Some chitchat, maybe the Director consulted with the White House and his staff, but, in the end, the assent was given.

“Okay,” said Nick. “Bob, call her back, read her in, and get her to that schoolyard. Chandler, get me our State Police liaison.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll see what she has to say.”

1145

Finally: the ammunition.

Maybe this is how it begins. You cannot love the rifle if you do not love the ammunition. Something dense, deadly, charismatic in the heft and glint of it. Nothing on earth quite like it.

He had, after all the experimenting and all the lives of chained men perishing at a mile-plus in the wild beauty of Wyoming, settled upon this.

With the tip of his knife, he peeled open the package he had prepared in Wyoming. The ten Kings of Hell spilled out, each 3.681 inches long, slightly front-heavy, somehow oddly dense for volume, a function of the 250 grains of Sierra .338 diameter MatchKing hollow-point boattail bullet inserted and crushed into place by the pressure of Wilson’s .367 seating die.

He loved the cartridges. He loved to build them, to think them, to imagine them, to feel the weight and roll of them in his hand. He’d scrubbed them with acetone in Wyoming and now touched them with rubber-gloved fingers only. Thus, no Juba would be evident to investigators on their ultimate discovery, even if the brass was notoriously adverse to recording the prints of its handlers.

He held each one. Slightly overpressured with 91.2 grains of Hodgdon H1000 smokeless powder that filled each once-fired Hornady tube, to be ignited by a Federal 215M Magnum primer. The shell had been chamfered for smoothness, its burrs and eccentricities milled away. It had been neck-turned so that the grip of brass that secured the bullet was exactly .004 thick all the way around. It had been tested for runout—that is, deviation from the axis—and found to be within the metric of .001, which meant as close to perfect as humanly possible. It had been annealed, a brief heat treatment that made its consistency profound. The bullets themselves had been sharpened in the Whidden die, improving their long-range accuracy. All these boutique touches, which the same investigators would eventually discover, were consistent with the high craftsmanship of a champion shooter like Brian A. Waters. They matched perfectly, both as an object and as a product of a culture, with what would be observed when, weeks from this day, his house was unlocked and subjected to the most intense of forensic examinations. No one looking at the recovered shell could doubt that it had been produced by the man from Albuquerque, about to be revealed to the world as yet another lone gunman on a grassy knoll—well, an apartment—administering hatred via a death that would change the world.