"Oh, the person who should do that is Theresa! Do you think he could fit her?" Cindy asked, looking at their friend.

"David can fit anybody. And he'd probably pay to fit Theresa." The young dancer laughed. She had a twenty-two inch waist and a chest of which she and her surgeon were both very proud.

"If the guns I want are taken, that's what I'll do," Cindy decided.

"And finally, the Two-Man Unlimited class," David Richards announced. "As Supreme Administrator-ForLife, I declare Guy Arnold and Tom Battle the winners in this category, with a time of three point nine seconds. Congratulations, gentlemen," he said as the two men walked up and shook his hand.

"What about you, Henry?" Theresa whispered. She looked around and saw that others in the room were talking amongst themselves, asking the same question.

"Don't worry about me," Henry told her.

"Thanks, great shoot, David," Guy Arnold said.

"Yeah, thanks," his partner agreed. The two men both drew numbers from the top hat.

"And now I would like to make a special announcement," David Richards said quickly. "In the Unlimited event, I am starting a new 'Outlaw' class, like the 'Run-what-you-brung' class in drag racing. Some of our competitors live in non-machine-gun states, and are restricted to using inferior shotguns when they practice before coming up here for the big shoot. So I'm putting machine guns in the Outlaw class. I've called it the Outlaw class because you have to shoot so much ammo practicing, it puts you in violation of all these crazy 'arsenal' laws they're talking about." Catcalls came from the audience at this comment.

"We're all in the outlaw class, David!" shouted one man.

"That's the truth," the host agreed. "And the winner of the first annual New Lease Outlaw competition is Henry Bowman. For this one, Henry doesn't draw a number, he gets his own special prize. Come on up here, Henry." The crowd cheered as Henry walked up and accepted the long cardboard box.

"Open it!" someone yelled. Henry did, and held up a break-open, single-barrel shotgun with rifle sights. It was worth about ninety dollars. The crowd howled.

"Concurrent with the new outlaw event," Richards announced, "I am creating the Shootaholic Rehab class, where you will be required to use a weapon like the one Henry Bowman has just won. You'll notice that this H&R shotgun is fully rifled, so you have to use slugs. The Rehab class is for guys who are trying to quit. It is a three-pin event. You will be allowed only three rounds of ammo, and you'll have to use slugs, because the rifling will give you donut-shaped shot patterns with a hole about four feet in diameter at twenty-five feet. Oh, one other thing: you start with an empty gun." Gales of laughter came from the crowd as they imagined competing with a single shot weapon under those rules. Henry Bowman laughed along with them, and started to return to his seat.

"Wait a minute, Henry, you haven't claimed the rest of your prize," Richards said. "Boys!" he shouted.

From the other end of the dining hall, pinsetters and other shoot workers began filing into the room, one after the other. Each carried an identical cardboard box about the size of an airline carry-on bag. Each box was obviously heavy. As soon as each worker set his box down by the podium, he went out to get another. Soon there were three stacks of boxes, each as tall as a man.

"This event is going to require plenty of practice," Richards announced, "so along with the gun, I'm including twenty-five cases of twelve-gauge slugs. I hope you brought a trailer." The crowd went wild, cheering and stamping their feet as Henry shook David Richards' hand once more and went back to sit with the two women. Everyone there knew Richards had spent over two thousand dollars on Henry Bowman's prize. It was the kind of thing David Richards liked to do at his shoot.

"That's it for the awards," Richards announced. "Dessert should be out shortly. Have at it," he instructed, and went off to find a seat at one of the tables.

"Earl!" Henry said when he saw that his chair next to Theresa had been taken by a lean, muscular man in his fifties with short, curly blond hair. "I didn't know you were here. Lord, I haven't seen you in ages!" Earl Taylor-Edgarton stood up and clasped his old friend's arm.

"Didn't want to interrupt while you were enjoying the company of these two charming ladies, but when you went up to the front, I judged it was every man for himself."

"Cindy, Theresa, this is Earl Taylor-Edgarton, formerly of Rhodesia, and a man who I haven't seen in years."

"Are you the man who teaches those classes about guarding against terrorism and assassination attempts?" Cindy asked.

"Yes, that's how Henry and I met, actually, years ago. It's slacked off a bit in the last few years," he admitted, pronouncing it 'lost'. "Though business has picked up again of late," he added with a meaningful look.

"Will you excuse me for a moment?" Theresa asked. "Mr. Richards is waving at me and I think he wants something."

"Certainly," Henry said. He and Earl rose as the young woman got up and left the table. "I think David is keen on your friend," Earl said to Henry and Cindy. Both of them started laughing when they heard this. Then Henry turned serious.

"Earl, before we get talking about other stuff, what's your read on this Oklahoma City thing? I've used more explosives than most people, and there's a lot of things that don't look right to me, but I'm no authority on blowing up urban targets with improvised charges. Everybody's been talking about it ever since it happened, but I haven't heard an opinion from a real expert. What do you think?"

"It's interesting you should be skeptical, Henry," Earl Taylor-Edgarton said. "There are a number of things which don't sit right in my mind, as well. I can say this with authority: if Mr. McVeigh did in Europe what he is alleged to have done here, he would be hailed by every newspaper and magazine on the Continent as an absolute 'Master Bomber'."

"Why?" Cindy asked.

"For one, because of his faultless construction of an improvised shaped charge on such a grand scale. The blast in Oklahoma City was a directional one. A car bomb sitting in an open area normally radiates its force equally all 'round. However, in Oklahoma, the devastation directed towards the Federal building far exceeded the damage on the other side of the bomb. I saw a quick mention of the theory that the bomber used sandbags inside the vehicle to direct the blast, but I'll tell you straight, there's quite a bit more to it than that." Henry and Cindy both nodded in understanding.

"The next troubling bit," Earl went on, "is the fertilizer issue. As you well know, ANFO is a low-grade explosive. It's good for shoving big heaps of earth aside when you put it in a series of holes in the ground, but to set it out in the open and expect it to shatter a structure meters and meters away with nothing but air between? No," he said simply. "Those vertical steel supports were sheared off by a high-level explosion, like Semtex."

"That's why the news reports kept upping the amount of fertilizer that was in the van," Henry said immediately. "It started out as a one-thousand-pound bomb. Then fifteen hundred, then twenty-five. I think they've levelled off at five thousand pounds now."

"And that provokes another major issue. The five thousand pounds had to be in a number of smaller containers. It wasn't two and a half tons poured into the van like so much oatmeal. Say our master bomber built compartments holding five hundred pounds each, which would be a feat in itself. It's not that bloody easy to get ten large quantities of fertilizer to detonate simultaneously. Last month I read a theory that the ANFO was in a hundred forty 5-gallon buckets. No. It's virtually impossible to get good simultaneous detonation on a hundred charges, without top-quality commercial detcord or other high-level detonators that are harder to get than high-level explosives themselves."

"Could you...improvise a bomb that would shear off the steel girders?" Cindy asked.

"Perhaps. And again, this is where it would indicate that a 'master bomber' had engineered this explosion. There are ingredients which can be added to the basic ANFO mixture to increase its shock, but I don't know if I could create such a result as we saw in Oklahoma. Not with ANFO as the base. If Mr. McVeigh accomplished such a feat, he is a genius with explosives."

"It's just like what Henry was saying today at the Oswald shoot," Cindy Caswell said. Earl Taylor-Edgarton nodded in agreement, and a reflective look came over his face.

"You know, in 1969, I believe it was, a group of eight young people blew up the U.S. Army mathematics laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. In that case as well, the explosives used were considerably more sophisticated than you'd expect to see a bunch of disenchanted students produce. The authorities caught seven of the group, and as you'd expect, they were all near the bottom of the food chain. The seven all agreed that the technical work had been done by the one other member, who no one seemed to know much about. The FBI found a false birth certificate, as I recall, and other identification that led nowhere. What's so funny?" Earl asked.

"You reminded me of something, that's all," Henry said, thinking about the stack of alternate ID, addresses, and credit cards he'd acquired in his college days by scouring cemeteries. "It's nothing. Go on."

"They never did find him," the Rhodesian continued, "but now it's assumed he was an agent provocateur. Your government did those kinds of things back in those days. I'd forgotten all about that math lab until just now."

"That's not the only historic precedent, Henry said. "Hitler's men burned the Reichstag to make it look like they had more opposition and justify violent retaliation. That worked like a charm. And at Amherst College, a few years after I graduated, someone burned a cross in front of the black fraternity when the campus Afro-Am organization was about to get its student funding reduced. Guess who finally confessed after his girlfriend ratted him out?"

"The President of the Afro-Am organization?" Cindy guessed.

"I must've told you the story before."

"Did they lynch the bugger?"

"No, but it did put a strain on race relations at the school for a while, from what I hear. Anyway, I think it does look a little suspicious that our master bomber picks a federal building with a day-care center in it, and that the ATF people were all conveniently out of the building when the bomb blew up."

"What?" Cindy asked. "I hadn't heard that."

"Yeah. They were all off at a conference somewhere out of town. Office was empty. Then, of course, there's this master bomber's so-called flight from the scene. He drives away, speeding, in a car with no license plate. He's wearing a shoulder holster with a Glock in it on top of a T-shirt, which is another big red flag. And when a cop stops him, after he's just killed a hundred people, does he blast him and leave? No. He lets the cop arrest him. Not for the gun; he had a carry permit for that. For a pocketknife. That was the concealed-weapon charge."

"You can't be serious," Earl Taylor-Edgarton said, astonished.

"Yep. So they got in a dig at the few states that are still trying to get carry laws, too. 'Oh, my God! The Oklahoma Bomber was carrying a gun, and it was legal! How awful!' Governor Flanagan in Missouri was rubbing his hands together."

"You think it was the ATF that did it, Henry?" Cindy asked.

"I don't have a clue. But it seems hard to feature a lot of those guys being in on it. Someone would rat out the rest of the group. I confess that my first reaction, when I heard what had happened and that ATF was out of the building, was that it was an accident."

"An accident?" Earl and Cindy both asked, not understanding.

"Not an accident that a bomb went off, an accident that any people were killed. That's why I wanted to ask you about the explosives end of it, Earl. I mean, I wouldn't think a bomb out in a parking lot would make a big building collapse, would you? I'd think you'd need to get the truck inside, like in a basement parking garage.

"See, my first thought was that maybe a couple of individual agents were scared of losing their jobs what with the upcoming hearings on ATF, Waco, and Ruby Ridge. So they go stick a bomb in a van out in the middle of the parking lot on the Waco anniversary, figuring they'll break a bunch of windows, scare the shit out of everybody, and shift attention towards the militias and the gun guys, and away from ninja-suited tax agents with machine guns.

"Except that it's a government building in a Democratic state, and when it was built, the contractor gave the Governor a big kickback, then left out a bunch of rebar and went real light on the mix. And instead of just having a bunch of windows break, the whole building fell down. Hell, in Chicago, back when I was nineteen or twenty, a whole highway collapsed for that reason. Had one-fourth as many reinforcements in it as the prints said it had. As I said, I didn't have any expertise on the explosive end of things, so maybe that accident theory won't work. But I'm a big believer in history repeating itself."

"I've not seen your theory advanced in the press," Earl Taylor-Edgarton said with a smile. "Perhaps you should suggest it to the FBI."

"There's an idea," Henry said.

"This McVeigh person is keeping his mouth shut, from all the reports I've read. Smartest thing he could do," Earl Taylor-Edgarton declared. Henry shot Cindy a look, and she smiled almost imperceptibly, remembering.

"I wonder how he spends his time in prison," Cindy said. Suddenly, the Rhodesian grinned. "If our friend Henry here is right," Earl said to her, "and history repeats itself, Mr. McVeigh has plenty to do."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, this McVeigh fellow is said to have been angry with a government he felt was oppressing him, so he allegedly set a bomb at a nerve center for government activities, and blew it up, killed dozens of government employees, women, and children.

"After World War Two, Menachem Begin led the Irgun Zvai Leumi guerrilla movement against the British government because the Brits were occupying Palestine. In 1947, Begin blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was a center for British government operations. He, too, killed many dozens of people- army officers, wives, children, and hotel workers."

"So?" Cindy asked. Henry smiled tightly because he saw where Earl was heading.

"So if history is our guide," Earl Taylor-Edgarton said with raised eyebrows, "then Mr. McVeigh is undoubtedly working on his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize."

June 21,1995 "Look, I'm, uh...really embarrassed," Cindy Caswell said as she reclined her seat-back another few degrees. "I didn't see this coming." Henry started laughing, took his hand off the steering wheel, and squeezed his friend's leg.

"You know, kiddo, it reminds me of the old joke about the guy whose wife dies, and he's just crying his eyes out at the funeral. His friend tells him to get a grip, and the guy says, 'No one to hold close, and kiss, and cuddle, and make passionate love to, and, oh, God, I can't stand it!' And the friend says, 'Look Harry, you're only thirty-five, you're in great shape, and people really like you. I'm sure that some time in the future you'll find another woman and you'll have all those things again. Buck up, man.' And the guy looks at his friend and says, 'Sure, but what am I going to do tonight?'"

"I still can't believe she's moving in with him without even going back home first," Cindy said. "It's my fault. I never should have suggested that stupid joke."

"Hey, David looked happier this morning than I've ever seen him. Right now, he's probably got on his English horseman's outfit, is swatting Theresa's butt with his riding crop, and trying to figure out how to work the scene into the next New Lease Body Armor instructional video. So chill out-you'll pick up another player for us, right?" he asked, looking over at Cindy. She turned her head, and then Cindy and Henry spoke in unison: "Sure, but what are we going to do tonight?"

August 12,1995 "Hey, been a while since you were in town," Stokely Meier said as Henry Bowman came through the door of the gun shop. "Anything new going on?"

"Just looking at rocks for people, when I'm working."

"And turning them into powder with your 4-bore when you're not?" Stokely said, laughing. "Something like that. I got a 2-bore, as a matter of fact."

"No."

"Yes. A single-barrel Farquharson a guy in Vermont made up. Shot it a bunch last week, with a 3145-grain turned brass bullet at a little over twelve hundred. You'll love it."

"Well, bring it on in next time, damn it. Hey-you see today's headlines?" Stokely asked as he tossed that morning's St. Louis Post-Dispatch onto the glass-topped pistol case next to the cash register. Henry Bowman looked down at the newspaper.

FBI Targets Four More In Weaver Case

Freeh's Ex-Deputy Included; Criminal Inquiry Launched "I heard about that on CNN last night, Stoke. They're throwing a few more babies out of the lifeboat, hoping to keep the sharks occupied until they can get to land."

"Four more paid vacations for those peckernecks." Stokely was referring to the last sentence of the lengthy article, which admitted that the four agents were receiving full pay for the duration of their suspensions.

"They admit to destroying evidence," Henry said as he scanned the news piece. "That's always good for public opinion. And I see Potts is mucho pissed about being demoted from Deputy Director," he commented, referring to the supervisor in charge of the Weaver fiasco.

"You should've heard what some of the guys who come in here were saying when they read Potts got the same letter of censure for Ruby Ridge as he did for losing a cellular phone."

"I can imagine. And if I were Lon Horiuchi," Henry said, referring to the FBI sniper who had shot Vicki Weaver in the head, "I would hire myself the best damn criminal defense lawyer in the country. I'd move to a state like New York or New Jersey, and I'd blow the Governor so that he wouldn't let me be extradited to Idaho. If that boy doesn't watch it, he's going to find himself facing a prison sentence."

"No shit. Hey, if you really want to get sick, read this." He handed Henry a copy of the latest Gun Week, a national weekly newspaper focusing on firearms-related issues.