“But if he really wanted to kill Mogul,” she said, “you would be all set up to prevent him from killing somebody else. You wouldn’t know it was Mogul. You’d think it was, say—oh, I don’t know—Hillary. There would be indicators all along—hints, subtle suggestions, the whole shadow show—all of it to convince you that it was Hillary. And the shot on Mogul would come as a complete surprise. It would utterly stun you. You’d have invested everything in saving Hillary from a threat that didn’t exist.”

Again, silence. Not a single Hillary joke.

“Think how he did it in Baghdad. The IED detonations drove the marines back to what they thought was safety. But what they thought was safety was the kill box. Lure and distraction: that’s his specialty. He lures you into one situation, twists it against you.”

“We thought we were hunting him,” Bob said. “He was hunting us.”

“Exactly,” she said.

The room went still.

“He’s very tricky. It’s not what you think it is. He’s come up with something else.”

Finally, Nick spoke—but not to her.

“What have we missed? Anybody?”

Swagger said, “All the gun stuff is hard. He will shoot at 1,847 over water in close to fifty-degree humidity with very little wind. He will use a .338 Lapua Magnum of a certain powder load, case preparation, and bullet choice and weight. You can’t argue that away.”

“So what isn’t hard? What is interp, as opposed to fact?”

“Behavior,” said Gold, from his well of ancient experience. “The hardest thing. You count on one thing, another happens. Always.”

“Let’s ID the behavior, then,” said Nick.

“Mogul will show up today at 1500. Juba’s known it. It seems solid. They believed it to be solid enough to plan on,” said Chandler.

“Mogul will address the crowd,” said Neill. “It isn’t planned, it isn’t announced, it’s on paper nowhere, but it’s his behavior: give him a friendly crowd and there he is, screwing Renegade out of attention and getting big pleasure from that, big as life, ready for a bullet.”

“Ready for a bullet,” said Chandler. “Meaning ‘still.’ He has to be still because of Swagger’s time in flight data. Time in flight is not negotiable. It’s the iron law of physics.”

“Stillness,” said Gold. “The young woman is onto something.”

“Go on,” said Nick.

“The time in flight,” continued Mr. Gold, “demands that he must be still. We assume that stillness is a speech near a body of water, and it turns out that Mogul indeed had a long-settled speech planned for that day right at the banks of the East River. Knowing that, anyone could plan backwards from it, could see what a brilliant bodyguard of lies it would make, how perfectly it might cover the real operation at about the same time, but which would turn on another form of stillness.”