She’d tried everything. More trips to the capital city after Bush’s surge finally quieted things down, trips to Moscow to bribe her way into KGB files and see if the Russians had any contact or training with Juba, a trip to Chechnya to see if he was one of the notorious Chechen snipers, so ruthless and cruel to the Russians during that little war. Afghanistan revealed some possibles: an American colonel, highest-ranking officer to fall to a sniper off an exceedingly long shot—that seemed to suggest a much higher degree of skill than normal. The same on a senior CIA operative in Helmand Province. Using her son’s death as an entrée, she met many marine snipers and intelligence officers, searching for hard leads. But everything was soft, a vague possibility, not proof.

“I almost gave up,” she said. Left unsaid: if she had nothing to live for, what would be the point?

But then she thought: What don’t I know? I don’t know the instrumentality. Perhaps that’s the key.

The rifles. She immersed herself in them, beginning with gun magazines, reading seven a month to familiarize herself. She read sniper memoirs, sniper fiction, saw sniper movies. She caught the upsurge in sniper as hero that pop culture suddenly embraced and followed the careers of Chris Kyle and other celebrity snipers. She learned ballistics, she studied rifles, she took shooting lessons . . .

“My son’s father—we divorced when he was three—gave me two hundred thousand dollars. So I was able to keep going, though I am running out of relatives to pay for all this.”

At a certain point, she decided to concentrate on the specific weapon. Juba and his team, according to every marine intelligence officer she talked to, had used the classic Dragunov, Russian-manufactured, and an issue weapon for close to fifty years. The marines knew it well. It had opposed them all over the world, and they’d been able to recover one in 1973 with CIA assistance.

“I’ve heard the story,” said Bob.

“But the key wasn’t the rifle. It was the ammunition.”

“Good insight,” said Bob.

“I never would have understood that. I thought you just put what I called a bullet into what I called a gun and pulled the trigger and that was that. But that wasn’t even the half of it. Not even a tenth. So much to learn. I learned most of it.”

The woman was determined. Nothing stopped her, not even the labyrinths of technical detail, shooting culture with its nuances, its contradictions, its loads of false information, its arbitrary names for things that made no sense and just had to be memorized.