David shivered inwardly. These guys, where do they come from? They spend all that time alone, crawling through swamps and up mountains, just to snuff out another man’s life. What was the point? What did you get out of it? It seemed somehow creepy. What was the difference, really, between them and the DC snipers, those two fruits who’d roamed the Beltway picking off people randomly while living in a car? Okay, the marine wore a uniform, but really it was the same thing—the same charge, that kick a fellow got from playing God and watching somebody else a long way out die of his own agency.
But after Vietnam the record got vague for this Bob Lee Swagger. There was a divorce on the record in South Carolina in 1975, and a few DWIs and minor scuffles with the law around the same time—drinking problem was written all over these years—and then silence, as if the guy had disappeared to reinvent himself. There was a Soldier of Fortune magazine story not available on the Internet now, because this Swagger was litigious; some Arkansas lawyer had beat the publishers of that magazine out of a substantial sum, and try as he could, David could never come up with the copy. Then there was that very odd business in 1993 with the Salvadoran. Again, it was hard to know what was real and what was fantasy. What was documented didn’t make a lot of sense, and the way the case had disappeared without a trace gave the odd impression of some kind of government entity at work. Intelligence? The Bureau? Now it was said Swagger was retired and lived a quiet life as some kind of businessman in the West. But nobody really wanted to talk, and David kept running into a wall of silence, along the lines of, “Well, Bob Lee’s not the sort who likes attention, and I love him too much to disappoint him. If you knew him, you’d know what I mean. So why don’t we just agree to end this conversation right now.”
As for Swagger, there was a listed phone number; he called it, got a frosty-sounding woman who would give him nothing at all and kind of frightened him, truth be told. His usual phone charm didn’t cut him any slack with her.
In the end he turned out a little piece that page one wouldn’t take, but it did keep the story alive on the From Washington page until the news from the lab arrived. His story simply pointed out that Memphis had a history of involvement with “sniper types,” as this “Bob Lee Swagger” certainly was, and it didn’t ask, there being no justification for pointed observations in a legitimate news story, whether an agent with known connections in the “sniper community,” including a long-standing friendship with one of its legends, was an appropriate choice to investigate a series of sensational murders whose perpetrator was suspected to have come from that community. Maybe an editorial writer would pick up on it, and the next day, indeed, one had.
It wasn’t the lead editorial, but even an off-lead got noticed in the Times.
We wonder what is going on at the Federal Bureau of Investigation these days. The Bureau, charged with investigating the heinous deaths of four Americans whose only crime was that they used their constitutional rights to protest a war that was both a tragedy and a mockery, turned that investigation over to the stewardship of an agent whose experience put him more in sympathy with its alleged perpetrator than with its victims.
As the Times reported yesterday, Special Agent in Charge Nicholas Memphis, who ran the investigation that quickly identified former marine sniper Carl Hitchcock as the primary, indeed only, suspect, has long enjoyed a relationship with another well-known marine sniper, Bob Lee Swagger, formerly of Blue Eye, Arkansas. One doesn’t begrudge Memphis his choice of friends, but at the same time, perhaps one should begrudge the Bureau its choice of executives. In matters of such importance, it would have been better for all concerned if the Bureau had selected an agent in charge whose connection to the act of sniping—the cold murder of a human being, guilty or innocent, at long range for something called “military necessity,” though too often neither military nor necessary in application—was more distant and less inclined to be tarnished with emotion.
Perhaps that is why the investigation has apparently fallen off the tracks and a final report, which all Americans must regard as an act of closure to these final, horrible war crimes, is nowhere in sight.
That got him the usual invites to the usual talking head roundtables—he was getting pretty good at it—but he passed that night because, well, because he too felt some combat fatigue; it had been a nerve-rattling few weeks, and he knew his career hung in the balance. It was still unclear whether he would ultimately join, in Howell Raines’s memorable phrases, the culture of complaint or the culture of achievement that prevailed in any given newsroom.
I am so close, he thought.
And when his cell rang and he looked at the caller ID and saw a Rochester area code, he thought he might have a heart attack. It had to be the lab. He’d appended a note with his number, asking for notification. He knew he just couldn’t face opening a FedEx package with no idea in hell what it contained, especially as the whole office would be secretly watching.
“Banjax.”
“Mr. Banjax, hi there, it’s Jeremy Cleary up at Donex, in Rochester.”
“Oh, hi” was what David came up with, so lame, his heart tripping off in his chest.
“Yes, you’d sent us a note; you’d asked for a call with our preliminary findings, before we sent out the final report?”
“Yes sir. Yes, I did. Do you have information for me?”
“I do.”
“Well, gee, let’s have it, Mr. Cleary.” He felt his heart bounce into overdrive.
“We find nothing.”
That was it?
What, nothing?
“I don’t understand. I’m not sure of your nomenclature. Is that good or bad? Is it real or not? Is it authentic or what?”
“Oh, you don’t know much about this, I see.”
“No, not a thing. Is nothing good or bad? There’s a lot riding on this.” He had not told them he was with the Times because he didn’t want that influencing their interpretation. Instead, he was just a David Banjax, of the given address of the bureau, Washington DC.
“Well, what we do is track fractal discrepancies. We examine by electron microscope, infrared scanner, spectroscope, even digitally break it down to sound waves and look for noise. That’s what your money buys you.”
“Okay, well, nothing would mean … authentic, right?”
He held his breath.
“We don’t operate in terms of ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic.’ What you get from us is a report of a digital forensics inspection. We look at a number of things: the smoothness of the images, patterns of relationship between adjacent pixels in the images. Altered images have distinct differences between the edges of the images and the original area next to them. We look at the length of the shadows, the color consistency; we measure the lighting to see if it is consistent in various parts of the image. We look deeply in the eyes of the people to see the reflections that appear there and determine if they are consistent with the rest of the photo. We search for clone-stamped areas of an image—parts that are so similar to each other as to make them suspect of having been the same image from the original area. The lab also assumes that all original photographs have ‘noise’ to some extent, and the noise has a certain consistency. Introducing a piece of another photo will give a different noise level and pattern that cannot be detected by the naked eye. If we had the original neg, we would be able to analyze much more information.”
“Did you have enough to make a call?”
“Well, our technicians don’t make calls. They measure, they tabulate, and they issue a finding. In this case, the finding was nothing.”
“So nothing is good?”
“Nothing means we can detect under various of our testings no indication of the presence of fractal discrepancies which would suggest photo manipulation techniques have been employed. Is it genuine? Well, that’s the kind of contextual decision you have to make. That’s about history, provenance, even trust. Not our department. What I’m telling you is that we will issue a bonded statement,
and defend it in court if so required, that we discovered no meaningful evidence of photo manipulation in the photo you sent us. If that’s your definition of ‘authentic,’ then you have your ‘authenticity,’ Mr. Banjax.”
“Nobody doctored it?”
“You’ll never get me to say that. What you will get me to say is that at the level of detail of which our laboratory is capable—the best in the country in commercial use—there is no tangible evidence of fractal discrepancy.”
“To me, that would be authentic.”
And to the Times, that would be authentic too.
Suddenly the air was sweet and chilled, and oh so much fun to breathe.
I did it, he thought. I got him. I got Nick Memphis.
34
It was not a good day, but then there’d been few good days for Task Force Sniper since the suspension of Nick and the arrival of the Robot. The Robot had a name but no one ever said it; he was, it was alleged, human, just as they all were; he just never showed it. He was the director’s designated enforcer, who was sent to trouble spots in the Bureau with instructions to make the trouble go away and make all the people who were making the trouble go away as well. His means were generally not pleasant. Like his namesake, he accomplished this task with mechanistic grinding and trampling; it was said that he could walk through walls and that heat rays burst from his fists when necessary.
It wasn’t that the Robot was on the warpath. He was never not on the warpath, the warpath being the state of his life and career. It was that this particular day, he himself had gotten a prod in the butt from the director about the Task Force Sniper report, and since it fell to the team of Chandler and Fields to write it, and since Fields was a bum writer, it fell really to Chandler, and she felt everything grinding downward upon her.
“You can’t move any faster?” the Robot demanded.
“Sir, it’s writing. It’s more nuanced; you have to find the best ways of saying things; you have troubles and problems and you have to reconcile conflicting evidence on nearly every page. It’s not like something you can just do.”
“It’s not a novel. It doesn’t need a style. It’s not supposed to fly along. Nobody’s publishing it except a Xerox machine.”
“Yes sir, and I’m not Agatha Christie either, but it’s got to make sense, be smooth, hang together, and give its readers a clear view of the case and our conclusions. That takes time.”
“Is your support up to par?”
Of course it wasn’t. The problem was Ron Fields, a brilliant operator, a former SWAT hero with more than a few gunfight wins to his credit, an up-and-comer of the Nick school, decent and true and modest and funny, but … he seemed kind of dumb. He was certainly no writer. A giant in the professional world, as her coauthor he became a kind of erratic junior member, lazy and mysteriously absent, and his warrior’s reputation made it difficult for poor new girl Starling to cope.
On the other hand, she had a terrible crush on him, as she did on Nick, and she was never going to be one of those headquarters snitch bitches who rises on complaints of others’ ineptitude.
“Agent Fields is a fine collaborator, sir.”
“There are a lot of people in Washington who want this thing on their desks yesterday. I only tell you what you know, but I tell it in a loud voice in case you’ve forgotten it. If you need help, sing out. I’ll get you interns, secretaries, typists, the works. I’ll even hire John Grisham.”
“I’ve just got to get it right.”
“I know you liked Memphis. Everybody liked Memphis. But you can’t let any affection for him frost your efforts for me and your job on this assignment. I’ve heard it said that the task force agents are dawdling because they want to see Memphis cleared of these charges and are waiting to see if someone on the new suspect list takes the investigation in another direction. Tell me that’s not true.”
“Sir, I’m just working as hard as I can, that’s all.”
“Okay, okay, get back to it. Why are you wasting time on me?” And with that the Robot lurched onward, looking for another target to destroy, slightly frustrated because the girl had not crunched under as he’d thought she might.
And the other thing: he had her dead to rights. She had been stalling dreadfully, trying to keep from reaching the last page, and getting the sign-offs by the others. Because once the report—this report, with this conclusion—was issued, it became the narrative, the official version, even if she and most of the others weren’t quite sold on it. But it seemed everyone in Washington wanted this poor guy Carl Hitchcock hung out to dry and all the evidence accepted as planned. The only way to halt that narrative was to halt the report that encapsulated it; that was its primary marketing tool. So she was in the absurd position of subverting her own biggest professional break because she didn’t quite believe in what was being said. And because she felt something for Nick; he’d been decent to her and he always apologized when he called her Starling, even though everybody now did and would forever.
But there wasn’t much more she could do. Wiggle room was down to zero.
The narrative, as they wanted, was all but done. It was exactly what everybody said was called for, a professional indictment of Carl Hitchcock, all i’s dotted, all t’s crossed, each bit of damning evidence assembled in its place, properly weighted, admirably described, the chain of events transparently clear: how this old warrior had cracked and gone off to reclaim the kill record.
She kept waiting for the day when one of the field agents working the list of new possibles that Swagger had turned up would deliver the key piece of dope that would smash the Hitchcock thesis, but it never happened. One by one the possibles became impossible: out of the country, dead, accounted for during that week, almost all of them, if not killing, off teaching. Jesus, far from being macho gung ho gun boys, professional snipers were like rabbis during the Middle Ages, heading from talmudic center to talmudic center, there to instruct, argue, dispute, spread reputation, enforce the orthodox, denounce the apostates, form and reform cliques, network like young movie actors. Good lord, who would have thought it?
But now—
Oh great, the cell in her purse. That was her private number and only her boyfriend had it and her boyfriend was in Kuwait this week going through some Al Jazeera tapes that might have been plants or might be the real McCoy. Only one other person had the number.
“Swagger, what?” she said.
“Agent Starling, hello. Consider this an anonymous tip—”
“Where are you?”
“If I’m anonymous, I ain’t nowhere, am I? Here’s your tip. You go to the University of Chicago, Department of Education, where Jack Strong was a professor. You subpoena the hard drive on his computer; you open his e-mail. Be sure to do it nice and legal-like so it can go into evidence.”
“Swagger, what the hell—”
“Are you getting this, young lady? What you’ll find is an amply documented relationship between him and a fellow named TomC, who you will certainly be able to identify as Tom Constable—”
“Swagger, I warned you—”
“You warned me that I had to have something real, not something that was my opinion. This is as real as it gets. Strong and TomC discussed an object which Strong had come up with that gave Strong leverage over TomC. Strong wanted dough, lots of it, tons of it. He wanted a new life in Switzerland, Armani suits, all that fine bullshit. He thought Tom would be oh so happy to give it to him. All this, by the way, was happening in the last few weeks before the killings.”
She was writing it all down.
“That will prove that TomC had a motive to eliminate Jack and Mitzi, while hiding it behind the camouflage story of old man Carl having gone nuts.”
“That’s fine, but without formally verified evidence, we couldn’t get a search warrant to impound. It has to be legal, don’t you see? That’s not legal.”
“It is true, however.”
“Unfortunately, there is a difference. I’ll try to figure so
me way to justify it.”
“Yes ma’am, I knew you would. Then there’s the boys he hired to make all this happen. I know where they are.”
“Then you have to give them to us.”
“If I do, them boys are gone so fast you won’t see the blur. They’s professionals, the very best operators in the world, way above all your pay grades down there. You’ll never git ’em. Nope, if I give you them, I’m letting them git away, scot-free. A lot of people died on account of this and I mean to see the ancient law enforced the ancient way.”
“Swagger, where are you?”
“Remember, I said same deal with you as with Nick. If I jumped, you’d know it.”
“Swagger, I don’t like the sound of that.”
She swore she could hear the old man laugh from whatever twisted arroyo or stunted tree he now hid himself within and had an image of him in torchlight, gleaming with blades and rifles and bandoliers of ammunition and Molotov cocktails, some kind of coonskin cap on his head, a tommy gun in his left hand and a Winchester in his right, all frontier 24/7.
“Well, young lady, this is my courtesy call. Here’s the news: I’m jumping.”
35
Swagger snapped the folder shut and slipped it into the cargo pants. Then he went back to his Leicas and 15X’ed what lay at the bottom of the hill before him.
It was not Tom Constable’s big, beautiful Wind River ranch house. That imposing structure, to all appearances manned only by a skeleton crew with its master somewhere else, lay a mile to the west, a strange accumulation of turrets and arbors and roofline nooks and crannies next to the most beautiful streambed in Wyoming, beneath the mountains and the wide blue sky.
This was the security compound. Tom wouldn’t live way out here without a small army of protection; it wasn’t his way. So Swagger reasoned: whatever he got off the Strongs, that’s where it’ll be. That’s where I have to go.
He was unarmed. This wasn’t a murder raid, even if the fucking New York Times had essentially decreed him a murderer yesterday. No sir. You could kick the door down way past midnight with an M4 and twenty magazines and try to kill all these boys flat, cold out, and what would it get you? A lot of return fire once they figured out what was going on, a running gunfight on the way out, blood loss, and bleeding out in a ditch. You’d never recover what it was that was at the heart of this thing. You might shoot the right shooters, but in the dark and the mayhem, who could tell?
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 87