It had been a long, dull trip across the United States. There wasn’t much to see from interstates at night, and they never entered cities, only the fringes, staying in cut-rate motels, eating fast food picked up from drive-thru windows. So to Juba, America was a blur of lights smeared by night, neon-basted plastic eat joints, and the ever-present cop fear. The last was misplaced, as, over the week of travel, no cop had paid them the slightest attention. Now, finally, chunk by chunk, five miles under the speed limit the whole way, they were here.

“Tomorrow,” continued Juba, “you will take public transportation here and spend three hours in the neighborhood. Your job is to look for signs of police or FBI observation. Maybe, somehow, they already know, maybe they are just waiting. Maybe Bobleeswagger has figured it out and he’s up there, waiting for me to walk into his trap.”

“I doubt it. It seems to me you have accomplished the impossible. You have been trapped three, four times, have escaped each time, and have left behind exactly nothing. They could know nothing. Menendez knew nothing, not that he could have told anyone anyhow, not with his brains on the ceiling.”

Juba nodded. “We know that they have studied the ranch, studied the remaining evidence. They have found the shooting site, measured the distance to my targets, examined my shop, seen my dies, my powders, the bullets I acquired. They know what rifle I am shooting.”

“What can they know from all that? Nothing, it seems to me.”

“They know the range, they know that I will shoot soon, because my data is only good as long as the weather here is similar to the weather on the ranch. They will try to infer from that my target, my shooting site, and my schedule. Their computers will help them in all this, which is my biggest fear. A computer could put something together in a second that no human could in a century. That is why Bobleeswagger could conceivably be up there, waiting.”

“He is just a man. And not as good a one as you.”

“Maybe. But to underestimate him is to court catastrophe.”

Juba drove around the building, which occupied a whole block. He could see nothing that indicated observation. Other than a random police car manned by two listless officers, he saw no signs of authority.

“Maybe drive around again?” asked Alberto. “Just in case?”