In each of the four cities, he presented the same phenomenon: a tall, lanky man in boots and a blue denim shirt, pressed and buttoned to the top. He wore a down-filled field coat, suede Tony Lamas and his black, wide Stetson but in Baltimore he felt out of place with the hat and left it in his room.

In each city he checked into a middle-range downtown hotel after taking a cab in from the airport; he ate modestly and never drank and when he wasn’t in his room, studying his maps, he discreetly toured the shooting sites, taking notes, walking off the distances, watching the fall of the light and the way the shadow angles changed as the sun moved across the sky; feeling the temperature, the push of the prevailing winds, looking at the traffic patterns in and out, at the theaters or stages where the president would be speaking when the shot was to be fired; he walked endlessly around the buildings, into their lobbies, but he never pressed his luck, and made no attempt to get into places where he was not permitted. His only eccentricity most people mistook for an elaborate camera. In fact, it was a Barr & Stroud prismatic optical rangefinder, with two lenses eighty centimeters apart. It enabled him to measure distances with unerring accuracy.

In each city, he learned things no map or guidebook could tell him. He discovered small discrepancies in the elevation grids of the Cincinnati hills, not much, but just enough to throw a shooter off. He’d be higher than he thought he was and his bullet’s trajectory therefore more subject to the pull of gravity.

In Baltimore, he noted the persistence of wind off the harbor; he’d never associated Baltimore with wind at all and the information irritated him. The guidebooks never said a damned thing about it, but the gulls hanging like helicopter gunships over a burning village told the story. He imagined a bullet riding those winds, drifting this way and that in their grasp, perhaps true to its aim, perhaps not.

In Washington, he saw the trees. The shot indicated in the picture of the Soviet shooting mock-up would have to pass through trees. Admittedly, this time of year the visibility was fairly good. But Bob thought the problem was a bullet-deflecting sprig of limb; it would be like firing through a labyrinth, and even the smallest of obstructions could send a heavy-caliber bullet moving at close to three thousand feet per second spinning off in the craziest ways.

Then, too, in Washington the shooting platforms were exceedingly iffy; Justice was closest but the angle into the back lawn of the White House was extreme, and if he were shooting from there – about 450 yards – T. Solaratov would have a quarter profile as a target, always the hardest angle into major body structures, a devilishly hard shot, though Bob had dropped a few that way. Almost a full mile out, from the Department of Agriculture, the sniper would have a much wider target, and presumably a much stabler one, as bodies don’t move laterally during speeches nearly so much as they moved up and back. Still…shooting through trees a mile out from atop a government building – this said nothing of the extraordinary deception operation that would have to be mounted to get him in and out – seemed the longest of long shots, purely from a technical point of view.

New Orleans was a Southern city, which he appreciated; the air was balmy, the breezes mild. Of all the cities, he liked it the best, and quickly found that only a sliver of it was the fabled block or so of Bourbon Street where all the movies were filmed. The place itself had a sleepy, nondescript way to it and the black people still carried themselves with that elegant dignity that is only possible in the true South.

But the problem with New Orleans was the air, which was heavy with the tang of salt water and the acrid, dense musk that miles of mushy swamp produced. It was almost a jungle climate, and though it could be shot through with accuracy – Bob had done it, after all – it produced the sort of accuracy warpage that would have to be planned for and practiced in. This was most interesting; if they were going to go for a.50 caliber shot a mile out in New Orleans, it occurred to Bob that they’d almost have to build themselves a mile of range here, because each swampy ecosystem has its own peculiar climate, depending on the density of the salt water, the gassiness of the swamp, the prevailing winds. You couldn’t prep a New Orleans shot in Iraq or even Russia, except in its most inconsequential aspects; you’d have to do it over a period of days in a period of weather conditions to see what hob the moisture would play on the bullet.

Might be interesting to check out, he thought.

His travels finished after ten long days on the road, Bob flew back to Arkansas and returned to his trailer. Again, it was as he left it, unentered; again, Mike’s slobbery love greeted him and he took some time to work with the dog, to pet him and make him feel wanted, to rub those velvety ears. You didn’t want to spoil a creature with too much attention, but Mike had such need it moved Bob. It was the longest time he’d ever been away from the dog; the dumb love poured up to him from the eyes and the hot breath. Its paws were flung upon him as Mike went nuts in bliss.

“Hey, boy, your old man’s back,” he said, again surprising himself with a kind of laugh. Truth was, he felt pretty damned good. He’d been in The World, tested himself against it, and come back in one piece, not destroyed. The work was fascinating and what he’d found pleased him; he was eager to get on with the next bit.

He went to the icebox, found some chili frozen in a square like a brick, and set it to warming on the stove; then he showered quickly, changed into clean jeans and shirt and boots. Then he took Mike for a good four-mile walk. By the time he was back, the stuff was hot and red, as he liked it. He ate it quickly and economically, with large glasses of iced tea, only momentarily missing the beer that had once been his chief sensual pleasure with hot food.

Then, though tired, he felt nourished. He went over to a typewriter that had been in the family since his grandfather was sheriff of Polk County back in the twenties, and began very slowly and carefully to write.

Bob always surprised people with his literacy; they expected an ex-Marine gunnery sergeant from Arkansas to be a complete fool when it came to letters, not knowing, say, capitals from small letters, or what a paragraph was about, or the difference between a period and a colon or the meaning of that great puzzler, the apostrophe. But he knew all that; more, he knew he had a small, quiet gift for expressing himself clearly and it always pleased him to do so. And he did so now.

He wrote a twenty-two-page document explaining his analysis of the four shooting sites and his prediction of T. Solaratov’s preferences. He knew, of course, where he’d shoot from himself; it scared him a little, because he saw how easy it would be, how in spite of all the advances since 1963, how despite the extent to which everyone had entered the era of maximum paranoia and security, it was still nearly impossible to stop a man with a rifle and the will and the skill to use it.

It was not an eloquent document, but it was direct, after the military fashion.

It is my feeling that the subject will most likely attempt his shooting of the President on 1 March of this year at Louis Armstrong Park in New Orleans. He will be shooting a 750-grain copper-sheathed.50 caliber round from approximately 1,200 yards out. The bullet will be traveling, when it strikes the President, at over 1,500 feet per second, and that should, with the bullet weight, defeat any body armor the President is wearing. The time of the shooting will almost certainly be near the end of the President’s speech, which is scheduled to begin at 11:30 and last 45 minutes. There are three reasons for this. First, a shadow falls across the podium of the shooting site between 10:30 A.M. and 2:15 P.M. on that day (give or take a few minutes) and the President will be deepest into it at the end of his speech, which will mean that the glare from the contrast between the light and the dark will be at its minimum during the time of his exposure. This would not be a factor under normal ranges, but the extreme distance of the shot will make even the most incidental considerations important. Second, midday is by weather bureau records the calmest time of day; the prevailing winds tend to be at their gustiest during the morning hours. The Russian will almost certainly know this, if he’s studied carefully. In fact, of the four shooting sites, only New Orleans puts the President in the zone of exposure during the calmest part of the day, with Cincinnati a distant second. And finally, the New Orleans site offers at least three escape routes. If he shoots from the steeple of St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, which is located 1,200 yards from the site of the speech, and he uses some kind of external (by that I mean nonballistic) noise suppression system, he can very easily retreat down the (closed) stairway, step into the crowds on the square and melt away. It is unlikely that discovery of the site would be made for several minutes, perhaps hours, because the site is so far from the bullet strike. From the church he could very quickly walk to the Mississippi, which is less than half a mile away, and flee by boat down into the bayou system, and it would be almost impossible to locate him in there. He could also depart down Decatur, a major thoroughfare unlikely to be burdened by heavy traffic at that time of day. Or finally, in desperate straits, he could be picked up by helicopter in the open space of Jackson Square, just in front of the Church.