He tracked directions and angles without regard to identified targets. The best shot clearly would have been on the secretary of transportation, where Juba could have perched atop what looked like an oil storage tank in Illinois and gotten a bullet across the Mississippi into Busch Stadium, where she was slated to throw the first pitch at a Cardinals game. But it just made no sense.

The Mogul sites were less promising, but not without a whisper of possibility. Of course, Mogul was so improvisational in his day-to-day, the long-term aspects seemed problematic. He might take off for golf in Florida that morning. He could do anything he wanted. He was the president!

The best shot would have been at an appearance in Baltimore, where he was more or less slated to appear at a luncheon at The Center Club—prominent, big-money businessmen—in the USF&G Building. He might be accessible from a mile-plus out from the Exelon Building across Baltimore Harbor, but that would involve shooting through glass, which hadn’t been in the specs. Could there be another shooter who could fire at a raking angle from closer and shatter the glass, and in that frozen moment, Juba could take his long shot on the target? Well, theoretically, but . . . so many moving parts.

At a certain point, it was time to break for dinner. But they didn’t break for dinner. Then it was time to break for coffee. They didn’t break for coffee either. They didn’t break for anything.

Finally, it was Chandler who said, “Everything we’re coming up with is vaguely possible but, for this reason or that, unlikely.”

“And your point is?” asked Nick.

“Maybe there’s a fundamental error at a crucial spot.”

“Did you hear that, Mr. Gold?”

“I did, and I think she has a point. But the question would have to be, at what crucial spot?”

“Well,” Chandler said, “the servo mechanism that puts possibilities before us is the Secret Service master schedule, right?”

“Yes.”

“Of all the attributes, that seems the most fragile. I mean, Swagger measured the yardage. That’s a hard figure, empirical, unarguable. All the other things—the weather, the wind, the angles, all that stuff—is hard data. But the master schedule is assembled by people acting on information from other people. People talking to other people often have motives in the mix, even unconsciously, and there’s miscommunication, it’s imperfect, any of a dozen things can go wrong.”

“All this is true. Do you want to call Secret Service and lean on them to recheck the schedule?”

“Here’s my thought,” she said. “Maybe what’s upcoming isn’t considered a Secret Service enterprise. You know, requiring special planning, the movement of assets, additional personnel, ground recon, prior coordination with local authorities. It’s not special. It’s normal, run-of-the-mill activity. So it’s not on any schedule.”

“How do we find out about it?”