Service guy, Phil Mueller, was sounding off as usual like General Patton for a squad of his own troops and for Howdy as well.

"And this is the last of them?"

"He says it is," answered Utey for Nick, before Nick could answer for himself.

"Even the inactives, the discontinueds, the imprisoned and the dead ones?"

"All of them, Phil."

"So with your files, with our information, and with the stuff from the National Crime Index, we got what, total maybe two hundred fifty names? Triaged into three categories, Alphas, Betas and Charlies, for bad risk, possible risk, and should-be-checked-out. How's the numbers on it? You getting through the Alphas?"

"Uh, Phil," said one of the Secret Service joes, "we're working them pretty hard. I've got three teams on them, that's six guys for fifty-six of them, I've got a Beta team, and we've got a hundred twenty-four Betas, the rest Charlies."

"How's it shaping up timewise?"

"I think we'll make the Alphas, no sweat, if we bring some of our other people in. I think we'll make most of the Betas, too, we get a break or two. But it's those damn Charlies that have us worried. I just don't think, manpowerwise, we're going to get very far into them."

"Um," said Mueller.

"A thought, Phil," said Howdy Duty.

"Yes, Howard."

"Maybe Nick could work the Charlies. Most of it's phone, no? Checking up?"

"Hmmm," said Mueller.

"He'd be more than willing, right, Nick?"

Nick just sat there, stewing.

Great. What these guys were doing -- what they always did prior to a visit by the Man -- was developing, in coordination with local law enforcement and cooperating federal agencies, a regional list of known wackos, screwballs, right- and left-wing dingbats, survivalists, and others fitting the potential risk profile. These people were then investigated by teams to determine location and current situation; if some signal of instability was detected by the officers, then surveillance was sometimes mandated; more frequently, the guys were simply rousted savagely, detained, had the shit scared out of them, then sent on their way. It was painstaking, boring work, absolutely the dullest. But it was Secret Service policy to know where all the nuts were stored before the Man got into gun range.

"But the bomb -- " Nick began.

"Can wait," snapped Mueller. "You get digging into the Charlies, okay, Memphis?"

"He'll do it," assured Utey. "Nick, you won't mind putting in the extra time, will you?"

So what do you say? Well, the good Bureau man doesn't say anything; he doesn't let anything show; he just nods and knuckles under and gets behind the team.

And that's what Nick committed himself to doing, biting down his anger that he'd missed a shot at the Secret Service bomb detail. Now those guys were pros. He'd wanted to see them work, they were so legendary. They did site preparation, and when they were done working an area over, you knew it was sanitized, that the dogs had sniffed no explosives or wires, that the spectrometers had uncovered no unusual radio waves for command detonations, that no sniper's nests or shooting platforms had been uncovered.

And it was outdoor work! It was doing something! It was getting back into the field, away from all this political nonsense and being just a clerk-jerk. And, the truth was, what Nick hated most of all of it was sitting in the office. He knew he wasn't thorough enough, that he tended to make small mistakes. He cursed, silently, as his fate overtook him. But he kept his face flat and mild.

When it was over, Herm Sloane, who wasn't too bad a guy, slid by and said, "Too bad, Nick. Know you wanted to slip out tomorrow. We're just bogged down."

"No problem," said Nick, trying for cheer, which was his usual way of dealing with adversity.

"I don't know who's worse," Sloane added conspiratorially, "my guy assholing it all over the place or your guy sucking it up all over the place."

"It's pretty fucking pathetic," Nick said. "You got those Charlies for me?"

"Fraid so, old pal."

Sloane handed over the stack of files that he had triaged into the Charlie category. Nick looked at them sadly. It was hours and hours of work. He knew his investigation on the death of Eduardo Lanzman was falling apart. It wasn't happening, because he couldn't get to it.

The names were prosaic, pitiful, and as he glanced through the files, he saw the usual litany of failure and hatred, the usual roundup, the usual suspects. Little men with large grudges and imprecise grips on reality, who were only to be reckoned with because they had or could get guns.

And then Nick saw the name of his hero: Bob Lee Swagger.

Bob the Nailer, he thought. Jesus Christ!

In three fourteen-hour days, Nick managed to eliminate fifty-six of his seventy Charlies. It was exhausting work, sitting there, phoning this office or that, tracking down that parole officer or this one, going through phone books and the state prison records division, talking to cops and lawyers and the various parish morgues. Of the fifty-six, more than half, twenty-nine, had simply died since, for whatever reason, they had been placed on the Secret Service Active Suspect List. Nick suspected therefore that the list was very old; so many old men. Another sixteen were serving jail time. Five were currently in mental institutions -- these were the real crazos, whose difficulty in dealing with authority over the long term had finally gotten them classified pathological and who were now rusticating in some picturesque bayou bin. Six more had vanished, left the city or the state, simply disappeared off the face of the earth. They were now, happily, somebody else's worry. That left fourteen to be accounted for, tracked, located, what have you; it was not easy work but he went at it with a great deal of effort.

And it left Bob the Nailer.

Nick had first heard of the great Marine sniper sometime in the early eighties, in an article in one of those Soldier of Fortune-type magazines that he used to read at the time. He remembered the cover photo of the lean young man in the camouflage paint and the intense eyes, and the beautiful Remington rifle he was carrying and the cover line: THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN ALIVE. The stories were incredible; whatever the guy shot died. Bob the Nailer had eighty-seven confirmed kills in Vietnam; he did some jobs for the Agency, it was said; and, his masterpiece, he'd hit a North Vietnamese battalion moving on an isolated Green Beret camp and held it down for two days, killing thirty-odd men in the process, saving the Special Forces' bacon.

That was when Nick himself was trying to be the great shooter, back in his ass-kicking SWAT days, before Myra and Tulsa. Thinking back now, it all seemed so clear and innocent; you were a trained man, you went against bad guys, and because you were so good, they got nailed.

That was when he'd sold his soul to the rifle, when he was, however briefly, an acolyte in the cult of the sniper. He shivered a bit at the vanity of it, remembering what his pride had turned into in Tulsa.

Still, all these years later he had a place in him full of respect for Bob. Bob had never wavered, had let nothing stand between himself and what he wanted to be, and Bob had tested himself in the crucible of the actual, while Nick had only tried once and failed spectacularly. His bullet had gone exactly where he had not wanted it to.

So it was with a sense of facing his old self and his old beliefs and the mistakes of his own youth that he set about to track down Bob the Nailer. And like many memories, this one proved easy enough to unearth. Bob was not hard to find, that is, the traces of Bob. He'd checked into the Robert Oliver Hotel in the French Quarter on February 3 and checked out on February 4. Two days. Nobody much remembered him; the only vague reports Nick could scare up told of a tall western-styled man, very leathery, who said nothing, kept to himself, was gone all day, and left without fuss. Had a funny camera with him, some expensive Jap thing probably.

Business of some sort, Nick thought. He'd heard that Swagger hadn't been able to stay in the Marines because of his injuries. Probably today he was some kind of traveling salesman or something, or an Arkansas farmer into the big city for the hell of it, a wild few days or something, take some pictures like any tourist, and go on back to the South Forty.

But it occurred to Nick to ask a more fundamental question. Why was the guy on the Suspects List at all? Who put him there? What gets you there?

He ran Swagger through the FBI computer and learned he had no record, at least no felonies listed anywhere. He checked him against the National Crime Index and again came up with nothing. Calling the Department of the Navy, he learned that Bob had retired at the rank of gunnery sergeant with physical disability pay after twelve years active service and close to three years in the hospital undergoing joint reconstruction and extensive physical therapy and had no blemishes on his record. He checked with the Veterans Administration and found out that Bob had never sought or received any kind of psychological testing, or counseling or anything like that. There seemed to be nothing on him at all. Now why the hell had he ended up on this list? And who was tracking him enough to note that he was here in New Orleans?

He called Herm Sloane.

"Hey, Herm -- "

"Nick, we're really pressed for time up here? What is it?"

"I just have one question. These Charlies, where do you get them? How does a guy get on the Charlie list?"

"Well, the Alphas are usually developed from intelligence, usually from the Bureau investigations of dangerous groups, from other Justice Department or DEA sources and our own intelligence unit; um, the Betas are usually guys with minor criminal records, guys who've made lots of public threats, who have an authority complex and tend to attract attention; and your Charlies are letter writers. We keep all the threatening letters the president gets, or threatening-seeming letters. Why?"