“Look, just be cool. If you won’t come in, go to ground. A week is going by with nothing happening. It’ll take that long for us to polish the report and for Professional Responsibility to run checks on Nick and the FN fonts to see if this holds water. On top of that, you respect our rules, by which I mean you have no information whatsoever that’s actionable, no name has popped up, you can identify no suspects, and anything you do is groundless and can only end by screwing things up. You stay put. Do I have your promise?”
“Same deal. You don’t have me arrested, I won’t jump without clearing it by you.”
She moaned.
“Swagger, you are a bastard.”
“I am, but I’m an honest one, Agent Chandler. If it comes to it, I will move aggressively to right this wrong, inside the law I hope, but outside it if necessary. I ain’t telling you no fairy tales, young woman. I am a sniper and I will go about my business the sniper way.”
“A week, or I cut papers now and make you number one on the hit parade.”
“A week then. Dammit, you drive a hard bargain, young lady.”
“A week,” she said. “By the way, that gunfight? Great shooting, Sniper.”
31
The hat seemed redundant as well as ridiculous. The story appeared today, featuring the confirmation from a bonded legal document master that the FN proposal and the FN internal notes came from the same printer, thus verifying the internal notes as being of FN origin, so what was the point of the hat? But the guy had said a hat, so Banjax wore a hat, an old Yankees cap. He had a moment of unease; the Redskins had just been creamed by the Giants, and maybe that idealized scrollwork NY on the blue cap would get him beaten up by an angry mob of notoriously volatile Redskins fans from, say, the hard guys at CNN or USA Today—he laughed at his own joke—but in seconds he saw that there was no particular brand loyalty on the streets of DC, as everyone wore a hat of his own choosing, from some kind of knit Afghan cap to stockings to baseball caps pledging allegiance to teams from all over the world. There was probably one from the Tehran Mud Hens.
He arrived late to the bureau, as befit a star. He actually didn’t like big story days, because he was somewhat self-conscious; he preferred to not appear when he had a big one riding above the fold. But he had to be here, and so he made the most out of his victory lap, modestly accepting the congrats that came to him, the looks of admiration, the winks and thumbs-up. Still, he had to admit, it was pretty cool, though not quite as cool as when his editor told him the document master had confirmed that both docs had come from the same printer and that page one was taking the piece. He’d been so lucky; Will Rashnapur, who covered the Justice Department, had a Bureau source and had been able to get a Xerox of the original FN proposal quickly. That was the hang-up and it could have taken weeks, but whoever it was delivered within twenty-four hours, so the freight-train momentum of the scandal was maintained.
He sat at his desk and began his ritual. First, he turned on his monitor and onlined the Post, the LA Times, the WSJ, the Tribune, and none of them had caught up, although on its Web site the Post had rushed a denial from the FBI PIO and another no comment from FN, as if gun companies ever spoke with the press. He checked Drudge and was gratified to see “Paper—FBI Agent in Snipergate took free air, steaks and a night at Carousel from gun boys.” He Googled “Sniper Nick” and got a thousand hits, the first fifty of which were simply repeats of an AP follow-up that some poor schmo had put together at 4 a.m. after the Times’s first edition broke on the Net.
Someone lurked. He looked up; it was Jenny Fiori, the TV
liaison.
“Okay, hero,” she said, “take your pick. Matthews, Olbermann, or O’Reilly. More audience at O’Reilly, but he’ll just call you a commie and yell at you. More prestige at Matthews, but he won’t let you finish your sentences. Olbermann will be the most fun, unless his leg starts twitching, at which point he turns nasty. Some dweebs at CNN also want you, but that doesn’t look like much. I’d go with Matthews.”
“I like Chris. He’s okay. You can’t get me off cable and onto one of the big networks? Katie? Brian, that guy—”
“The nets don’t give you enough time and New York frowns on them. It’s usually about making the anchor look smart. You can do any of the cable from here with our hookup, or just go over to Matthews, it isn’t far.”
“Okay, sure, Matthews.”
“Great. I’ll get it rolling. Hey, what’s with the hat? Are we trying to be colorful now?”
“Uh, no, I forgot I had it on.” He shucked it.
He checked his phone messages. Oh, so fun. His agent, “Call me.” Two other agents, including a famous one. The local station, WRC, for a nooner, the girl should have gone through Jenny and could be safely ignored. Someone he knew at Esquire, someone at the Atlantic, someone at TNR. A couple of FBI-hating civilians. Someone calling him a rat.
Then he went to e-mail. Over seventy, not bad.
“Way to go,” said Anthrax, of New Orleans.
“You the man,” said Jefferson, of Florida.
“Did you discuss this with God first?” wondered a Mrs. Salatow, of Cape May.
“You red shit,” observed ex-PFC, from North Carolina.
“Why are you tearing down the FBI?” wondered Gordon. “Do you want the terrorists to win?”
“You’re doing a great job, David,” said Bill Fedders. “Call me if you need any more help.”
And on and on it went, the queue lengthening even as he tried to read through it all. Finally it was too much.
Time for lunch.
“Killer, join us?” said a colleague. “Thai, that little place on K.”
“That’ll be fun,” he said, pulling on coat and hat.
“You’re a Yankees fan? Never would have guessed.”
“Yankees, baseball, right? Where they hit that thing with a club?”
Then they saw he was being ironic and laughed, and off they went and had a fine, merry lunch.
He got back late, again okay for a star. He ran the afternoon blogs, saw that he had heated up the boys at Power Line but was a god on Huffington, and the Daily Kos seemed close to declaring him a new religion. Calls from some tag-along foreign pressies—Australian, Japanese, Dutch, the Swedes and their pals the Danes—all wanting to do phoners. Ho-hum. Another call from WRC, a call from NPR, some woman who claimed she’d met him at a party.
It was almost time for the 4 p.m. meeting, and no, nothing had—
“Oh, David, this came for you, meant to drop it off earlier,” said Judi Messing, who administered the office as its receptionist.
He took it. Big envelope, manila. He breathed hard.
Okay, maybe so.
He felt it; yes, there seemed to be a sheet of photo-thickness paper inside.
“David, the meeting. Don’t be late,” someone called, rushing past. “They’ll be singing your praises.”
“I can’t come. Something just came in.”
He saw all the reporters gathered in the conference room and the assistant bureau manager running the show, with the big man himself off to the side, hiding behind those half-lens reading glasses he’d affected for twenty-odd years. David watched through the glass, as if observing a pantomime, while each boy or girl self-promoted his or her own stories, and the great man handed out nods of acceptance or frowns of denial. There was a lot of laughing, as there always was, as the very smart people who constituted the office enjoyed each other’s company, camaraderie, shared values, sense of irony, dedication to professionalism, and, of course, ambition.
He felt above it.
I have transcended, he thought.
Now it was time. He looked around—nobody nearby; someone taking dictation; someone on the phone, too busy to attend the meet; Jack Sims, notorious curmudgeon, boycotting as he had famously for twenty years; researchers sitting at their screens still grinding away; yadda yadda, the same old. God, he loved it. It had taken most of his life to get here, and it had seemed so far
away for so long, but now he was actually a member of the bureau in the biggest, fiercest town of all, for the greatest newspaper that ever lived and breathed, and he counted, he was one of them, he was part of it, he moved, he shook, he influenced. Yet for an empire it was a seedy palace: it looked, to continue with the customary metaphor, like a second-tier insurance company branch office, decorated in early-twentieth-century political posters. Some trophy front pages also hung about, but mostly it had the industrial cheeriness of the New Office Interior Design, littered with piles of crap, stacks of crap, pieces of crap, little doohickeys that reporters always got sent, for some odd reason, and a few morale-boosting quotations taped to the walls from men like Breslin, Mencken, Liebling, and Baker, the latter of which was the most helpful:
Q: Mr. Baker, what do you do when you write a column and it’s just not there, you know, you just haven’t done it right, it’s not very good, you know it’s not your best?
A: Publish it.
David always got a smile out of that truth. Anyway, now he opened the flap and slid the paper out, seeing that yes, it was a photograph, though upside down. He turned it around and his eyes drank up the details.
The first thing was the target. He thought it would have a black bull’s-eye, but it was of a configuration he didn’t understand: the predominant feature was a heavy black square about three by three inches in the upper quarter of the face. It lay across and occluded the top of a collection of circles within circles which seemed to form the nominal “target” of the thing. He looked at the printed label up top and made out “I.B.S. Official 300 Yard Bench Rest Target.” Whatever. The sheet was mounted in a frame of some sort. The bullet holes actually weren’t in the center of the circles or in the box either, but just off the box at about ten o’clock in the third ring. The cluster of shots had landed nowhere near the center, but the three men gathered about the target appeared joyous.
The one with the rifle was clearly Nick Memphis, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened. He held a big gun, a rifle, with a tube along the top, an imposing-looking gadget with turrets and markings that sort of resembled a camera, if a camera were a tube instead of a box. The gun looked massive, and it wasn’t the machine gun type of thing, with handles and bolts and cooling ventilation and curved magazines, but more like a hunting rifle, though somehow swollen, as if it had been ingesting steroids. It was black, like the scope, and lay against Nick’s knee as Nick posed kneeling by the cluster of holes, five of them, a little constellation. Next to the cluster, as David bent and squinted to see, someone had written in magic marker, “Nick Memphis, 300 yards, FN Model PSR, .308 Black Hills 168, 1.751!, June 23, 2006, Columbia, S.C.” David didn’t know what the 1.751 referred to and why it bore an exclamation point. He didn’t recognize the two men flanking Nick on each side, their sleeves also up, their ties loosened, each with an earphone pushed up on their heads, as were earphones pushed up on Nick’s. In fact, it was like a glimpse into a strange world, maybe on a distant planet or a million years in the past or future, full of protocols that were mysterious, full of traditions that were meaningless, pride that seemed arbitrary, and most of all that big, immutable gun right in the middle, the center of it all, as if these three guys worshipped it. Very odd.
But the point was, here was visual, dramatic proof that Nicholas Memphis, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, had journeyed to South Carolina in June of 2006 to examine FN’s entry in the FBI Sniper Rifle Selection, against FBI regulations, especially, as the documents already obtained and proven authentic had revealed, at the expense of the Belgian arms manufacturing concern.
If it was real.
David leaned over as he opened his desk drawer and removed a magnifying glass bought two days earlier for exactly this purpose. Not knowing just what he was looking for, he ran his eye, through the magnified lens, over every square centimeter of the photo. He certainly saw nothing obviously fake, like a shadow going the wrong way or a subtly incorrect relationship of head to neck or a line around this or that figure or object. But who knew what they could do these days?
“Is that it?” Jack Sims asked, leaning over. Jack was of the old-professor type, usually a study in tweeds, jowls, horn-rims, rep-striped bow tie, blue Brooks Brothers button-down even though, regrettably, Brooks now had its shirts made in China, a man with whiskey breath and a memory for arcane political minutiae that was legendary in DC.
“Yeah. Jack, were you in the Army?”
“I was. A thousand years ago. No guns then, we used spears. I was in the 235th Spearchucking Regiment.”
“Seriously, see where he’s written ‘1.751’ here, with an exclamation point and an arrow to the cluster of bullet holes. Any idea what that means? Is it a score or something?”
“No,” said Jack, “it’s not a score. Not with the decimal point.”
“Could it be a caliber? Is the gun a 1.751 caliber?”
“Hmm, when I was in in the sixties, we shot something that had millimeters. I don’t know what the inch measure would be. Wait, I know a photographer who’s a gun guy. For some reason photogs are gun nuts, more often than not. Maybe it’s the love of small, well-machined little gizmos. Anyway, let me Rolodex his cell and see if I can get an answer.”
Jack disappeared, not that David noticed, so absorbed was he in the drama of his examination, and it seemed that Jack came back in a second, when it was really twenty minutes.
“Okay,” he said, “the 1.751 is a group size. In other words, the guy fired five rounds at the target and the five made up a group. They’re trying to figure out the mechanical accuracy of the gun, not the shooter, and they get that from the group. So they use calipers to measure from center to center of the two farthest shots, and it comes out to be one and seven hundred fifty-one thousandths of an inch.”
“Is that good?”
“At three hundred yards, that’s magnificent. My guy says an inch per hundred yards is very good, so at three hundred it ought to be three inches. It’s one and three-quarters of an inch. That’s a wow.”
“Okay,” said David. “Thanks, Jack, big help. Now I get the exclamation point.”
Just at that moment the bureau chief came over.
“I see you guys acting like teenage girls at the mall. Did it come?”
“It sure did,” said Jack. “David’s Pulitzer, gift-wrapped. He’s taking the office to Morton’s for dinner tonight, right, David?”
“It did come,” said David, modestly.
“Okay, bring it in, we’ll see what we’ve got.”
David trekked into the chief’s office, and just about everybody important in the bureau followed. He laid the photo out on the glass table as they crowded around.
“That’s Memphis,” somebody said.
“It sure is. Does anybody know who those other two guys are? David, was there any information with it?”
“No, Mel. It was just the—”
“Sir,” came a voice; it had to be an intern. They were everywhere, ambitious little reptiles, incredibly smart and industrious, desperately wanting to eat the flesh of anyone who stood in their way. Little show-offy monsters.
This one’s name was Fong, but his ethnicity wasn’t Asian, it was ambition. David hated them, even though he realized he’d been one himself.
“I stopped at a gun store in Silver Spring. It’s called Atlantic Guns. Anyhow, they were giving away catalogs of all the gun makers and I thought we needed the FN catalog, so I picked one up.”
“Good, Fong.”
“Let’s fire David and give Fong his job,” said Jack Sims, and everybody laughed.
“David, we don’t need you anymore. Fong’s here, he’ll take care of things.”
“Fong, you’ve just been appointed bureau chief in place of Mel,” Janie Gold said. “Mel, can you be out of your office by five?”
When the laughter died down, they let Fong do his thing, and naturally he worked at a speed beyond the comprehension of everyone older.
“The guy on t
he left, see, that’s a fellow named Jeff Palmyrie, head of operations, FN of America, and on the right, that’s Pierre Bourre, President, FN International GMBh, Brussels. Here, look, make sure I’m right.”
He put the slick paper catalog, opened to the executive page, down right next to the photograph, and yes, it was clear indeed that those were the two others in the picture.
“Did you call FN today?” asked Mel.
“No, not yet,” said David. “But they’ll have no comment. They’ve had no comment for eight days; I can’t believe they’d change now.”
“Still, you should do it.”
“I will, Mel. Right after the meeting.”
“What’s the gun?” somebody asked.
“It’s what they call their PSR,” David said. “Police Special Rifle. I got that from the Web site. It’s in the catalog too. It’s a three-hundred-eight-caliber rifle. In the catalog you see the rack where they attach the telescope, yeah, but of course the one Nick is holding has a telescope. See, look, the stock, the handle, the trigger thing—it’s all there just like in the picture, dead center. That’s the one FN wants to get the sniper contract, and this proves they brought Nick in early, to get him on the team.”
“He’s not a very good shot,” someone said. “I thought he was a sniper.”
“No, he’s a very good shot,” David said. “See, he’s shooting what they call a ‘group,’ meaning he aimed at one place and tried to put all the bullets as close together as possible. See, all of them went into a group at three hundred yards.”
“Tell them what it is,” said new friend Jack, setting him up with a smile.
“The point is to show off the accuracy of the gun. This one kept five shots inside two inches, and the standard is what they call angled minute or something, which means one inch per hundred yards. So if it’s under three inches at three hundred yards, it’s really good.”
“Wow,” somebody said, with the same enthusiasm with which he might have said, “My wife is divorcing me, but that’s okay because I just totaled my car.”
“Have you set up the photo examination?” Mel asked.
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 85