“You know, I didn’t think to ask her,” said Swagger. “She was so worried that she hadn’t done well in her little undercover thing that I couldn’t get it into the conversation. Want me to call her?”

“No, let’s save her for when we’re in a real jam.”

“Makes sense.”

“Gold is enough, I guess,” said Chandler. “But one of the things we might look at is a history of sales, or specials, or something, from these outlets. The reason I say that is, maybe Juba didn’t himself place the order but had some minion of whoever is working with him do it. And his agenda might be different. Maybe one of these places had a real good buy on Steiner Optics, and the guy decided to save five hundred bucks by going Steiner instead of Schmidt and Bender.”

“Good point, Chandler. Damn, you’re smart. Ever make a mistake?”

“Only once. I married a guy who thought I actually cared about sex.”

“We fall for that one every damned time, don’t we?”

“It was nothing a divorce couldn’t solve.”

A few minutes later, out of nothing but his cogitations, it happened: a palpable thought.

“Oh, and this,” said Bob. “The rifle Juba’s using, I’m betting, was stolen from somebody here in the U.S. It was probably a high-ranking competitive shooter. Now, that guy would also want the Harrison rig duplicated for exactly the same reason. Yeah, the other stuff might work, but Juba’d know the AI rig works. And so would the theoretical original guy. He’s probably got some sniper buzz going on using the right stuff too, though he’d never admit it. So we have to look for a listing of stolen guns.”

“Got it,” she said.

The first stop, then, was the National Firearm Registry, a listing of all stolen guns. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had made off with the weapon of choice and that could lead right to the heart of the matter? But no such luck. A Barrett .50 caliber was the closest thing, but a quick call to the jurisdiction revealed that it had been recovered.

That possibility exhausted, they moved on to the sales records of the three companies.