"My people never saw him," said Shreck. "We have no idea who he is or what he did. We only know that he can shoot better than any man on this earth. And we know he isn't mobile, because he had to work from Bob's report and couldn't handle it himself. And we had the sense that he was once famous, in a way, or at least public. So there has to be history there. And we examined his rifle. We know that it was used to win championships."

Hugh's eyes flashed over at Shreck.

"Among other things it was used for," he said. "The security was important, indeed crucial. There are things you don't need to know. I told you I would handle that part of it. That it didn't involve you or your people. Didn't I? Now what on earth can this be about, Colonel?"

"Our plan needs bait. This Swagger is a difficult antagonist, but he has weaknesses. He had a weakness for a Soviet sniper he thought shot and killed his best friend. My staff psychiatrist, Dobbler, put that together; and it worked, Mr. Meachum. It got us Swagger on a platter. But we couldn't keep him there."

"Obviously."

"Now Dobbler thinks that Swagger will have somehow sensed the other shooter. And will find him as provocative as he found the Russian. I want to put him before Swagger. It needn't be complicated, but it must be authentic. I want a sense of him, I want his cooperation."

"As bait?"

"Yes. Well, not physically. But we'll need name, history, background, accomplishments, that sort of -- "

"Well, for your information, he and I go way back. We went to school together, in fact. His life has been...remarkable. Colonel, his identity is the one secret I hold most precious."

"If we don't get Swagger, he'll blow us away, Mr. Meachum."

Hugh considered.

"I'll have to ask him," he said. "I couldn't think of doing it without his agreement."

Chapter TWENTY-NINE.

They pulled up outside the house. It was a quiet twilight in Syracuse, New York. Nick wore a suit, a white shirt, a tie, all recently purchased from Bob's cache of nearly thirty thousand dollars that he wore in a moneybelt. Bob had bought a suit and tie, too -- he looked almost civilized.

Nick turned and faced the house, and took a swallow.

"Oh, my," Nick suddenly said. "We are finally here."

This was the hardest thing, and it had placed a large ball of ice in his stomach.

Bob just chewed on a toothpick, looked ahead through the windshield of the rented Buick.

"Got to do it, Memphis."

Nick exhaled four or six lungsful of air, just kept blowing the stuff off as the melancholy crept through him.

"I cross this line, I may never get back."

"You don't cross this line, they may kill you on the wrong side of it."

"Doesn't help much," said Nick. "Not the way I was raised."

The line was the felony line. It had haunted him since Bob had laid the plan before him; but it was the only way.

"This is it?"

"Yeah, 'fraid so. No other way to get what we want and get it fast. Look at it this way. These bad boys from this RamDyne outfit probably going to blow you out of your socks in a day or two anyway, what difference does it make then?"

Bob smiled at him again.

"Okay," said Nick. He knew that so far in his adventures he'd done nothing illegal, though he'd stretched the elasticity of the law considerably. This was different. He was about to represent himself as a Federal agent, when he no longer was one. It violated Federal Code 28-02.4, and it carried three to five, though if he ever went over on it, he knew he'd be out in six months maximum, unless somebody was really mad at him. But he also knew he'd never work his side of the street again.

"Okay," said Nick again. "Let's do it. And to hell with Howdy Duty."

"This is your duty," said Bob.

They knocked on the door and a little girl answered. Nick took out his identification.

"Hi," he said. "My name is Nicholas Memphis and I'm a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. May I see your daddy, please, honey?"

She ducked in and in a few seconds a grave, thin man in a cardigan appeared.

"Yes?" he asked, running a hand through his hair.

"Mr. Porter, I'm Nicholas Memphis, special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. My associate, Special Agent Fencl."

"Sir," nodded Bob.

"Have I -- "

"No, no, sir," said Nick fast. "But if our information is correct, it's from this address that you edit and collate and send out Accuracy Shooting, the newsletter of benchrest shooting?"

Porter swallowed.

"Uh, yes, that's correct. I'm an insurance executive but I've been benchresting fifteen years. I inherited the editorship ten years ago. A labor of love, really. I lose time and money on it. But I've gotten some good friends out of it and had lots of fun."

"Yes, sir. We understand."

"Mr. Porter," said Bob, "we're looking for a man who may be involved in several shootings."

"Oh, God -- " said Porter.

"And our information suggests that he was at one time one of the leading benchresters in the country."

"Oh, no," said Porter. "Benchresters aren't like that. We're not talking about, you know, survivalists, AK-47's, that sort of thing. These are just tinkerers who love to play with their completely useless rifles and loads and shoot tiny groups. Gosh, they just sit there and shoot and cuss, that's all. It's the most boring thing you ever saw. It's enormously challenging to do, but to watch it it's -- "

"Our information is pretty good, Mr. Porter. You know, there's always one or two in any group who can give it a bad name."

"God, it's so harmless," Porter said. "I'd hate to have the damn newspapers to get ahold of something like this and say, you know, that benchresting was training for sniping or some such -- "

"Mr. Porter, the last thing we'd ever do is talk to the press, you can be sure of that. What we'd like to do is examine your subscription list. This is an older man, he was active in benchrest shooting back in the late fifties, and we believe that if he's a subscriber, he'd almost certainly have been one for a long time. As we understand it, the publication began as a shooting club newsletter right back in the early sixties?"

"That's right. You're looking for a name?"

"No, sir, almost certainly he's living under a pseudonym. But we have several other characteristics, and if we get a set of names from you, we can compare them to other lists and look for correspondences. We can assure you your information will be held in strictest confidence."

"And I suppose if I said no, you'd get a subpoena."

"Mr. Porter," said Nick, "this is a friendly visit, not a hostile one. If you'd like to call a family lawyer and have him come over and advise you, that would be fine. We can wait."

"No, no," said Porter. "No, come on in. Would you guys like some coffee?"

"Thank you, no, sir," said Nick.

Porter led them through pleasant rooms until at last they reached his study, where an IBM PC and an Epson printer stood on the desk. The room was heavily lined with shelves, and Nick recognized many standard texts of ballistics, many reloading manuals, but also Crime and Punishment, Portnoy's Complaint and The Great War and Modern Memory, all books he'd planned on reading sometime. On one wall hung a series of the typescript covers of Accuracy Shooting.

"I went to the computer two years ago," Porter said. "It was getting to be too damn much with the paste-up. I can do each issue in one operation now. And I've got loads of volunteer help. And my wife helps with the typing. It's great fun, we've loved every second of it."

"Yes, sir," said Nick. Bob hung back, letting Nick do the talking. Great, Nick thought, I'm in so deep now there's no way of ever getting out.

"Now, I have twenty-seven-thousand-five-hundred-odd subscribers, Mr. Memphis. Do you want me to print out a whole list or something?"

"Sir, is there any way you can break it down by chronology? That is, early subscribers, that sort of thing. First subscribers. We're quite convinced that our man would have found out about you early and been one of the first subscribers."

"Hmmm," said Porter. "You know, I don't think I could run a program to shake it out that way; I've set the whole thing up to run alphabetically. Whenever I get a new subscriber, I add him to the list and the thing just inserts it where it should be."

"I see."

"How did you get your subscribers, Mr. Porter?" asked Bob.

"Well, I've taken out classified ads in SGN and in the slick gun mags. And of course there's a subscription form in every copy of the magazine."

"No, I mean originally. When it was first started. That first year, what was that, 1964? How'd they start it off?"

"Well, as I understand it, it was started informally as a newsletter of match results. And now and then a small technical article. The men were all driven to communicate what they were working on. And people who were just interested in the sport or the experiments or what have you began to ask to get on the mailing list. And I think they first started selling subscriptions, yes, it was 1964, after the newsletter became an actual magazine."

"Those first subscription requests. Say, the first thousand. Any idea what became of them?"

"Oh, Lord. Did I throw them away? I got all that stuff from old Milt Omahundro who used to put it out. God, I -- No, I think I've got some old cartons out in the garage."

"Could we see them?"

"Sure. This way."

And he led them out into the garage, where against one wall a pile of cardboard boxes stood.

"Oh, Lord, I just don't -- "

"Mr. Porter," said Bob. "Tell you what. If you get me some coffee like you offered before this young man said no, I'd be happy to go through those boxes for you. And I'll make damn sure it's as neat when we leave as it is now. Fair enough?"

"Well, that's the best offer I've had in weeks," said Porter.

Bob and Nick got busy, and it was Bob who worked the hardest. Taking off his coat and folding it neatly, he threw himself against the task with that same thorough intensity that always numbed Nick. He'd pause to take a sip of the coffee now and then, but mainly he just plunged ahead.

He'd make a good cop, thought Nick, who had never been outworked before.

It was in the last box and it was Bob who found them: the first thousand or so subscription forms to Accuracy Shooting, now yellowed with age. Many were simply letters that had had checks enclosed and still bore the imprint of a paper clip or the punctures of a staple; some were index cards or postcards. Only a few were forms. It was a box of old memories crumbling into dust. Hard to look at it and think that something so utterly banal -- a box of forgotten letters and forms -- might hold a key to something so monstrous as the shooting of Archbishop Roberto Lopez in New Orleans.

"I'll be," said Porter. "That takes me back awhile. I'd forgotten all about those. Didn't even know I still had them."

"Sir," said Nick, "what we'd like to do is write you out a receipt for this material, then return it to you when we've completed our investigation."

"Oh, I don't know. If I'd have found them, I might have thrown them out myself. Why don't you just take the damned things and if you lose them, so much the better."

"Yes, sir, but I'd be happy to write out the receipt."

"No, you just go on and go. I've got work to do."

The next day, Shreck drove alone down through Virginia and into North Carolina, following complicated directions. There, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just over the state line, he turned down a private road for perhaps a mile until he came to an electronic gate. He got out of the car and pressed the buzzer on an intercom system.

"Yes?" came the voice.

"My name is Shreck," he said.

"All right," came the voice.

The door slid open, and Shreck got in and drove for another two hundred yards. Sitting in the shadow of a six-hundred-foot hill was a handsome ranch house, rambling, bright, and open. Shreck had always lived in apartments, almost monastically: but he had a moment of awe when he saw the spread -- it was beautiful, and if he ever had a place, this is the sort of place he'd have. Whoever this guy was, he had money. He parked and got out. A cement ramp led up to double doors. The house had no steps.

Shreck walked up the ramp, found the door open.

"I'm in the shop," came the call over the loudspeaker.

Shreck walked through the house, through its wide doors, past the sun deck. Out back he could see the rifle range, the white targets lodged against the base of the hill.

At last he reached the rear of the house, and stepped through another wide door. A man who looked ten years older than he was sat curled in a wheelchair and was very carefully turning a single brass shell in his hand as he worked it with some kind of metalworking tool, a keylike handle that embraced a brass cartridge case locked in a vise.

"Hello, Colonel Shreck."

"Hello, Mr. Scott."

Lon Scott wore his gray hair short and neat above the long face and aquiline profile of a blue blood. His eyes were dark and ropes of veins showed along the muscled ridges of his forearms and hands. But his body was horribly twisted, the spine bent like a bow, his dead legs awkwardly spindled beneath him. He couldn't exercise his body, so it had acquired a packing of fat, and his stomach bulged under his belt. Once beautiful, he was now grotesque.

Shreck tried to let nothing show on his face, but he knew a trace of horror had crept into his eyes; and he knew Scott noticed.

"Not very pretty, is it? That's what a bullet in the spine can do to a healthy growing boy, Colonel. Turn him into a geranium."

"I'm sorry, sir. I just -- "

"Don't worry. I can handle it. Now, my friend Hugh Meachum said you had some bad news for me. Let's have it, Colonel. You don't look like the sort of man who pulls his punches."