The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

by Stephen Hunter

  “You think it’s legit?”

  “That’s my feeling,” said Bob. “I spent another hour there. Obviously, I’m not a scientific document expert. But the paper was the same weight and shade as the others in the file, even accounting for aging. Typewriter was the same font, perfect to the slight darkness in the center of the small ‘e.’ The format was in accordance with other letters from Charlie Harris, including those to Jack O’Connor at Outdoor Life and Warren Page at Field & Stream. The diction felt right for about 1960. The shipping reference is right; he said ‘trips to the railway station.’ That’s because guns and powder couldn’t be shipped by common carrier in those days, meaning they couldn’t be delivered. You had to go to the Railway Express office at the train station and sign for the packages. And, Charlie Harris was the manager of the gun room. I found references to him all through the literature of the time. He sold Hemingway a batch of guns.”

  Nick considered. “I don’t like it. All that may be true, but it’s within the reach of professional high-end forgers.”

  “Maybe, but because that’s so it doesn’t mean this is forged.”

  “Too bad you didn’t bring it with you.”

  “I wanted to preserve the box, for comparison purposes. And I thought to go the lab route would take too much time. If and when, we can subpoena for it. I stashed it carefully in that mess.”

  “I don’t like it, Bob. If it means you go alone to that estate, out of our swift-response zone, you could be dead and buried before we get choppers in. Help is minutes away when you need it in seconds.”

  “I don’t like it either. But it seems to me we have to keep going on this line or cut bait.”

  “What about we bust Marty and Richard for attempted fraud and third-degree ’em. As you say, they’re not tough guys; you know they’ll fold. Meanwhile, we give that letter the full nine yards in our doc lab. Marty and Richard roll over, we go to the next link up the chain, and he rolls over. If the letter’s forged, our forgery guys will know who did it, and we round him up and bang his head against the bars. He squeals. That’s how you bring a crime lord down.”

  “Yeah, but a crime lord has property, a place in the community, investments, family, all of which make him more or less stuck in place. If Hugh’s alive, he has none of that, that we can find. We have no idea where in the world he is. He can disengage in a second, and he’s clever enough to have designed break-offs in his network so he can disappear from our reach instantly. We pick up Marty and Richard, he’s gone for good. Then next year or the year after, I catch a .338 Lapua in the ear while I’m riding spring fence, and that’s the end of that. We’re close. I know we’re close. Nobody has been this close. I feel him.”

  “What are you getting?”

  “It has to be Hugh. He’s old, cagey, smart. He’s been in the game a long time. He knows what he’s doing. He’s no psycho; everything is rational, objective-driven. He’s subtle, he’s witty; in a funny way, he’s honorable. We left his kids alone, he’s left my family alone. I don’t know why, but I trust him for that. Like his cousin Lon, he’s a decent man, except for the few seconds when he killed the thirty-fifth president of the United States.”

  “It’s your ass, so it’s your call.”

  “Then I go.”

  “I’ll have people close by, chopper teams, observation—”

  “No, uh-uh. If Hugh has people, they’ll see it and hit eject hard, and that means he’ll hit eject. It only works if I go in alone, unobserved, no teams, no air cover, no radio nets, no backup. If I need help, I’ll call the state cops.”

  “Swagger, still crazy after all these years.”

  “I’m not saying I’m not scared or that I think this is wise. I am, it’s not. I just don’t see any other way.”

  “That’s what they said about Iwo Jima.”

  “We won Iwo Jima. Look, here’s my plan. I’ll call Richard, tell him about the letter, have him contact Marty, and set up a date for next week. Then . . . I go on vacation.”

  “Do you have a time-share or something? A condo in Florida?”

  “No. But I have to get away. By myself, somewhere quiet. I’ll pick it at the airport. I have a lot to think about.”

  “You seem to have done a lot of thinking already.”

  “Not enough. I have crap in my head that I can’t figure. There’s something called synesthesia involved, which reflects a mind glitch that sees certain letters or numbers in color. Niles was a synesthete, as they’re called.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “So was Nabokov. He saw letters in color. Niles had a connection to Nabokov through synesthesia, and I think that’s why he used it to construct his bogus ID for Hugh. It was an expression of his and Hugh’s love of Nabokov, and it represented the kind of cleverness Nabokov used. Niles saw nine as red. I’m guessing the fake name that Niles gave Hugh all those years ago reflects a color or a number, probably a variation on red or nine. I’m trying to work that angle.”

  “It’s thin,” said Nick. “I mean, even knowing that it’s a color or a number, a red or a nine for some reason, what use is that without a suspect pool?”

  “Oh, I’ve got a suspect pool,” said Bob. “It includes everyone currently alive on the planet Earth.”

  “Good,” said Nick. “That’s encouraging.”

  “Then there’s something about the Charlie Harris letter. Don’t know, but I’m getting a buzz. Everything’s perfect, as I told you, but I get this buzz. Got to figure that.”

  “The Swagger buzz. Admissible in all state courts. I have complete confidence that you’ll get your man.”

  “I’m sure I will too. After all, Humbert got Clare Quilty at the end.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Another manhunt story. I’ll tell you later.”

  Swagger!

  It clawed me from unconsciousness. I awoke, as before, in a cold sweat, enfeebled, aged, overmatched. I tried to sort it out before my heart exploded and aneurism did finish me. I had directed Richard to work with a police artist to prepare a likeness of the “Jack Brophy” who had shown, possibly killed my driver, then disappeared in Dallas, and it took until that night, but . . . could it be Swagger? No. Impossible. The odds were too distant. But I’d seen long odds cash in enough times not to see it as a possibility. I grabbed the drawing from my desk and bore down on it.

  I had seen him, of course—that day in 1993 at the preliminary court hearing in New Orleans. I had sat behind the prosecutor’s table in gray herringbone and red bow tie. I looked like ol’ Perfesser Flibberty-Gibberty out of a Frank Capra movie, very much the Ivy paragon of diffident and eccentric genius. That was my style then, hopelessly tweedy of appearance, of mind.

  I remembered: lanky, jeans, boots, some sort of cowboy jacket. For all my efforts, I couldn’t get a face. I had impressions, not images. I saw that stretched-out body, not accustomed to sitting, unsure how to arrange those legs. Wary—the word “wary” keeps coming to mind. He seemed to be watching everything evenly, without remarking, holding his cards tight to his chest, always calm, a kind of easy grace to his actions. It was easy to project that temper into a sniper, who’d need wariness, a gift for observation, patience, and could have nothing of the showy, boastful, immodest, or psychopathic about him. The work was too dangerous for show; it demanded contradictory gifts, the precision for equipment maintenance and the patience for detailed preparation, but also the imagination to project into space an enemy’s movement and predict where he might be; and beneath it all, the stubbornness to keep the imagination from inventing demons and letting panic take hold. Many men can be brave in batches, where sacrifice and support are the group norms; being brave on your own, out in Indian country, for hours and hours—that’s a trick.

  So now, at 4:19 a.m., I looked at the likeness and racked my memory. Were they the same man?

  I felt like Laurence Olivier’s Crassus in Spartacus, who learns with amazement that he’s s
een Spartacus fight but can’t remember the details. I stared frantically at the rendering, trying to resolve it. Finally, I faxed it back through the layers of administration between me and the facilitators of my orders and required that the artist do his best to render the same face minus the twenty-odd years. I thought that might help. I also ordered the issue expedited.

  The new version came the next day, and it did the trick.

  There was no doubt: Bob Lee Swagger was hunting me, and if history was any guide, I wouldn’t survive that distinction.

  Now I tried to imagine the fantastical circumstances that would bring him back in quest of me. How had it happened? What were the links, the whimsies, the chance connections that put him on my trail again, twenty years later, when I thought I was out of it? I couldn’t run an investigation for the simple reason that it would soon reveal itself to him, he would then know I knew, and the game would become infinitely more complicated. The first rule of my war against him was to prevent him from knowing I knew his identity. I did resolve that when it was over and I had him dead and buried, I would solve the mystery. It was that fascinating to me.

  The first step was hard thinking: what could he know? Not what did he know, but what could he know, as a maximum? That would be our parameter for action. I had to apply the tenets of the New Criticism to my interpretation of his mind, to ruthlessly obliterate wishful thinking, daydreams, sentimentality about his nobility and heroics, his capacity for Hemingway’s classic grace under pressure, and think of him purely as an enemy who needed to be destroyed. I realized that he would come upon the “dead” Hugh Meachum sooner or later. He’d track me through Hugh.

  Was there much on Hugh Meachum available? No; I’d been smart. No family pix, no glory wall, that Washington vanity, behind my desk, nothing written for the record. Moreover, the Buddings Institute of Foreign Policy, the feeble cover for me and many of my colleagues in Clandestine, was long gone and had left no records. A genius might tease out some information by tracking through real estate records to determine that the funding that staffed (if barely) the suite in the National Press Building for many years originated in Agency coffers, but I didn’t think that was the sort of work Swagger was capable of.

  Then there was Agency culture; would he try to find survivors of Clandestine, men like me in their eighties, in hopes of turning up a memory of Hugh Meachum, poor old long-dead Hugh? Possibly they’d talk after a lifetime of being coached not to.

  All that didn’t matter in the long run. Even if he discovered that Hugh had survived his own funeral, my new identity was secure; he would never know, and he could never locate me, while it was a matter of time before I located him. I had to like my odds in this fight.

  I made decisions. Richard in Dallas had to stay put. It was probable that “Brophy” would try to contact him again, since he was the one possible link to me, whom he presumed was still alive. Brophy/Swagger wouldn’t be sure whether our man was an agent or simply someone we kept under observation and piggybacked our ops off of, so he’d be sly about it. But when it happened, the Dallas operative was to notify us immediately. He would be given a special number by which he would directly contact the unit I meant to set up. They would be able to hit the ground running, the object being to kill Swagger.

  I knew I’d have to put together a first-rate kill team, preferably men with special-ops experience, SWAT or Delta, that level, at any rate, and I’d have to equip them with the latest toys, because those boys would as soon work with cool toys as make millions of dollars. I’d have to put a jet at their disposal, have all documents at the ready, so that they could be anywhere in the world in twenty-four hours.

  The same unit would have an intelligence component too, the best people, well experienced, savvy manhunters; my mind turned to the Israelis, the world’s best at this sort of thing. They would be charged with running as discreet an investigation as possible into Swagger: what had he done the past twenty years, where did he live, how did he support himself, what were his operating patterns, his preferred methods of travel and communication, his ties to a logistics base (did he have access to sophisticated documents, photos, forgeries?), what were his technical capacities, who were his allies, his relatives, his children, how was he vulnerable, whom would he die for, whom would he kill for? If possible, I wanted to leave family out of it; if he was married and had kids, I hoped I had the strength of character to keep them off the board. After all, he had not come after mine and was not interested, as far as I had any knowledge, in my three sons or their wives and children. That was how I hoped to keep it.

  I went back to bed, humming with excitement. I have to say, it was good to be back in the game. Retirement, even in a style of haute billionaire decadence, didn’t appeal to me that much. This was going to be fun.

  Within a month, I was set up. My intelligence team was headed by Colonel ———, formerly of Mossad, with a reputation for prying Arab terrorists out of the gutters of casbahs all over the Middle East. He was assisted by Captain ——— and Sergeant ———, also Israeli manhunters, specialists in seeing tracks where there were none, reading signs, making brilliant deductions, and with the patience of hawks high in the air, planning and executing the best in assassinations. Their specialty was the helicopter-wire-driven missile hit, and they could put a bird through any window in the world if they had to. It took a pretty penny to dissuade them from their duty stations in the Tel Aviv defense complex and relocate them to a command bunker I had prepared. Fortunately, I had several pretty pennies at my disposal.

  I secured a landing site and training ground in New Mexico and there located my kill team. These were magnificent men. Two were ex-SEALs, one ex–Special Forces. All had survived, even flourished, during much time in both war zones. They were under the leadership of a major from 42 Commando Royal Marines, where he’d run a close-combat troop. He had more combat time than the others combined. The Brit was one of those tough guys who, by reputation, would not stop coming; he had been shot in the head, laughed it off, and killed the fanatic who shot him. Who was the real fanatic? I leave it to you. All commanded another pretty penny, but all—I personally vetted them—had sterling reputations. They spent their mornings in brutal physical workouts to keep themselves in top shape, and in the afternoon, they worked on devious tactical live-fire exercises. They were probably the best close-quarter battle unit in the world, and they loved the unlimited ammunition budget even more than the ample pennies I deposited into their accounts on a regular basis.

  Close by them, in a rather too nice condo in Albuquerque, I had my forgery unit. This was basically a man-wife team who had provided product to all the major Western intelligence agencies. They cost a fortune too, and I must say, they were the only ones I resented, because while the killers were shooting and practicing jiujitsu or Bruce Lee kung fu or whatever, and the hunters were locked in cyberspace, penetrating databases, monitoring police reports, and accessing satellite data, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, as I called them, spent their time on the golf course or in the malls, living a grand old life at my expense. Such loafers! That’s the price of talent. I knew that I could send them a BlackBerry alert, and within eight hours, they could produce identification documents, passports, top-secret clearances, the whole gamut of access media that would get my killers in anywhere in the world, except perhaps North Korea, and I bet they could do North Korea in sixteen hours. Meanwhile, they shopped and golfed.

  We waited, we waited, we waited, life went on, pleasant but more expensive than before; I encouraged the government to up the budget for and the manpower of the special battalion responsible for security in my neck of the woods, and still we waited and waited. I spent five thousand dollars a day on ammunition, I lived at the end of an umbilical cord to my communications, and finally . . .

  Moscow!

  Do you need details? I am too weary to note them now, and besides, what difference does it make? Final score: S&S: 5, the Izzie boys: 0.

  But I knew: the real hunt was
just beginning.

  CHAPTER 21

  Jean Marquez” was how she answered her phone.

  “Jean, it’s Bob Swagger.”

  “Oh, you!” she said. “I’m so happy to hear from you. I thought you’d disappeared.”

  “I can be hard to find at times. My old crank’s suspicion.”

  He was calling from his cell in the arrival terminal at Baltimore/Washington International. Vacation in Baltimore? In the real world, it’s been known to happen, but in this case, he was on duty, as it were. It wasn’t exactly Marquez he wanted to see; nor did he want to rent her inherited tommy gun—yet. He had another purpose.

  “I heard about some Russian driver-murderer killed in Dallas,” she said. “I know I can’t ask you questions, but—”

  “That was part of the deal. He was the wheel man. He tried his trick on somebody who was waiting for him. It was part of an FBI sting.”

  “You—”

  “I had a little to do with it. But the job ain’t finished. Have you got time to talk?”

  “I’m a newspaper reporter. I chat, that’s what I do. Go ahead.”

  “Ah, this is sort of hard to explain, but some evidence has come up that suggests a puzzle of some sort, many years old, might be involved and has to be solved. I know, it sounds goofy. It is goofy. But that’s how they worked back then.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Did your husband ever make a connection to the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov?”

  “I must say, the last two words I ever expected to come from your mouth are ‘Vladimir’ and ‘Nabokov.’”

  “They were the last two words I ever expected to say, believe me.”

  “The answer would be no. Jimmy’s literary period was long past. He read about guns and he read history and politics. I don’t think I ever saw him read a novel.”