A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  Some reporter named Banjax was all over cable, documenting his disclosures, trying desperately to separate himself from the implication of his words. He of course had no opinion on the appropriateness of Nick to head the investigation, no investment, emotional or professional; his job was to report the facts and let others draw the conclusions. He just felt the public had a right to know that the FBI’s chief sleuth had been himself involved as a participant in issues similar to the ones here—tragically so, sadly so—and the question of why was a logical one to ask.

  The Bureau had no comment; Nick, of course, had no comment. Bob saw a glimpse of the girl Starling, her head down, racing past the assembled cameras outside the Hoover Building in DC; he thought she looked upset.

  Then the shows all cut to an interview with Joan Flanders’s ex-husband, the rich oddball T. T. Constable. He was all cowboyed up, because now he lived in the West, had essentially given up his eastern identity, and by now everybody was used to seeing him in a cowboy hat and open-necked red shirt with a red bandana about his neck.

  As usual, he was ornery and colorful, and the cameras ate up his rugged, tanned face and grizzle of day-old beard, as if he’d spent the day ropin’ and brandin’ instead of sellin’ short and firin’ low producers.

  “Well, damn,” he said, “I do expect more from the FBI. We all know who did this, and the sooner we reach that legal determination, the sooner we can put it behind us and celebrate Joan’s great life instead of her unfortunate death at the hands of some screwball marine who thought he was still in the war or something. It’s so straightforward, it’s a mystery to me how they could get it so knotted up.”

  Then the Wyoming congressman—the shows didn’t point out that he represented the district in which much of Tom Constable’s vast ranch, one of several, was located, nor did they mention that his party affiliation was the same as Tom’s and that Tom had donated generously to his campaign—this Jack Ridings took over, and promised hearings on FBI hiring and promotional practices, and wondered how a situation like this could come about. Essentially you had a sniper investigating a sniper, and was it not fair to wonder where his allegiance lay? Did he have some sort of psychological investment in the act of sniping? Did he think it was noble to eliminate a human being at long range; would that cloud his professional judgment, cause him to refuse to accept certain realities?

  Bob turned it off then. Enough. And shortly thereafter Washington called, at the end of the duty day, saying yeah, he knew what was going on, but he did have these notebooks for Bob, if Bob wanted them. Bob wanted them.

  So Bob sat there, trying to make this or that out of the notes. Each guy or gal had his own scheme, his own method, his own set of abbreviations, so it wasn’t easy going, and a lot of it was guesswork or inference. Eventually, he got to know the two simplest styles of penmanship, so he could read those books easily enough, even if some of the initials remained mysterious, and another guy had gone back over his notes with a red pencil, starring each entry that he thought might lead to further inquiries.

  Essentially what he found confirmed his own investigations. In the past few months or so, both Jack and Mitzi had been morose, uncommunicative, seemingly depressed. Friends wondered about the health of the marriage or the long-term depression the rejection of Jack’s book might cause. A perhaps too bitchy interviewee made the point that it had been so important to him to have a big New York publisher take it, but nobody would, and that had been a devastating blow to Jack’s dream of literary glory and a return to centrality. Plus, he now owed the publisher the money he’d been living on for five years.

  But then everyone agreed that there’d been a miraculous recovery. Suddenly the old Jack, the old Mitzi were back: they always had a swagger to them, a charisma, and a happiness, an ebullience. Most people seemed to put this as happening somewhere early in September; it was as if that ship, which seemed to have vanished, had arrived at long last.

  What could have happened? Bob wondered.

  He wished he could get back into the house, maybe look more carefully at appointment books or calendars for that time period. Once he’d penetrated the safe, that’s all he’d cared about and he’d concentrated on it at the expense of everything else.

  Fool! Idiot! Making mistakes! Sloppy, old, stupid, eyes not working, brain asleep.

  He tried to think what to do with the information. He could go over the information from the safe again, for the fiftieth time; he could go over the notebooks again, thinking perhaps he’d missed something; he could log on to the Internet and call up newspapers from the first week in September on the possibility that it was something out there, in the real world, that had left a mark that he could understand and link to them for a clearer picture; he could go through the biography a journalist had written about them and check to see if something in their past happened around the first and they were celebrating—but that one was dumbest.

  He was so tired. It was time to go to bed. His mind was blurring; he was getting nowhere.

  But he couldn’t tear himself away. Silly as it seemed, he had to run it out. He got out his laptop, logged on to Google. He thought he’d just Google randomly for a bit, Jack Strong/Mitzi Reilly/September, and see what he’d get. He got nonsense. Nothing, crazy, insane, lots of refrains of some song or pieces of doggerel poetry like “Try to remember, it was the kind of September, when we were mellllllowwww,” whatever that was. He jumped through the listings, and then something caught his eye on about the seventh screen under the listing O. Z. Harris, an obituary, from the Chicago Tribune, page D15, with the lines blackened “… and was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzy Reilly, a 1997 biography.”

  He called it up.

  The headline read Radical journalist O. Z. Harris, 81.

  He read,

  Oscar Zebulon Harris, a Pultizer Prize–winning journalist who challenged the system and earned renown for his integrity and intrepidity, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, died Wednesday after a long illness.

  Harris, 81, better known as “O. Z. Harris” and “Ozzie” to the many young writers who admired and loved him, covered the American left over many years and worked for, among others, The New Republic, The Nation, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and finally his own newsletter, called Ozzie’s Oz, a famous muckraking journal that took on the powers that be.

  Frequently called an agitator and, in a different age, an activist, Ozzie was as prickly to his enemies—usually the Justice Department, four Republican administrations, the Department of Defense, and the Department of the Army—as he was loving to his friends, which included a generation of progressive journalists and activists.

  His reporting on war crimes in Vietnam won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 and he was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, a 1997 biography.

  He died September 3.

  According to his own wishes, no services will be held and his body was cremated. Donations on his behalf may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union.

  The Cook County Department of Public Administration warehouse was west of the city, even beyond Oak Park, in a town near O’Hare called Franklin Park, full of tidy bungalows and Italian, Mexican, and Korean restaurants, tracing the demographic tides that had flowed outward from the big town. It was flat, out here, and so far gone the skyscrapers that contributed to America’s second-greatest skyline were unseen. Trees filled the little crosshatched streets off the main drags, but the drags themselves were the usual run of strip malls, chain restaurants, the odd old free-standing restaurant, even a racetrack with an imposing stadium abutting it.

  Washington and Swagger found the nondescript old factory building on Mannheim Road, in an area zoned for light manufacturing, each building separated from the others by cyclone fences with barbed wire discouragement up top. They turned off the busy Mannheim, pulled through a gate, earning admittance on the power of Washingt
on’s police ID, found parking, and went through a green door to a grimy office with a counter.

  What brought them there was Bob’s call to Dennis Washington, Washington’s to the coroner’s office to learn the hospital in which Harris had died, followed by Washington’s visit to that establishment. The hospital kept careful records, and it became clear that over the last months of his life, Ozzie Harris was regularly visited by his friends and comrades Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly and nobody else. Washington did some quick, casual interviews, found a few people who remembered and all agreed that the old radical really came to rely on Jack and Mitzi, who in turn had treated him with respect and love. He remained “Mr. Harris” to them, never “Ozzie,” as everyone else called him.

  The clerk eventually noticed Bob and the imposing Washington and ambled over with a melancholy weight to his movements. It wasn’t much fun, Bob thought, working among the aisles and aisles of unclaimed property of the dead; most of it, according to statute, would remain in escrow against claims by long-lost relatives for six months; then it was auctioned, and what remained went to the burner.

  Washington flashed ID, laid the death certificate out, and the clerk toddled away, returning with a key attached to a necklace that wore a metal disk upon which H-1498 was stamped.

  “Go on in, Detective. It’s pretty self-explanatory; you just follow the rows to H, then go down the shelves till you get to unit 1498. The key opens the padlock. I’d take a mask; it’s pretty dusty in there.”

  “Thanks,” said Washington, and he and Swagger headed through the big double doors into a kind of cathedral of American stuff, a huge, darkened brick room that was crosshatched by a wooden latticework that supported Cyclone wire dividers.

  Ozzie Harris didn’t have much, as his life had clearly not been about stuff. There was furniture, surprisingly Victorian, bags of old clothes, Oriental lamps, rolled-up woven rugs, an ironing board, a small TV that was probably black-and-white, various cheesy appliances like a microwave and a toaster, an old Mixmaster, a juicer, a crate of cereal and laundry products, surely burner-bound, an old bike, a Barcalounger, a state-of-the-art 2003 computer and printer from some clone outfit, tons of books and magazines, six filing cabinets, a ratty set of golf clubs from happier days, the inevitable framed photos of world events Ozzie had witnessed or written about, speeches he’d given, conventions he’d covered, great men he’d loved or despised.

  They worked. On hands and knees, bent over the material in poor light in a cocoon of drifting dust in an airless room, they patiently processed all that was before them. The books took the longest, and many of them had notes or underlined passages that had to be examined and determined to be text-related, not secret messages. The photographs had to be probed for things folded and hidden, the files had to be gently exhumed, each sheet quickly examined.

  Many were articles, razored out, dumped in manila folders indexed by various outrages: Racism, militarism, sometimes whole drawers like Vietnam ’64–’67, Vietnam ’67–’70, Vietnam ’71–’75. There was a file of erotica, surprisingly mild, mostly drawings of women in tight latex lingerie that pushed their breasts and buttocks out plumply and had highlights from unseen illumination glowing on them; many were tied, all were made up, with bright red cupid lips. Then too there were files of acceptance letters and rejection slips, fan notes from kids, letters from lawyers threatening libel suits or political opponents expressing disappointment or outrage or sucking up. A whole file was full of mash notes from celebs, mostly second-tier movie lefties. There was a file of letters from students wanting Ozzie essentially to write their papers for them or at least do the research or—

  “Hey, Sniper,” said Denny, “hey, come lookee here.”

  He was lying under the box spring, a tough fit for such a big fellow, and his suit coat spilled open, showing the Sig 229 holstered to his belt.

  Bob scootched and knelt and wedged, and saw where Denny’s rubberized finger pointed: inside the box spring frame, toward the end of the structure, four yellowing strands of Scotch tape peeled away from the wood, drying out in the arid atmosphere. Each one showed one end that suggested being torn or twisted loose.

  “It looks like he had something taped here. And judging from the yellow color of the tape, for a long time. Then recently someone pulled whatever was there loose, breaking and twisting the tape. I make it to be four by four, about.”

  “Yeah,” said Bob. “I wonder if there’s prints on the tape.”

  “Well,” said Denny, “I will mark it down, and if we find something corroborating, maybe I’ll get an actual search warrant and come in with technicians, and we can check the tape for prints. Be interesting if Jack Strong’s prints showed. There’d be your proof he took something. I don’t know where that would lead you, but you’d know Jack had dug through all this, at least.”

  Bob looked at his watch. They’d been at it over three hours. He had a couple of drawers to go.

  Bob went back and tried to find renewed vigor as he plowed through the details of the old lefty’s life, but it had never been new to start with and stayed old all the way through, although a file of letters from angry readers showed some life: “You fucking commie bastard, they ought to hang you from a lamppost. All you Reds will get your day of the rope, you just wait.” But even the craziness grew boring, and none of the letters—the signed ones, as most bore the signature A Patriot or I Gave to My Country—displayed a name that suggested anything or led anywhere.

  Agh, he thought. What did you expect? You can’t do this sort of thing on the quick with a buddy helping out. This is what the FBI is for, to go through this stuff, run it down, track it, read it for fingerprints, analyze the forensics, do the dozens of tests, the magic stuff they do. You are stuck in the year 1948, and this is an obsolete black-and-white movie where the detective finds the Big Clue in some dusty old file.

  But he didn’t find the Big Clue.

  “Well, I guess we crashed and burned.”

  “I guess we did.”

  “Okay,” Bob said. “Nothing here. Nothing here at all. I’ll call the feds and see where we are. You were great, really.”

  “No big deal. Semper Fi, all that shit.”

  “All that shit.”

  Washington rose and then said, “It is kind of funny though, a guy as red as this guy, so kill-the-rich and power-to-the-people and all that bullshit, of course he saves a letter from his broker. His broker! Can you imagine?”

  “They’re all like that,” said Bob. “Look at Strong. He’s secretly trying to get a roll together, not to pay off his debts but to take off and live big like the millionaires he’d execute if he became, God help us, the big boss.”

  But then he thought, why wasn’t the letter in the files with all the other crazy shit?

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Oh, it was folded up in Das Kapital. I don’t know why it was there.”

  Bob thought, that is odd. That is unexpected.

  “What did it say?”

  “Nothing. It was just a recommendation of stocks for him to buy, sometime in 1972.”

  Bob thought, nowhere else in all this shit is there any expression of interest in the stock market, any interest in capitalism except how to destroy it, any relationship with a broker, any connection to anything that isn’t somehow political—for Ozzie, whoever he was, was like Jack and Mitzi: a total creature of politics.

  “You didn’t find any other letters like that?”

  “Nah. Some guy in New York.”

  A New York broker.

  That set off a tiny alarm in Bob’s brain, from somewhere in his own past.

  “You have the letter?”

  Washington went to the case, bent, found the thick spine of the book, pulled it out, pulled out the envelope, and began to hand it to Bob.

  “No, no, just look at it,” Bob said. “The guy who sent it. Was his name Ward Bonson?”

  Washington looked.

  “Give the man a prize. He’s a mi
nd reader.”

  “Jesus,” said Bob.

  “Why? Who the hell is Ward Bonson?”

  “At one time he was the highest-ranking Soviet penetration agent in the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1972, after he’d left Naval Intelligence and before he went to work in the CIA, he was a very successful Wall Street broker, just waiting for the Agency to come and lap him up, which of course it did soon enough.”

  “You knew him?” asked Washington.

  “I killed him,” said Bob.

  24

  Nick resigned every day at 8:30 a.m., and every day at 8:30 a.m. the director turned him down.

  “I am not going to let those bastards tell me how to run the Bureau,” he said. “Get back to work. Bust this thing for me, Nick. Now. Soon. Fast.”

  “We’re trying.”

  Nick gave him a daily summary after the resignation ritual, on any given day reporting the task force’s progress along its new lines of inquiry: of the ninety-seven new suspects, Task Force Sniper, with its additional manpower, had eliminated over forty-one. But there were sixteen of that first already-vetted group who demanded more careful attention—reinterviews, records checks, travel and time line indexing, overseas liaison—and there were still over fifty to go who hadn’t been looked at at all.

  Meanwhile, the scandal refused to go away. Usually things in Washington blow over as new news cycles demand new material, but the reporter David Banjax was clearly on a hot streak as he chronicled the life and times of Special Agent Nicholas Memphis, the hero and goat of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who now ran the Bureau’s sniper investigation. Banjax was given a quarter of the Times’s front page to tell the story of Nick and his first wife, Myra, whom he’d paralyzed and married. While some saw it as a human interest story that made Nick look like a prince, many others saw it as another example of Nick’s misjudgment, of his emotional cloudiness on the issue of snipers and sniper victims and the discipline and potential tragedy of the figure of the law enforcement marksman.