14
Sally was working on some big case with a team from Treasury involving fraud in the financial meltdown, so she wasn’t around much, which meant that Nick found himself with more spare time to kill than he ever expected. Task Force Sniper was nowhere, just going over more leads, tracking down some of the wilder ideas, all of it more or less make-work, waiting for Nick’s decision to release the report and release the task force’s assets, and he was holding out to see if Swagger came up with something truly interesting. Meanwhile, the reps from the three local departments had all been sent home with nothing to do.
Nick decided, late that night, to have a nice dinner, since he hadn’t eaten real food since this thing had begun. He left the ominous Hoover Building, stepping around the line of cement revetments arranged to keep the mad terrorist car bombers at bay, and dawdled aimlessly around Southeast DC, looking for a spot to eat.
It was getting glamorous around here. In the nineties and early in the following decade, Southeast had been a dump, a crappy zone of once-prosperous retail and apartment buildings gone shabby with neglect, a little too far from the federal triangle to attract the lunchtimers who drove more central city food culture, unserviced by movie houses, bookstores, boutiques, that sort of thing. Then it changed when the Verizon Center opened, a new big cathedral to the religions known as NBA and NHL; with it, restaurants opened, a big multiplex of theaters, a busy and hustling main street of sorts, Seventh Street, and all kinds of snazzy little places. It seemed to fill up overnight with that disturbing tribe of unrecognizable barbarians called “the young,” and as Nick moseyed through the streets, he was astounded by their numbers, their energy, their clothes, their heat, their hubbub, their urge to fill the world with their own centrality. It gave him a headache. Ugh, how’d he get so old, over forty, with a big house in Fairfax he hardly ever saw and a wife who had turned out to be such a hotshot he hardly ever saw her either.
He drew his overcoat a little tighter, as deep fall, threatening winter, had come to the East. He took his ID card on its chain off and stuffed it in his pocket, as he didn’t want to be ID’d as a bureaucratic geek out on a late-night prowl. He felt the Glock .40 against his hip, well back in a Safariland holster, and the counterweight of two mags with twelve apiece on his other hip; he bought his coats a little big so that the gun wouldn’t print, even if it meant he had to have the sleeves taken up.
Fish. He decided it would be a fish night, because he was a long way from a reputable steak joint, the nearest, Morton’s, being over on Connecticut at K. It was a cab ride away. Nearby there was a place called Oceanaire he’d always heard good things about; he’d hit that, have a nice dinner, walk back to the Hoover underground, and be home in Fairfax by midnight.
He got to Oceanaire, which was on L, and liked what he saw: it seemed to have a kind of forties look to it, and it made him think of movies about G-men, where everyone wore a tough fedora with a tilt to the brim and a trench coat and carried a Colt Dick Special. Oh, and smoked, they all smoked, and he remembered the movie that had set him off on this path in life, which he’d seen on television in the seventies lying on his belly at fourteen in his parents’ split-level, gray in the light of the tube; it was called The Street with No Name and told the story of a heroic G-man named Gene Cordell who had infiltrated some mob in the tacky slumtown of “Center City,” and it ended in a blazing shootout, with tommy guns spitting flashes and spurts of spent gas and long columns of tumbling brass into the night air, while slugs chewed the shit out of a guy named Shivvy, sparing Cordell’s life at the last moment. Cordell was played by—what was that guy’s name? Some guy who never made it big, but boy, he’d seemed big in that movie. Steve Jackson? Jack Smith? Bill Stevenson, some name like that, some—Mark Stevens, that was it, and for that movie at least, no matter what happened before or after, Mark Stevens was so cool, so smart, so tough, so brave, so everything a kid could want to be, that’s when Nick knew he had to be a G-man or his life would come to nothing.
Nostalgic for the good old days of G-manning he’d only experienced in the movies, no matter twenty-odd years of service as a special agent, Nick slipped in, saw the place was half full, caught the maître d’s attention, and was taken to a nice out-of-the-way table. He sat, turned down a drink, listened to the specials, chose grilled rockfish with mashed potatoes after a salad, oil and vinegar, and began to work on a little plate of on-the-house munchies in sour cream the waiter had brought before he’d taken the order.
Meanwhile big-band music filled the air, and Nick waited for the announcement that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, but it never came. Instead, a bottle of champagne did.
“I didn’t order that,” he said to Chad, the waiter.
“I know, sir, but a fellow at that table sent it over. It’s the very best. Not cheap.”
Nick looked across the room and saw that man Bill Fedders, waving pleasantly at him.
Nick smiled back, then turned to the waiter.
“Take this back, thank Mr. Fedders for me, if you don’t mind, but tell him I’m on duty. I’m an FBI special agent and I’m carrying a firearm, so it’s against regulations for me to drink tonight. He’ll understand.”
“Yes sir,” said the waiter, and sped off. But if Nick thought that would be the end of it, he was sadly mistaken. He had the salad, the rock, nicely done, and was enjoying a cup of decaf when a shadow crossed the table, and he knew who it was.
“Nick, hi. Bill Fedders—”
“Sure, Bill, I remember, in the director’s office a couple of weeks ago. You’re working for Constable, right?”
“I am indeed. Doing the boss’s dirty work, as usual. Sorry you couldn’t take the champagne. It’s a really light one, very good with fish. But I understand. Something happens, you have to pop a bad guy, and the fizz-juice comes up and it’s a lot of trouble.”
“Even I admit the chances of me popping a bad guy tonight are pretty remote, but if you get into a way of living, it’s tough to get out of it. Thanks for the offer. I’m not a prude. It just wouldn’t have been a good idea.”
“Got it. Nick, do you mind if I join you for a sec?” Fedders had a smooth way of ingratiating himself, that professional Washington player’s sense of entitlement to attention everywhere, welcome assumed. He was a radiantly handsome man, wearing the power attorney’s immaculately fitted blue pinstripe, with a glisten in his gray-black hair and the fresh look of just having stepped out of the barber’s chair.
“Mr. Fedders—”
“Bill.”
“Bill, it’s probably not a good idea. I do official business at the office, in the open, where everybody can see and hear. If you want to schedule an appointment, we’ll certainly do our best to accommodate you. Or if—”
“It’s not really official, Nick. Not really.”
“Well, sure then, but bear in mind I have a walk back to my car and a long drive back to Fairfax tonight. And I want to be in early tomorrow. I always try to be the first guy in the office. It goes with all that big money they pay me.”
Fedders smiled, eyes sparkling, as he eased into the empty chair. He put a half-full glass of scotch down before him.
“Nick, it’s my job, you know. I have to ask around, I have to find things out, I have to know how things work. That’s what Tom pays me for. I guess I’m sort of his ‘special agent.’ ”
“Sure.”
“So I hear things. I hear, for example, the investigation has suddenly gone off on another route.”
“We’re trying to be diligent, that’s all.”
“Sure, sure. I hear that too. I hear from people, ‘That Nick Memphis, sure to be an assistant director before the year’s out, just gone from triumph to triumph.’ I understand that thing in Bristol was hairy.”
“I caught a piece of lead, but I’m okay except for the funny walk.”
“Well, a hero. Very good guy. And that’s what I hear, that’s the summary judgment on Nick Memphis, FBI. ‘Very good guy.’ ‘The be
st.’ ‘One of the incorruptibles,’ ‘really a comer,’ ‘going places.’ ”
“Bill, going places isn’t the point. I’ve had a wonderful career and I’m happy at the small contributions I’ve made. That’s enough. If I make it to the next floor, won’t that be swell. If I don’t, that’s the way the cards fall. My ambition doesn’t include myself. I want to make sure we get it right; that’s my ambition.”
“Well said. You’re a noble man in a town full of assholes, professional and amateur. Okay, Nick, but let me just be square with you. This guy Tom Constable is your classic big foot and he’s not afraid to hurt people who get in his way. I try to get him to exercise some constraint, but these made-it-themselves celebrity billionaires are tough cookies when it comes to getting their own way. I’m just here to say, if there’s no point in antagonizing him, don’t do it. He can and will bring hurt, and I’ve seen it. Nick, I’d hate to see a guy good as you get buried under the big guy’s big foot over nothing. He wants the investigation closed; he wants his ex-wife’s name out of the papers; he wants the whole thing to go away. I’m only telling you this out of respect for your accomplishments.”
“Oh, I see,” said Nick. “You’re doing me a favor. See, I thought you were threatening an FBI agent.”
“Nick—”
“Mr. Fedders, I’d like this conversation to end now, before you get in trouble. Yeah, you have to serve the big man, and yeah, I have to tread softly around the big man, we both know how it works in this bad old town. Okay, you’ve made your point. Power talks, bullshit walks, welcome to the City on the Hill.”
“Nick, be pissed if you want, but think of it from another angle. This guy could really help you. I mean why do the assholes like me make it big and the good boys like you never quite do? It’s because us assholes aren’t afraid to suck up to a big foot, flatter him endlessly, do his dirty little jobs, and get the big payoff. You could say that’s the life I chose, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But a good guy like you, if you do this one little favor for the big man, you have no idea how it can help a career. It could get a good guy like you to the Seventh Floor, and think of the good you could do there, and the pride you’d take in it. You’d be ahead of your wife too, and I know that’s got to play into it”—so Fedders had actually looked into Sally’s thriving career at Justice and knew that she was fast-track to the upper floors—“and think how good that would feel. Nick, that’s all I have, thanks for listening, you have my card, and if you ever, and I mean ever, need a favor in this town, call me.”
He smiled warmly and without a trace of shame, then got up and gracefully left.
Nick watched him go, thinking, Oh Christ, where is this going?
15
It turned out to be almost too much fun. Bob had to watch himself; he could be seduced by the pleasure of the three days into forgetting why he was here, which was to recon iSniper and see if he could get some kind of look at the student log and learn who had purchased and been taught to use the thing. But he almost had to force himself into that: most of the time was spent on the range among guns and gunners, men like himself, who’d been and done, except they’d be and do again. So he more or less slipped aside and watched as Anto and his boys helped the younger Americans master the toy.
It was almost as advertised. It could put you on target without a doubt in the world faster than anything going, and in the sand it would be a major boon to American sniper teams, if it held up. There were some ergonomic issues, and the iSniper cadre, led by the irrepressible Anto Grogan, took careful notes to feed back to the iSniper geniuses for the next generation. For one thing, the ranging button atop the monitor to the left of the nodule was difficult to access quickly, unless you were well used to it and had done it ten thousand times and had burned it into muscle memory. It was the key to initiating the target sequence; it was also the same size and height as the enter button and the reset button, and the young snipers sometimes groped for it or hit something else. A slightly roughened surface to distinguish it from the other buttons would help. Then there was a problem with the battery housing, which worked well enough in the day on the range with access to tools but might be a bitch in some frozen third world bog with bad actors on the prowl all over the joint, even if the batteries were said to last for a thousand hours. The housing latch was too small for men with big, blunt fingers and no
fingernails; it had to be redesigned more generously for the big-size boys marine and special forces snipers tended to be.
But the real issue was the necessity of taking the info off the readout screen; it meant you had to come out of your hold, out of your cheek weld, out of your proper eye relief, out of your focus, out of, in short, your shooting world, read a set of numbers, then mentally retain the figures and work them out in the delta of aiming points under the crosshairs. It worked well enough, though when you came up, you always lost your scope vision, your pupils dilated, and it cost you seconds when you came back to the eyepiece to reach max efficiency.
“Aye, it could be better on that score,” admitted Anto. “It’s not perfect, not quite, maybe in the next generation. We told ’em it would be something if you just pushed the ranging button, the leprechauns inside did the heavy lifting, and then instead of presenting a number for you to look at on a screen, the proper aiming point just lit up, you never having to leave the scope. You put it on Johnny, and bingo-bango, time to paint a new swastika on your fuselage. Maybe they’ll get there some time.”
“It’s still the best,” Bob lied, as if he were familiar with the other items from anything other than a Google experience. “Horus is too much time off the scope, though I like its reticle design. DTAC has too busy a reticle with all those other graphs there, and the same with the Holland. Y’all had any luck with Horus out there?”
“Yes sir,” said Blondie, “it gets you on target, but like you say, it’s too slow, too much Palm Pilot and Kestral stuff. I like this here too; it cuts the time way down from figuring to shooting, not quite perfect but perfect enough.”
“Have we made that sale yet, Mr. Swagger?” Anto asked.
“You’re damned close,” Bob said. “I just want to see how the things hold up over the extensive shooting you put them through these five days.”
“We’ll beat ’em to hell and gone and they’ll keep on ticking, you’ll see, sir. I’m here to serve, oh great and mighty and shining one.”
“Anto, I’m just another—”
“Anything I can do I will, which is why they’re paying me the big buckeroos.”
But that all went away at nights, off the range, where the snipers took over a bar called the Mustang across from the Red Rooster where iSniper had booked all. Then it was just men of the gun, lots of beer, war stories, a sense of the smallest, most exclusive community in the world, men who’d shot for blood and lived to tell about it. Bob went too, under the pretext that he might learn something off Anto in a moment of weakness, but Anto never had any, and anyway the love that came to Bob was something he was unprepared for and had never encountered before.
“Mr. Swagger—”
“Please call me Bob, young guy.”
“Bob, I’m not supposed to let this out, but me and Chip are Delta snipers, headed now to Afghanistan for my third, his second, tour with Fifth Special Forces.”
“My hat’s off to you fellows. You’re doing a hell of a job out there.”
“Nothing like you, sir. We’ve heard the An Loc story; it’s a legend. You stopped an NVA battalion, a fucking battalion, that was headed into an A-camp under siege. I just wanted to say, it’s a fine moment for us to be here with you.”
“Y’all make me out to be more than I am. I didn’t stop no battalion. I slowed ’em down, that’s all. Took some of their officers. The rain helped, but what helped most of all was the young man with me, who I am so sad to say didn’t make it home. Anyhow, it was the Phantoms that did most of the killing. They got there with the dawn just as the weather broke, and I have to
say those were brave men in those planes; they got so low to the deck to put the burning jelly where it hurt the most, I’m betting most came back with grass in their scoops. I just watched it.”
“He’s a modest man, our Bob,” said Anto, leaning in, “but the story as I heard it has him racing through Indian territory by his lonesome and squeezing down on that battalion for two solid days. Officially it was eighty-seven, was it not, and I’m betting it was eighty-seven that day alone, with no officer there to check. That’s a soldier of the king, I’m telling you, and it shows the power of the fella with the rifle.”
“It was so long ago I can hardly remember,” said Bob, “and I won’t talk no more about myself because you’re doing it better and harder than I ever did, no matter what this drunken IRA bastard says, but I will raise a drink, even if it’s a Diet Coke, to the fella with the rifle.”
When he got back on the second night, the message light on his cell was blinking. He called, knowing it would be Nick, but instead it was the young special agent Chandler and she asked him first off how it was going.
“Going fine. Having a hoot. Ain’t found out much, though. I see Anto’s got some kind of book with him, and he’s a well organized man, so I’m betting he’s got notes taken on all the tutorials he’s run. I’d like to get a look-see at that and let you know if it’s worth subpoenaing.”
“You have to be careful. If you peek and it comes out you’re working for us and we used any information you obtained, a defense attorney can use it against us in court, along the lines of a highly problematic warrantless search, and no matter what, the whole thing could go away. You’re much better off just looking and learning what’s in the open, taking careful notes, and we’ll see where we go from there.”
He sighed. It was clear she had no feel or imagination for undercover work. Her tendency was to push him toward the strictly legal, can’t-get-in-trouble line. But he knew that sometimes you had to push it, just a little, poke it, dance around it. Either that or walk away.
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 74