He turned around. I froze; he saw me.

He did it just like I'd expected him to: reached into his armpit, came up with the gun, clasped it in both hands, brought it down so all I could see was the barrel. I threw myself on the ground. But you can't throw yourself the way you'd throw a baseball. The best you can do is drop yourself-take your legs out from under and wait for gravity to pull you down at thirty-two feet per second squared. If you're falling off a bridge, that seems very fast. But if you trying to dodge a bullet, it's worthless.

Fortunately, at this point, Dolmacher got an arrow between his floating ribs; it went in three inches and stuck. He flinched, as though he'd been kicked, but he clearly didn't really know what it was. He just turned around, the arrow whacking against a couple of birch trunks, and strode calmly and purposefully into the open, taking his knowledge of the toxic bugs with him, stored up there in his big, unprotected melon.

The trench coat who'd left his position when Boone made his move was-on his way back. Dolmacher nailed him with his Tazer, melted his nervous system, left him thrashing around quietly on the ground. Didn't even break his stride. A bunch of folding chairs were set up for spectators and he stood up on one of those, at the back.

"This is a hypothesis out of science fiction," Fleshy was saying. "To release genetically engineered bacteria into the environment-why, that's illegal!"

Jim Grandfather cut off my view by stepping in front of

me and drawing a bead on Dolmacher. The arrow got him in the left kidney just as he was pulling the trigger.

On TV it's amazing. Fleshy is standing there looking like a possum who has wandered onto an interstate. His eyes are wide open, his eyeglasses luminous in the TV lights, sweat breaking through the powder on his brow. He's looking every which way. Boone is standing six feet away, a rock, talking calmly and quietly like a nursery school teacher handling an obstreperous child. They're talking simultaneously about genetically engineered bacteria. But there's rising commotion in the background and suddenly the camera swings drunkenly away from them. It happens just as Pleshy's saying "Why, that's illegal!" Everything goes dim and grey for a second because we don't have the TV lights on our subject, but then the camera's electronics adjust to it and we have Dolmacher, pale and righteous, standing on a chair, calmly drawing down on Fleshy just the way he drew down on me.

If they stay on that camera you can actually see the arrow coming into the last frame. But if they cut to the other camera, the one that's still on the podium, you see Fleshy looking at something else-he never even saw Dolmacher-and you see Boone, confused for just an instant, then focusing in on the man with the gun. And for a second, he actually thinks. That's the amazing thing: you can see him thinking about it. Then he's moving forward, he puts up one arm and clotheslines Fleshy. Fleshy falls away like a tin duck in a shooting gallery and Boone raises his hands, almost in triumph. Just as he's turning to face Dolmacher, his face disappears, replaced by an eruption of red. It splatters everywhere-onto Pleshy's notes, onto the lens of the camera, onto Pleshy's stupid plaid mackinaw.

Back to the other camera and we see Dolmacher giving himself up, two arrows still dangling out of his torso; overwhelmed by trench coats so that there's nothing to see. Then back to the dais and we see Boone staggering around blind with his hands over his face, everyone up there standing with the expressions of developing shock you always see in assassination footage-eyebrows coming up and together, hands rising up from the sides, mouth forming into an O, but the

body still stiff and unreactive. Boone is lost, out of control. Then he shakes his head, leans into the body of a local cop who has just nan up to help him, and asks him for a hanky. He's just been hit in the face by a pellet of red paint and it's hurting his eyes.

JIM AND I TURNED TAIL AND RAN . First we ran in a state of terror, but then, when we figured out that we weren't being followed, drew closer together and started to skip and leap through the air, whooping, laughing like loons, like high school kids who've just egged the principal's house. I wasn't thinking, yet, about Dolmacher spending the rest of his life in the booby hatch, out of reach.

Finally, toward the end, we ran very slowly and made moaning and puking noises. And when we found our way back to the trailhead, Boone was waiting for us. In a helicopter.

It was a news chopper from one of the Boston stations. Boone had agreed to trade an exclusive interview for a lift back down to Boston.

"I'm finished," Jim Grandfather said. "I'm all done with this crap."

He went over to his pickup, leaned against it and breathed. I stood with my hands on my knees and did the same.

"You know, for ten seconds," I said, "I was sure you had saved my life."

"So was I."

"Let's just say you did."

"I don't care."

"I have a question for you," I said. "If you'd been carrying a real arrow-a big-game arrow-would you have used it?"

Jim stood up straight and shrugged. His big coat fell off his shoulders and his quiver tumbled out of it. All the fishing arrows had been used, but there were three in there with wide, razor-sharp heads. "No," he said. "Too dangerous."

I laughed because I thought he was joking, but he wasn't.

"You've drawn my bow. If I used one of these, it would go all the way through Dolmacher's body, out the other side and kill one or two other people."

"Well, I'm glad."

"Yeah. Considering that he was shooting blanks, I'd have felt like kind of a prick."

Jim and I hugged for a while, something I never do with another man, then Boone came out and they shook hands. Jim got in his truck and drove away. The copter's engine started to rev up, so Boone and I had a few private moments while we walked back through the rotor wash.

"What did you know," I asked, "and when did you know it?"

Boone gaped at me for a second, then laughed. "Shit. You don't think I'd step between Fleshy and a bullet, do you?"

We both laughed. I wasn't really sure. I wasn't convinced that he could recognize Dolmacher's gun that quickly.

"I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent," he confessed. "Because then you're the only person in the world who can knock down the president and get away with it."

We climbed into the chopper and Boone started giving a prolonged, monosyllabic, "aw shucks" interview about why he had put another man's life before his own. He was claiming to be a Boston environmentalist named Daniel Winchester. I seized upon a catnap; it wasn't that far back to Boston. I was hoping they'd swing over the yacht club, because I wanted to look down into our slip and see if Wes had gotten out the other Zodiac yet. If so, I'd probably be ripping it off sometime soon. I was in luck; they took us back to Logan itself.

That was fine, since the Blue Line took us right in to the Aquarium stop. I was still too recognizable around the yacht club, so I had Boone saunter by there while I loitered at a McDonalds. I had one of those milkshakes that's made from sweetened Wonder Bread dough extruded by a pneumatic machine. This, perhaps, would serve as a buffer against the toxic waste inside my system.

When Boone emerged from traffic he wore a grin. The ' Zodiac was there, all right, but with a wimpy ten-horse motor, and even that was missing a few strategic parts. So before we did anything else, we prepared ourselves. At a marine supply place out on one of the piers we bought ourselves a fuel line, spark plugs and other small important items that Wes might have removed to make the Zodiac unstealable. Boone flaunted his stack of credit cards.