“Sounds like you’re suggesting a drink. Only problem is, if I have one, I end up three weeks later in Calgary during the rodeo season, married to a calf roper with four kids.”

It was a familiar line of his. Usually, somebody laughed. Not this time.

Chandler leaned back against the cushion of her seat and closed her eyes, as if to relax.

“All I see is my sisters’ husbands trying to cop feels over a long, long holiday weekend.”

“Any of ’em jihadi snipers?” Swagger asked.

“No, just doctors, lawyers, and one would-be poet who sells real estate. He’s the worst. The poets always are.”

So she got the laugh.

“All right,” she finally said. “I am getting something on numbers. Three of them: 8-7-1.”

“Are you of numeric imagination?” asked Gold.

“I’m of no imagination. I’m just good at math.”

“What that means is that in the presence of numbers you are relaxed. Thus, there is less to oppose the flow between conscious and subconscious.”

“Maybe. But I just see 8, 7, and 1, from somewhere, sometime—recently, I think. Don’t know why, can’t connect it with anything. Where would there be an 8-7-1? Swagger, do you recall that in our hunt?”

“Lots of numbers. Phone number, zip codes, catalogue numbers, calibers, trigger-pull weights.”

She pulled out her iPhone, went to Safari, ran the number 8-7-1.

“It’s not an area code,” she said.

“Try a zip code. The first three numbers of a zip code.”

She did.

“Okay, it’s Albuquerque, New Mexico—87102 through 87123—twenty of ’em.”

They let that lie for a second. Then Gold said, “Contiguous zones. So that would mean that no matter if the town or suburb were different, the physical sites could be quite close to each other.”

“Yes, and what are the odds of so many different .338 guys living so close to one another? Probably, in the west, lower than elsewhere, but still pretty remote.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go back into Cyber Division and see what our 8-7-1 gets us.”

28

The wheat

By midmorning, they reached the wheat.

It rolled for miles and miles to the horizon, golden, turning almost liquid by the wind rippling its surface, broken here and there by a farmhouse, a silo, maybe a stand of trees. Now and then, a huge red or green machine—thresher, combine, packer—moved like a heavy tank across the surface of the earth. The sky was blue and vast, the clouds hazy, the weather crisp and precise. He’d never seen wheat like this and was glad he now had.

These people may be infidels, he thought, but they are excellent wheat farmers, maybe even better than the Russians.

He said nothing. What would these Mexicans know about wheat? The answer was, nothing. It was an alliance of convenience—financial, for the one, and practical necessity.