It appeared perfect. Every item he ordered was displayed on a heavy worktable against the wall. He went quickly to the heart of it, the yellow packaging from L.E. Wilson, and saw several containers of neck bushings that ran from .366 to .368, as well as the crucial boxes containing neck sizer and bullet seater. Another box contained a Whidden bullet-pointing die, to sharpen the tips of the missiles themselves, and they were close by, boxes of Match bullets from Sierra, Nosler, Hornady, and other makers, all .338 Match grade. Next to the bench was packaging from Oehler, signifying a high-grade chronograph, to measure velocity. And an iPhone 8, lying on the bench. Seemingly innocuous, it had been programmed by its original owner with data onto a ballistic app, the Hawkins Ballistics FirstShot software, which offered instant solutions to the equations that ruled the universe of long-range. Canisters of smokeless powder, bright as pennants leading the Saracen army, stood on higher shelves, and a brand-new arbor press, as well as boxes of Federal 215M large-rifle Magnum primers, chamfer tools for both neck and primer hole, seven reloading manuals—all had been placed around the central icon in what was almost a crèche of infidel devotion.

And its icon was a rifle.

31

Eighth-floor conference room, Zombieland

The zombies were hungry. Pink-faced, blue-suited, white-shirted, red-tied—they sat around the conference room table, champing their jaws, screaming for flesh, starved for protein to be washed down by blood.

They were the creatures Bob had always hated. So far away from it, so sure, so absolute, so magnificent, so clean of fingernail: who could not hate them? If you lived behind wires and sandbags, and shit in a hole and got shot at a lot, it was mandatory to hate zombies—not these particular ones but zombies as a class. Yet where would the world be without its zombies?

“All right, Nick,” said the head zombie, “who, what is, and why should we care about a Brian A. Waters of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who has no record and no footprint, and, by all accounts, is a pleasant, accomplished, well-respected fellow?”

“Mr. Gold, would you speak to that?” Nick said, then checked for zombies who had trouble keeping up. “Swagger found Brian Waters, but Mr. Gold identified him as only a theoretical possibility, so Swagger worked off that, isn’t that right, Bob?”

“Completely,” said Bob.

Gold was not a zombie. Somehow being an Israeli meant you could never be a zombie. Swagger wasn’t sure by what principle this was, but it was a principle nevertheless, perhaps having to do with all the shit they’d been through, their tenuous grasp of survival, and perhaps most of all the subtle intensity that underlay the Israeli faces, as opposed to the theatricality of these American intelligence and enforcement executives.