“His obsession is long-range precision shooting, and he bought land enough in New Mexico for a mile-long range, as well as a collection of rifles capable of accuracy at that distance. He’s spent the last eight years on an odyssey to put five holes in a bull’s-eye a mile away. It’s been done by about fifty men, Mr. Waters hopes to be the fifty-first.

“He has no vices, no politics, no angers, no hatreds, has never said a bad thing about anybody on earth that we can find. But he is an isolate. Being entirely alone with his obsession, he is perfect prey for men who would use him. And we feel he has been used.”

“Do you believe he is dead?”

“Yes, sir. Well, dead in reality. That death is not known. To his few friends and neighbors, he’s simply disappeared, but he disappears a lot. He travels all over the world to shooting matches, he hunts in Africa and Asia and New Zealand, he goes to conferences. His friends are elite shooters, the world over, who share his obsession and speak his language.”

“What is his current official status?”

“He—or somebody with access to his email—has announced to his friends that he’s going on a hunting trip in Southeast Asia and will be incommunicado for several months. We have checked with every known outfitter, and he is not on any trip docket. He has applied for no visas or hunting permits in any Southeast Asian country. His house is closed and locked, a lawn service attends to the yard once a week, prepaid via the Internet. He has vanished, but without any alarm being raised. That is why our hope for his survival is so low. It would be so much easier for them to kill him, help themselves to his life, and use him as an avatar to their purpose under a false flag. So he is being kept alive—well, not physically, but by reputation and counterfeit footprint.”

“Is there any evidence or is this just a working assumption?”

“Well, sir, no physical trace—that is, face-to-face, eyewitness accounts—have been documented with him in several months. Physically, he seems to have vanished from the earth.”

Nick continued, “We believe that a part of this operation is to implicate him as the perpetrator of whatever crime it is that Juba the Sniper means to accomplish. A ‘legend,’ as those of you with intelligence experience will recognize, will be or is being created, and a paper trail will be uncovered, skillfully counterfeited by the best covert people in the world, to suggest that he did this, he did that, he believed this, he believed that. All of that information will play in a certain way to create a certain meaning—certain ramifications. That is why we must stop this thing.”

“Since we seem to know he’s being used, it seems like we can quickly counter any—”