"He was out of Pennsylvania, I remember that. Murdoch, I think, was his last name. Can't give you any more than that."

"Do you have any idea who might have built the rifle? Maybe I could call him."

"Don't have a clue. It'd have to be someone who had paid that crazy $3000 tax, and I don't know anyone who'd be willing to do that. Those ATF bastards might come kick your door in and stomp your cats to death."

"Or burn you alive, right?" the agent said with a forced chuckle, trying to keep the man talking.

"Yeah, if they brought the FBI into it, that might happen," the gunsmith answered. The two agents jumped when they heard that. "But give Nelson a try, too. Out in Colorado," the gunsmith went on. "He's worth a call."

"Listen," the FBI man said quickly, "you've been very good to talk to me about this, and-" "Oh, hell, no problem. Didn't help you out much. But if you're really serious, I got one last idea." "What's that?"

"Build the dang thing yourself. Get you one of these Asian mill-drills for about fifteen hundred, new, and a decent used lathe for thirty-five hundred, four thousand. Be only five parts you'd have to make. Couple hours a night, you'd have your action in two, three months. Damn sight sooner than any gunsmith you'll find to build it, especially me. You'll still have to get all those stupid forms and pay the $200, but you got to do that anyway. Wouldn't have to pay the $3000 'less you built one to sell."

"Ah, I'll think about that."

"Okay. Well, good talking to you-I got to get back to the shop. Good luck." The man in Vermont hung up. "Let's keep going on the list," Alex Neumann said with an enthusiasm he did not feel.

"Maybe the shooter built it at home, like he said." "I don't even want to think about that."

"What the hell is this?" Alex Neumann demanded as he stood, openmouthed, by one of the desks. "Where's the guy that sits here?"

The day before, ATF had given Neumann and his assistant the list of all the licensed destructive device manufacturers in the country. After eliminating General Electric and other similar government contractors, there were only a handful of small independents. One of them from Texas had indeed made several bolt action single shot rifles for the 14.5mm Russian round, but neither he nor anyone else had made a single shot 20mm.

Now, on the morning before the mysterious Mr. Jones was due to contact the President, Alex Neumann was standing by one of the desks in the Washington office. Next to a picture cube holding photos of some agent's wife and children sat a fired 20mm projectile. It was the same shape as the M246 'firestarter' Smitty at the FBI forensic lab had given Neumann, including the aluminum nose cap. The projectile body, however, was not painted. Instead, it was bare steel that was covered with a patina of rust. The copper drive band just above the base of the bullet was engraved with rifling marks, but otherwise, the bullet looked like it had never been fired. It certainly showed no evidence of having struck anything.

"That's Polvecki's desk, sir. Shall I go find him?" another agent asked.

"Yes. Immediately." The agent hurried off, and in a few moments he returned with a very worried-looking man.

"Where did you get this?" Alex Neumann demanded, holding up the rusty 20mm projectile. "One of the crew that came from the helicopter crash site gave it to me, sir. I think he got it from one of the divers."

"Get hold of your friend, and right now. I want to talk to that diver immediately. Get me as soon as you have him on the line. I'll be over with Smitty." I hope I'm not clutching at straws here Alex Neumann thought as he hurried off to deliver the projectile to the forensic people.

"Ah, sir, I think I know the one you're talking about, but I picked up a whole bunch of different bullets off the bottom of that pit. Just for souvenirs. I mean, they were all over, just lying there on the limestone floor. They weren't part of the helicopter crash, or anything. Somebody's been shooting into the water in that quarry pit for a hell of a long time, sir."

"Were there others like the one you gave Agent Polvecki?"

"I really don't know, sir. I was concentrating on finding helicopter parts, and I just scooped up a few bullets off the bottom and put them in my pocket while I was looking for pieces. I didn't see any harm in it."

"No, you did fine. It's just that this bullet you picked up may have some bearing on the case, we're not sure. I want you to take a team back there immediately, and this time I want your search to be specifically for bullets at the bottom of the pit. You're probably right about people plinking there, so don't waste your time on anything that looks like it came out of a normal pistol or rifle; I want only big stuff. Don't just confine your search to where the helicopter was found. Look all over. Then get everything you got up to Lambert Field in St. Louis and to an air cargo company with next-flight-out capability.

Don't spend all night picking up bullets. Give it an hour or two with a big team, so you get a lot done, then ship up what you've got. We have a deadline."

"Yessir," the man said, and Alex Neumann broke the connection.

"We may have more samples in another eight or ten hours, Smitty," Neumann said to the forensics specialist. The tall, balding technician tossed the bullet a few inches in the air and caught it.

"It's a Vulcan projectile all right," he said, scowling, "but it's a practice round, not H.E. or incendiary, like the ones that shot down the helicopters. This thing would just make a hole when it hit." He thought a moment and revised his statement. "I take that back. If it hit steel, or rock, you'd probably get a mild pyrotechnic effect, from the aluminum nose cap vaporizing into aluminum oxide under the impact. That's what the ordnance experts tell me, at least. But this one obviously didn't hit anything other than water. One other thing-this wasn't fired out of a Vulcan or a revolver cannon."

"What?"

"It came out of something else. Rifling marks aren't the same width as either of those two guns. Those guns have a gain twist. Whatever shot this had conventional rilling. Diameter of the drive band's not the same, either, but that might be just manufacturing tolerances. We really need more than one bullet to look at."

"I'm hoping that in about ten hours, you'll have others."

"Ah, sir, we're starting to sort the bullets that just came in from Missouri, but, there's an awful lot of them. Maybe you better come look." Alex Neumann closed his eyes and gripped the receiver more tightly.

"Did those goddamn divers pick up a bunch of rifle and pistol bullets?" Neumann demanded. "I told them nothing that would have come out of a pistol or hunting rifle."

"No, that's not the problem, sir," the man on the other end assured him. "Looks like it's almost all .50 caliber and up."

"Well, set aside all the .50s. We're interested in the bigger stuff. How many bullets did they ship us, anyway?"

"We got no idea of the count, sir," the agent told him truthfully. "But the weight's more than four tons." "That might be him," the President said quickly when he heard Harrison Potter's cellular phone ring. Potter nodded and pressed a button on the instrument.

"Hello?" Potter listened, then nodded to the Chief Executive. "Ah, Mr. Jones, I think it's time you talked directly to the President. I'm giving the phone to him."

"So I finally get to talk to you, Mr. Jones," the President said. Neumann nodded, letting the President know their devices were tracking the call.

"I hope you understand my caution," Ray told him.

"I now wish I had...considered your points more carefully," the President confessed. Both men knew that the lawyer's negotiating position was stronger than ever. The government was in a virtual state of siege. Every time anyone opened the newspapers or turned on the news, another federal agent or antigun politician had been shot in the back while on his way to work, had his house firebombed, or been knifed to death on vacation.

"Before we work out the details, Mr. President," Ray Johnson said, "There is now an additional demand that is absolutely non-negotiable. My clients were pleased at the public reaction to Senator Katzenbaum's death. Apparently, many people in this country felt that he should have been tried for treason years ago. There is another person now in the private sector who must face similar judgment, with your unofficial sanction."

"I cannot use the office of the Presidency to carry out contract murder," the President said levelly. Ray Johnson gave a short bark of laughter.

"You do it all the time. You just don't want to do it to one of your own. And anyway, your people won't have to do a thing, just look the other way and not interfere, then let the verdict of suicide stand without picking at the details too closely. The White House has some experience in that area," he added.

"I won't allow the assassination of a former President of the United States," the President said firmly, mainly for the benefit of the recording devices.

This time Ray's reaction was genuine laughter. I can tell he's considering it Ray thought with amusement. "You won't have to do that," Ray assured the Chief Executive. "He has it bad enough, with what he's got to live with, and all. My clients will settle for smaller fish." Then he told the President what he wanted.

"I see. Well." He chewed his lip. "That shouldn't be a problem," he said finally. "And the Secret Service isn't involved in...in that instance."

"I know," Ray said. "Now that that's out of the way, let's get back to where we were at your last meeting with Judge Potter."

"A good suggestion. But before we do, Mr. Jones, I have to comment on what your people did out in Wyoming. Most impressive," the President said with what might have been either fear or respect, or both.

"That wasn't any client of mine," Ray Johnson said immediately. "But we welcome the ever-widening support." Ray gave a short grunt. "Damn, but that guy could shoot, huh? Wonder how he got so good?" Though the remark was made ingenuously, it had a powerful effect. Ray could not see it, but all the color drained out of the President's face. Ray was unaware that his casual comment had just cemented the negotiations.

As the President and Ray Johnson continued their discussion, the FBI's electronic device was busy gathering data. Unfortunately for them, the results would be the same. The call had been shunted through yet another electronic distributor of long-distance air time, this one based in Los Angeles, with one-timeuse access codes sold anonymously in chain stores. It was a dead end.

After Ray had finished speaking with the President, he hung up and dialed another number. Cindy Caswell picked up the receiver of the pay phone and held it to her ear.

"You there?"

"Yes," she said, recognizing Ray's voice.

"It's a go." Cindy hung up the receiver and wiped off the instrument with her silk scarf. Then she walked across the street and down the block to another phone. Cindy deposited ten dollars in quarters, and dialed a number from memory.

"Yeah," came Allen Kane's voice on the other end.

"You're on," Cindy said, and hung up.

"What the...?" Alex Neumann said as he stared at the piles upon piles of bullets laid out on the folding tables. On the floor in the corner of the room sat a mound of boattailed .50 caliber bullets. The pile was seven feet in diameter and about two feet high. The tables were covered with larger slugs of different sizes, segregated into piles of like type. The largest bullets were about three inches in diameter. Alex walked over to the table with the 20mm slugs on it, and one of the technicians approached him.

"Sir, when you told us we could put all the .50 caliber ones aside, it sped things up a lot. We're just about done."

"How many 20mm projectiles do you have here?" Neumann asked.

"A thousand, at least. About three or four to the pound." Neumann noted that there were quite a number of larger diameter bullets gathered on two of the other tables. He turned his attention back to the 20mm pile and saw immediately that not all the bullets were the same shape. Most were steel-bodied bullets with a conical aluminum nose section, rounded at the tip, just like the ones he had seen before. About one out of every twelve, however, were steel throughout, and had a rounded ogive that came to a sharp point.

"Get this whole pile to Smitty," he said, patting the mound of steel slugs.

Allen Kane knocked sharply on the door of the double-wide, and in a few moments it opened. "Good morning, Ma'am," Allen said as he suppressed an involuntary grimace. "My name's Wade. The Director sent me to speak with you." He held out the credentials of an ATF agent he had killed two days before. The woman peered at them momentarily through her thick glasses. Then she opened the aluminum screen door and ushered Allen Kane into the drab surroundings.

"What is it now? More hearings again?" she asked as she turned to close the door. Allen glanced around, confirming that no one else was nearby.

"Nothing that complicated," he said as he withdrew Wilson Blair's Beretta 92 from the zippered folio he carried, jammed it in the woman's mouth, and pulled the trigger. The steel-cored 9mm 'Cyclone' bullet went through her soft palate and blasted a hole out the back of her skull. Brain tissue and cerebro-spinal fluid sprayed onto the wall as the slug chopped though several layers of drywall and came to rest in a 2x4 at the far corner of the structure. As the slide cycled, the front sight chipped one of the corpse's front teeth.

The shapeless body collapsed in a heap on the floor. Allen Kane wiped off the gun with his handkerchief. He wrapped the cloth around the pistol's slide and haphazardly pressed the grip against the dead woman's right hand. Then he tossed the weapon four feet away onto the cheap carpeting. He took an envelope from the pocket of his suit coat and tore the end off it. He shook it, and out fell a folded note which landed on the floor next to the corpse. I TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY read the words which had been printed in felttip ink with the aid of a ruler.

Anyone who was of a mind to could find lots of things wrong with the scene Allen Kane was leaving, but it was plenty good enough for a sympathetic investigative team. Using his handkerchief as a glove, Allen let himself out.

He smiled when he got out to the sidewalk. The sun felt wonderful.

"Mr. President? Jones again," Ray said in a neutral tone of voice

"Has anything...changed?" the President asked into Potter's cellular.

"Not at all. Everything is going very well. The scene was left so that your people can easily defend a verdict of suicide." How's that for a little wake-up call, hm? Ray thought. He could not see it, but the President did a creditable job of looking like an unflappable diplomat whose necktie had just been set afire.

"So let's finish up the last of the details, and call it a day, shall we?" Ray Johnson said cheerfully.

"Same deal, Mr. President," Alex Neumann said as he shook his head in defeat. "Call was made with an access code. We can maybe get what store that batch of numbers was shipped to, but then what? Ask the clerks for descriptions of who bought them? Even if we could do that fast enough, it wouldn't surprise me if Mr. Jones got someone else to shop for him."

"And did you check on..."

"Lying on her living room carpet with her brains blown out the back of her head. Printed note next to the corpse, 'I take full responsibility', and a Beretta 92 lying four feet away. Checked the serial number-it's Wilson Blair's gun." The President nodded slowly, and gave a long sigh.

"All right," he said finally. "We'll play it out tomorrow night. Just like I promised Mr. Jones I would."