"Hmmm. Did you see him enter? As I recall, there's only one entry to that courtyard."

"No, sir. And I was on station at 1000 hours."

"Damn, isn't that strange? Yet in his log he says he saw something suspicious at Four-fifteen St. Ann Street up near the roofline and entered the courtyard and -- "

"Your Honor, I object," said the quick Kelso. "Detective Timmons isn't on trial here and counsel himself objected when I tried to introduce the detective's account -- "

"Your Honor, I'm just an old country boy, but I'm wondering how this heroic detective turned himself invisible that day. That's a hell of a trick."

"Your Honor," Kelso pushed ahead, "let me further point out that Mr. Memphis has been dismissed from his job in the Bureau out of gross negligence and dereliction of duty. His screwups on this case are notorious throughout the law enforcement community. To offer him as any kind of paragon of professionalism, as the defense is clearly trying, is ludicrous beyond words."

Great. Now ritual humiliation in public added to everything else.

"He does have a point, Mr. Vincent. But I've marked your observation down for further study. All right, Mr. Kelso. Proceed."

Nick lumbered back to his seat, feeling the weight of ages on his suddenly frail shoulders. Another nail in the coffin.

He fought his way back to the seat next to Sally, and she leaned over and put a hand on his.

"You tried," she said.

"Catastrophe," was all he could think to say.

He looked up to see the judge announce an hour recess for lunch.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

On the way out, two or three news types hounded him, but he just bulled on by; more of them were clustered around the star of the hour, the charismatic young prosecutor, who gobbled up sound-bite-sized nuggets for the six P.M. news. Sam Vincent was nowhere to be found.

"Sally," he said, after they had sat in glum silence for a few minutes at a diner a few blocks away, the food claiming his last eleven dollars, "I think we have to talk."

"All right."

"I don't think we're going to win. In fact, I know we're not going to win. Maybe Bob specializes in getting out of tight spots but this time...well, the point is, it's not going to happen today. The noose is too tight. It's over."

"Nick, I -- "

"And when he goes, I go, and when I go, you'll go. But it doesn't have to happen like that. I want you to call Kelso and volunteer to testify against me. Tell him I duped you, I seduced you, I used you. I won't deny it. It's me they really want. If you give them me on an espionage charge, something heavier than this stupid 'impersonating a federal officer' thing, they'll go for it in an instant. It's the smart move. Okay?"

"The smart move," she said.

"Howard only wants me destroyed, because I wouldn't give him his phony undercover thing. And there's this mysterious old goat named Hugh Meachum that I think works for the CIA or did or something like that, he's here to make sure it all stays contained. That's the point of the drill. I know they won't -- "

"Nick, let me tell you something. Bob Lee Swagger may specialize in getting out of tight places, but you specialize in loyalty. You gave everything to the Bureau and everything to Myra all those years. I've watched you. I've been watching you for years, and how much you gave. And how I was never a honey to you; you were the only one who ever treated me like a human being, and you never came on to me, and believe me, A. B. Nick, you wouldn't believe some of the champions of the family value system that came on to me. And that's because at some point you are fundamentally the most decent man who ever lived. And now you've given your loyalty to Bob Lee Swagger. Well, Nick, I've loved you for half a decade and if all I get for it is today and tomorrow until we're both indicted and held without bond, then that's enough for me. I'll give you the loyalty you've been giving everybody else all those years. It's time for somebody to give you some loyalty."

"Sally, I -- "

"And I'll bet you that old country boy Bob Lee Swagger has some sly left up his sleeve. I'll tell you this, Nick, I'm from the South and I've known men like that my whole life. They're not much damn good at anything except dying in wars and shooting helpless animals, Lord knows why, and outsmarting the law. They're sly, that's their talent. And I never met anybody who could outsly a sly old country boy and from what I've heard of Bob Lee Swagger, he's the slyest of them all. There's just no way a carpetbagging yankee like Howdy Duty or an old ghost like Hugh Meachum could bring it off. Nick, you've just got to believe in Bob Lee, do you hear me?"

He touched her arm. He wanted to kiss her. All that radiance in those bright eyes. Dammit, she believed, where he himself had lost all belief.

"Come on, son," she said, "time to git back to the show. Got me a feeling there's fireworks to come."

The young man's name was Walter Jacobs. He was extremely clean-cut, balding, mild of face and demeanor, his eyes narrowly intelligent and beaming with goodwill behind his wire frames, his suit blue and crisp, his shirt white and crisp, his tie black and crisp.

And he was death.

He was the one who'd do it, finally, push it that last little bit.

"Your employment, Mr. Jacobs?"

"I'm a senior firearms technician in the FBI Forensic Ballistics Laboratory in Washington, D.C."

And so to means at last. Kelso, grunting to make it appear heavier and more lethal for the judge, bent to lift the means.

"And this is it?"

"Yes, sir," said Jacobs.

"Your Honor, I'd like to enter this rifle as state exhibit four, please."

"So mark it."

"And this."

It was a tiny, twisted piece of lead and copper -- the base of a hollowtip bullet.

"Yes. Exhibit number five, Mr. Kelso."

"And this -- the final link -- as state exhibit six."

He held up a thin brass tube, 2.015 inches long, narrower at one end, rimmed at the other. It was an empty cartridge case.

"So marked," said the judge.

"Would you identify this exhibit please, Mr. Jacobs."

"Yes, sir. It's a customized Remington Model 700V bolt action center-fire rifle in .308 caliber with a Leupold 10x Ultra Scope. It was recovered in the attic of Four-fifteen St. Ann Street, in this city, on the date March first, 1992."

"All right. Can you tell us of the rifle's background?"

Quickly, Jacobs sketched the rifle's course from the Remington custom shop in Ilion, New York, to its special-order purchase through the Naval PX system by the commanding officer of the Marine Corps Marksmanship Unit at Camp Lejeune in 1975, where the paperwork said it was presented to Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, that unit, on the occasion of his disability retirement from the service.

"I see. Can you characterize the nature of the weapon?"

"Yes, sir. Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble and evinced a great deal of guncraft in making that rifle superbly accurate. The original custom rifle was very accurate, what we'd call a minute-of-angle rifle. But he has done things to refine it even more. For example, the original Remington barrel has been replaced by a custom-made Hart stainless steel barrel, with button-cut rifling. That work, incidentally, was performed by Hart Rifle Barrels of Lafayette, New York, according to company records, for Bob Lee Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, in June of 1982. The new fiberglass stock was manufactured by McMillan and Company, of Phoenix, Arizona; a stock of that model was sent to Bob Lee Swagger of Blue Eye, Arkansas. The firing pin has been replaced by a much lighter one of titanium from Brownells, of Montezuma, Iowa, to improve lock time thirty-five percent, that is, increase the speed between the trigger pull and the actual firing. The rifle has been bedded in Devcon aluminum and its screws have been 'pillar bedded,' meaning that they've been driven through a pillar of aluminum inserted in the stock. All of this, of course, makes the rifle more stable and therefore more accurate."

"Thank you. And now, the last two items."

Kelso held up the lead and copper scrap.

"That's what remains of a 200-grain boattail hollowpoint Sierra MatchKing bullet," said Jacobs. "It was recovered from the podium of the Louis Armstrong Park here in New Orleans, clotted with brain tissue and skull fragments."

"Is there enough left to make a ballistic identification?"

"No, sir. We were unable to get a rifling signature from the bullet, since it was so mutilated."

"I see. So what did you do?"

"Sir, we carefully sluiced the barrel of the rifle and took very careful samplings of copper and lead residue that remained in its rifling channels. We took copper and lead samplings from the bullet. Then, we made neutron activation analysis examinations of each metallic sample."

"What did you learn?"

"That the bullet and the residue were atomically identical, sir."

"Proving?"

"Proving that either that bullet, or one exactly like it, was the last bullet fired down that barrel. There were no other identifiable lead or copper tracings."

"Are these bullets common?"

"They're manufactured in small lots by Sierra Bullets of Sedalia, Missouri, primarily for thousand-yard shooting. The yearly production is less than five thousand. It's not a common hunting round. We found several boxes, including one recently opened, in the suspect's shop in Blue Eye, Arkansas."

"I see. And finally, the case. Would you characterize it, please?"

"Yes, sir. Well, sir, the case indicates a handload assembled with some care and skill. Both the outside and the inside of the neck had been turned, to guarantee smooth bullet release and concentricity. The primer, a Federal Bench Rest primer, had been seated precisely in the center of the primer pocket. The flash hole had been deburred for consistent ignition and the primer pocket cleaned and reamed for perfect depth and squareness."

"Could you mate it to the rifle?"

"Yes, sir. There are six tests and measurements that one can make to ascertain whether or not a shell was fired in the chamber of a rifle and ejected from it. These include neck diameter vis-a-vis chamber diameter, thickness, chamber imperfection pattern, rim indentations...and on and on. It passed all six."

"So it was fired in and ejected from that rifle."

"It would be mathematically impossible for it not to be."

"Thank you, Mr. Jacobs. What kind of case was it?"

"Sir, it was a Federal Nickel Match .308 case. Federal doesn't make them anymore but we found several boxes of them in Bob Lee Swagger's shop. And we found Federal large Bench Rest Rifle Primers. We identified the powder residue in the case as IMR-4895. We found an eight-pound keg of IMR-4895 in Mr. Swagger's shop, half gone."

"Thank you, Mr. Jacobs." He turned. "Your Honor, I think you can see the chain. We have motive -- resentment of the president as evinced in the letter. We have opportunity, as Agent Memphis's testimony placed Swagger in the sniper's nest at the time of the shooting. And we have means -- his rifle, custom built, painfully assembled over the years into the most efficient killing machine ever made. We have the bullet from the rifle. We have the shell ejected from the rifle. And a good man is dead. And there sits his killer."

"We're screwed," said Nick to Sally.

"The prosecution rests," said Kelso.

"Mr. Vincent."

"Your Honor, I have no -- Oh. Just out of curiosity. Mr. Jacobs, how does the rifle shoot?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"How does she shoot? If you're examining a rifle to see if it killed a man, don't you have to have some idea how it shoots?"

"I can assure you, sir, it has all the hallmarks of a rifle customized for maximum accuracy."

"Yes, but how does it shoot?"

Jacobs was suddenly a bit uncomfortable.

"Your Honor," said Kelso, "I object. This has no bearing on -- "

"Mr. Kelso, you introduced the rifle to evidence, not Mr. Vincent. Objection overruled. Answer the question please, Mr. Jacobs."

"Well, sir," said Jacobs, "I assume it shoots very well."

"Whoa, son," said Sam Vincent. "You assume? Now does that mean, you haven't fired the rifle?"

"Yes, sir. There was no cause to, given the fact that the recovered bullet was too badly damaged to read the rifling signature."

"So you can't say how accurate this rifle is, not ever having fired it. You can't testify that this rifle is capable of the kind of accuracy you say it is."

Nick held his breath, wondering if the old goat had come up with just the faintest opening.

"What's going on?" whispered Sally.

"See," Nick explained, "because there was no ballistic signature on the murder bullet, they couldn't shoot it, because they didn't want to have to say in court they failed to get a match. They just passed on the test altogether. I don't know where this is leading."

Jacobs held his ground.

"Sir, I've examined thousands of rifles in my time, and I examined that one minutely, including taking it completely apart and examining it for function and reliability, and I can say -- I can guarantee you -- that everything in that rifle is consistent with a weapon of extreme accuracy. There was no point in shooting the rifle, as we had no sample of its rifling to test."

"Or maybe you did test it and it didn't match," said Sam Vincent.

Kelso was on his feet screaming.

"I object," he yelled. "Counsel is impugning the integrity of the FBI's ballistic laboratories, an institution with a worldwide reputation for integrity."

"Or maybe the FBI tampered with the rif -- " Sam started.

"That'll be quite enough, Mr. Vincent," said the judge. "Objection sustained. There's no evidence to suggest tampering."

"Sir," said Jacobs, "may I make a statement?"

"Go ahead," said the judge.

"Sir, I've been testifying in cases for over ten years and nobody has ever suggested that our lab would tamper with evidence. On my word of honor, I guarantee that that rifle is exactly, precisely the way we found it, except for disassembly and the barrel swatching process I've already described. It has not been altered in any way at all."

"Seems to me he has you, Mr. Vincent," said Judge Hughes.