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and found himself looking into the muzzle of a small pistol. He backed inside as the man
     with the tray in one hand and the gun in the other advanced into the room and eased the door closed behind him with his heel.
    “My money’s over there, on that chest of drawers,” Sonderberg pointed.
    The man with fair hair nodded and put the tray down on the chest. “Lie face down on the floor.”
    Sonderberg didn’t argue. He did what he was told, lying on the right side of his face and watching the gunman.
    “Point your nose in the carpet. I don’t want you looking at me.”
    Again Sonderberg did what he was told. The fair-haired man pulled two pillows off the bed. He placed one on top of the prone
     man’s head. Then he pressed down with the gun into the pillow until he could feel Sonderberg’s neck.
    In a muffled voice, Sonderberg said, “Why don’t you just take the money?”
    He pressed down with the muzzle into the downy pillow. Using his left hand, he covered his hand holding the gun with the second
     pillow. Then he pulled the trigger. There was hardly any sound, certainly nothing that could be heard through the walls of
     the room. Sonderberg’s body stiffened and relaxed for a moment.
    He lifted the top pillow and a puff of acrid gunsmoke rose in the air. Both pillows were blackened by powder burns. He lifted
     the lower pillow. The bullet had penetrated through the back of Sonderberg’s neck, near the base of his skull.
    The gunman did not take any of Sonderberg’s money from the top of the chest, but he did remove the room service tray and replaced
     it where he had found it in the corridor. It was always his habit to cover his tracks.
    Charley Woodgate and Herbert Malleson were talking about the recent indictment of a Virginia arms company while waiting at
     the farmhouse for Richard Dartley to show. The company was accused of selling El Salvador $4.7 million in cheap inferior Yugoslav
     ammunition, which the company had imported, repackaged as first rate American ammo and exported to Central America for top
     dollar.
    Charley was annoyed. “People read stories like that and think that’s the kind of business I must be in.No one even knows what a craftsman is anymore. It’s all repackaging and hype.”
    “You don’t do that kind of work?” Malleson teased.
    Charley refused to rise for the bait. “They all get caught in the end. If they put as much work into honest deals as they
     do into cooking up frauds, they’d make even more money. What bums me up is the way just a few people give everyone in our
     business a bad name.”
    Dartley arrived soon after that. As usual he had no time for greetings or small talk. “What did you find?” he asked Malleson.
    “I called your uncle earlier today,” Malleson said, “and told him Gary Sonderberg would probably be the next victim.”
    “I had just got word myself he had been murdered in Las Vegas,” Charley volunteered.
    “I wasn’t certain he would be the one,” Malleson went on. “Now that he was, I think we’ve cracked the system they are using.
     Sonderberg was the sixth man to die. Working with the five men killed previously for some kind of pattern in the order of
     their deaths, I fed all kinds of data into my big computer. A few weird coincidences cropped up, but nothing that seemed to
     lead anywhere. Then I started playing about with one of the more obvious things about them—their names. The computer came
     up with an odd fact.”
    He handed a sheet of paper to Dartley, who looked at the names printed on it.
    John Arnold (Kuwait)
    Bernard Phillips (Texas)
    Joseph Donovan (Saudi Arabia)
    Roger Elliott (Indonesia)
    Leonard Hill (Massachusetts)
    “They’re listed in the order in which they were killed,” Malleson explained. “The initial letters of each man’s either first
     or last name spells out a common Arabic first name, Abdel. Now I know that’s really reaching. But I had nothing else worth
     a damn. So I put every possible