“I want to put a clandestine forensics team on the ground in Albuquerque. I don’t want our mobile lab units and three hundred technicians showing up at the closed-down Waters house. I need to get a good workup on what is missing from his house, I want to know if there are any forensic discoveries that could lead us another step—prints of any sort, DNA, who knows whatever clues. But I don’t want them to know we’ve picked up on this. If they do, they’ll take steps to cover further footprints, they’ll enter a higher state of vigilance, and they may alter their plans. We want them confident that they’ve evaded for now, which will give us time to track them down, then we’ll jump.”

“Mr. Swagger, you’ve been hunted. You’re also a rifleman of great skill and experience. Where is Juba now? Mentally, psychologically?”

“He’s happy as he’s ever been. He’s made his getaway, he’s got his rifle, he’s working with it, which for a man like Juba is not a duty but an obsession. A pleasure. He’s a sniper with a target, and a sense of importance and contribution, according to the tenets of his faith. He’s one happy boy.”

“Your job is to make him unhappy,” said a zombie.

“Swagger’s a sniper,” said Nick. “Unhappiness is his business.”

32

The shop, the ranch

The rifle is not beautiful. Its designers yielded on aesthetics from the very start. They knew and loved the look of rifles—the sweep of dark wood, the glow of deeply blued metal, the grace, the symmetry. It was in their blood, but they knew, as well, that they had to ignore that siren call. Theirs was a single-minded objective, not dedicated to the kill so much as to the shot. There was no kill without the shot and thus the shot was everything.