He was still abed after three long days of working with a very decent guy billed as the best police artist in the world, but it came to only this.

“He looks like a cross between Saddam Hussein and Dr. Zhivago,” said Swagger.

“You mean Omar Sharif, the Egyptian actor,” said Nick. “Well, it does have a certain standardized, even idealized, quality to it. We’ll put it out, but if it draws in over seventy-five thousand suspects, we’ll know it’s not really working.”

“He’s not a face. He’s motion. He’s speed, grace, battle talent, remorseless will. The face is nothing.”

The door opened, and Mr. Gold appeared. He looked tired because during all the time since Juba’s escape, he’d been sitting in the temporary FBI working room in the Wichita Hilton, going through reports, looking for patterns, reading the transcripts of interviews with the captured shooters and the glazier, trying to infer from the grade Z material something grade A. Again, plenty of try, no do.

He shook Swagger’s hand.

“You have survived again,” he said.

“Dying is above my pay grade,” said Bob.

“The bravery is just this side of insanity,” said Gold. “No man on earth would have launched himself at this fellow without a weapon.”

“If it was about heroism,” said Nick, “we’d win every fight.”

“While you’re here, Mr. Gold, I’d like to run my take on the shooting by you. Maybe you’ll see something I missed.”

“Doubtful. But please proceed.”

“I have been thinking about his shot, because I never made one so good. Nobody has, not even Craig Harrison, the long-distance champion of Afghanistan. Hitting a dime at three hundred ain’t the deal, so it wasn’t just marksmanship. It was, I don’t know . . . They didn’t teach no words for what I mean in 1964, which was my last brush with formal education.”

“‘Spatial imagination’?” asked Nick.

Bob chewed it over.

“Sort of, but not quite. What I mean is, the understanding in a flash of the forces at play and understanding how they must go a certain way, anticipating that, being ahead of it, and putting the shot where the target is going to go, not where it is.”

“Magic?” said Nick.

“‘Dynamic projection,’” said Gold.