“It turns out the most accurate 7.62×54R ammunition in the world was manufactured by the Bulgarian Arsenal AD in the ’50s. It’s called heavy ball, and it has a yellow tip. It ships in metal cans of three hundred rounds and has corrosive primers, so the sniper has to keep his barrel clean. I reasoned that Juba would always have heavy ball on hand.”

“That’s good,” said Swagger, who had hoarded American .308 Match Target from Frankford Arsenal during his time in operations. You wanted the best. You had to shoot with gear and ammunition you trusted with your life, because you were trusting it with your life.

“So I reasoned that after he left Baghdad, he’d continue to have need for the ammunition, because in any further endeavors he’d need it. So I had to know: where do you get Bulgarian 7.62×54 heavy ball?”

“Next stop: Bulgaria?”

“Yes. It turned out that it was no longer being manufactured, and even when it had been, it wasn’t turned out in mass quantities. Not in the tens of millions, but in the low millions. It was a slower process because the tolerances in the loading dies were tighter, the inspection of rounds more intensive.”

In Sofia, she met a man who knew a man, and, twenty-five thousand dollars later, she was in the government archives, going through bills of lading for the heavy ball. It had been declared surplus in 1962 and spent the next twenty years in a warehouse. When the Russians moved into Afghanistan, their snipers quickly discovered how good it was, and the bulk of shipments went to the Russian army. It killed a lot of mujahideen there, and more in Chechnya. But by the new mandates of capitalism, the leftover ammunition—maybe ten million rounds—was exported to a variety of countries where the 7.62×54 was shot, mostly countries that had imported large quantities of the Mosin–Nagant, the Soviet/tsarist twentieth-century bolt-action battle rifle of the same caliber. It was a great Mosin round. So it ended up that the largest for-sale accumulation of Bulgarian heavy ball was an importer in Elizabethtown, South Africa, called SouthStar.

“You went there.”

“Yes. Helpfully, it’s another country where everything is for sale. After a few false starts, I gained entry to SouthStar’s shipping and inventory records, for a single evening.”

She reached into her briefcase and pulled out a computer printout.

It was a huge thing and it must have taken hours to master. But she’d gone over it before and certain shipments were annotated over the long years of SouthStar disbursement of the metal boxes, with their yellow dots painted on the sides to signify the superiority of the round.