Time to Hunt bls-1

by Stephen Hunter

  "Your husband was in the State Department. Did he have any connection with any of this?"

  "Not at all. He was in the counselor service. We served in a number of embassies abroad representing American interests but never had a thing to do with the missiles or that sort of thing. He finished up his career managing an economic research project."

  "A brother, a sister?"

  "My brother is the famous Yale ornithologist, two of Jack's are dead, one a doctor, the other a lawyer in New York, the third, a survivor, manages the family money, my sister is three times divorced and lives in New York, spending money and trying to look younger."

  "All right."

  "You'll get it. Eventually, Sergeant Swagger, you'll figure it out."

  "I think I'm out of my league this time, ma'am. I will keep working on it, though."

  "Good luck."

  "Thanks."

  He hung up, stumped. He opened the phone book, found a commercial shooting range called On Target over near the airport. There, he rented a stock .45 and spent an hour shooting holes in a target at twenty-five yards while his campers cooled their heels outside in the parking lot.

  When he emerged, the food choices weren't great: Popeyes Fried Chicken, a Pizza Hut, a Subway and, down the road a bit, a Hardee's. He decided on Subway, and was walking toward it when he realized what it had to be and where he had to go next.

  JBonson was flagged down after the 3 p.m. meeting by his secretary, who said there was an urgent call from Team Cowboy. He took it in his office.

  "He burned us."

  "Shit."

  "He knew we were there all along."

  "Where did he go?"

  "He slipped us so easily it was pathetic. Went into a Subway bathroom, never came out."

  "Subway, where, in DC or Baltimore?"

  "No, the sandwich shop. On Route 175 near Fort Meade. Went in, never came out. We waited and finally checked it out. He was long gone. His rental car was still there in the parking lot, but he was long gone."

  "Shit," said Bonson.

  Where has the cowboy gone? What does he know?

  CHAPTER forty-one.

  Solaratov knew the one sound rule that held true the world over: to catch a professional, hire a professional.

  This meant that in his time he had worked with criminals of all stripe and shape, including mujahideen skyjackers, Parisian strong-arm men, Angolese poachers and Russian mafioso. But never a seventeen-year-old boy, with dreadlocks, a baseball cap backward on his head and a pair of trousers so baggy they could contain three or four editions of his thin, wiry body. He wore a T-shirt that said: just do it.

  They met in an alley in the dockside section of New Orleans. And why New Orleans? Because the origin of "Sally M's" flight on the Post-It slip was that city.

  The boy sashayed toward him with an abundance of style in his bopping walk that was astounding: he pulsed with rhythm and attitude, contrapuntal and primary, his eyes blank behind a pair of mirror-finish glasses.

  "Yo, man, you got the change?"

  "Yes," said Solaratov.

  "You can do this?"

  "Like fly, Jack," said the boy, taking the envelope, which contained $10,000. "You come this way, my man."

  They walked down sweltering alleys, where the garbage, uncollected, stank. They passed sleeping men wrapped around bottles and now and then other crews of tough-looking youths dressed almost identically to Solaratov's host, but with this young gangster in command, nobody assaulted them. Then they turned into a backyard and made their way into a decrepit slum dwelling, went up dark, urine-soaked stairs and reached a door. It was locked, the boy's quick hands flew to his pockets and came out with a key. The lock was sprung, Solaratov followed him into a decrepit room, then through another door to an inner office where possibly a million dollars' worth of computer equipment blinked and hummed.

  "Yo, Jimmy," said another boy who was watching a bank of TV monitors that commanded all approaches to the computer room. He had a shorty CAR-15 with a thirty-round mag and a suppressor.

  "Yo," responded Jimmy, and the sentry moved aside, making room for the master.

  Jimmy seated himself at a keyboard.

  "Okay," he said.

  "M. You said M, from New Orleans, receiving phone calls from Idaho, is that it?"

  "Yes, that's it."

  "Cool. Now what we do, see, we got to get into the phone company's billing computer. All that takes is a code."

  "I have no code."

  "Not a problem. Not a problem," said Jimmy. He called up a directory, and learned the code.

  "How do you know?"

  "My peoples regularly be going Dumpster diving, man.

  We hit the Dumpsters behind the phone company three times a week. A week don't go by we don't git their code memos. Yeah, here it is, a simple dial-in."

  The computer produced the mechanized tones of dialing, then announced LINKED and produced what Solaratov took to be the index of its billing system, with a blinking cursor requesting an order.

  "This is the FAC," said the boy, "Southern Bell's facilities computer. Gitting into this one is easy. No problem.

  Kiddie shit."

  He asked the computer to search for calls received in the greater New Orleans area from Idaho's 208 area code, and the machine obediently rifled its files and presented a list of several hundred possibilities over the past week.

  "Memphis," said Solaratov.

  "Our information says the husband once had a friendship with a New Orleans-area federal agent named Memphis. My guess is "Sally M." is this agent's wife, come up to Idaho to take care of the woman. She would call home from wherever she's hiding.

  That is my thinking. She--" "Don't tell me too much, man. Don't want to know too much. Just want to find you your buddy. Okay, Memphis."

  "Memphis," said Solaratov, but by that time the boy had it up. A Nicholas C. Memphis, 2132 Terry Drive, Metarie, Louisiana, telephone

  5045552389.

  "Now we cooking," said the boy.

  "I'll just ask Mr.

  FACS to locate and--" He did so, a new set of numbers popped onto the screen.

  "--there's your billing address and service records.

  Now let's see."

  He looked.

  "Yes, yes, yes. Your friend Mr. Memphis, he got calls from outside Boise beginning late afternoon May fourth--" Solaratov knew this as the date of the shooting.

  "Three, four calls from--" "That number is not important. That is the ranch house number."

  "Hey, man, I done told you, I don't want to know nothing."

  "Go on, go on."

  "Then nothing, then the last three days, one call a night from

  2085555430."

  "Can you locate the source of that call?"

  "Well, let's see, we can git the F-1, which is the primary distribution point and that turns out to be .. ."

  He typed and waited.

  "That turns out to be the Bell Substation at Custer County, in central Idaho, near a town called Mackay."

  "Mackay," said Solaratov.

  "Custer County. Central Idaho. Is there an address?"

  "No, but there's an F-2: 459912."

  "What's that?"

  "That's the secondary distribution point. The pole."

  "The pole?"

  "Yeah, the pole nearest wherever they are. That be the pole that the phone wire is directly wired to. It can't be more than one hundred feet away from the house, probably closer than that. They got all the poles labeled, man.

  That's how Ma Bell do it."

  "Can I get an address on that?"

  "Not here. I don't have access to their computer from here. What you got to do is go to that little phone substation and break in somehow. You got to get into their computer or their files and get an address for F-2 459912.

  That'll put you there, no problem."

  "I can't do computers. You come with me. You do it.

  Much money."

  "Yeah, me in Idaho
, with the dreads and the 'tude.

  That'd be rich. Man, them white boy five-Os arrest me for how I be looking. No, man: you got to do it yourself. You want that address, you break in. It ain't no big deal. You may even get it out of the Dumpster. But you break in, you check the files, you find the F-2 listings. You might even find a map with the F-2s designated, you dig? Ain't no big thing, brother. I ain't shitting you."

  "You could call, no? Bluff them into giving you information?"

  "Here, no sweat. In any big city in America, no sweat.

  You can social engineer the shit out of these boys. But out there: they hear a brother in a place where there ain't no brothers, I think you got problems. I don't want to risk blowing your caper, man. What I'm telling you, it's the best way, it really is. You'll see, you be chilling in no time."

  Solaratov nodded grimly.

  "You can do it, man. It ain't a problem."

  "No problem," Solaratov said.

  CHAPTER forty-two.

  In the graduate degree ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 132 men and women were awarded their PhD's in assorted academic and scientific specialties. But only one received the Ball Prize as the Institute Scholar, for only one was the ranking member of the class.

  He was a tall young man, prematurely bald, of surprising gravity and focus. He took his degree--"Certain Theories of Solar Generation As Applied to Celestial Navigation" was his dissertation--in quantum physics from the clean and was asked to speak some words, and when he assumed the podium, his remarks were short.

  "I want to thank you," he said, "for the chance you have given me. I have been a scholarship student since my undergraduate years and even before that. I came from a poor family, my mother worked hard, but there was never enough. But institutions such as this one--and Yale University and Harvard University and Madison High School--were kind to me and doors were opened. Without your generosity I could not be here and I am honored by that, and by your faith in me. I only wish my parents could be here to share this moment. They were good people, both of them. Thank you very much."

  He stepped down to polite applause and went back to his place in line as the ceremony--interminable to an uninvested outsider--went on hour after hour. It was a hot day and cloudless in Boston. The Charles River was smooth as blackened, ancient ivory, a thin veil of clouds filtered the sun, but did nothing to help the heat. The Orioles were in town, to play the Red Sox in a four game series, the president had just announced a new attempt to curb welfare growth, the international news was grave--the Russian election had the pundits worried, with everybody's favorite bad guy leading by a seemingly unassailable margin--and the stock market was up four points. None of this meant anything to the tall man in the khaki suit who sat in the last row of the graduation ceremony.

  He waited impassively as the minutes churned by until at last the crowd broke up and families rejoined, old friends embraced, the whole litany of human joy was reenacted.

  He walked through the milling people toward the podium and at last he spotted his quarry, the young man who was the Ball Prize winner.

  He watched him, the young man accepted the attentions he had earned somewhat passively and seemed not to respond to them with a great deal of enthusiasm. He accepted the embraces of colleagues and professors and administrators, but after a while--surprisingly quickly, as a matter of fact--he was alone. He took off his cap and hung his gown over his arm to reveal a nondescript, almost shabby suit, and began to leave. He had, in fact, the look of a loner, the boy who's ever so rarely at the center but prefers to blur through the margins of any situation, is uncomfortable with eye contact or attempts at intimacy, and will lose himself readily enough in the arcane, be it quantum physics, Dungeons & Dragons or sniper warfare.

  It was a quality of melancholy.

  Bob intercepted him.

  "Say there," he said, "just wanted to tell you that was a damned nice little talk you gave there."

  The boy was not so mature that he didn't appreciate a compliment, so an unguarded smile crossed his face.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "What's next for you?"

  "Oh, the prize thing is an automatic year at Oxford as a research fellow. I leave for England tomorrow. Very exciting. They have a good department, lots of provocative people. I'm looking forward to it. Say--excuse me, I didn't catch your name."

  "Swagger," Bob said.

  "Oh, well, it's nice to talk to you, Mr. Swagger. I've, uh, got to be going now. Thanks again, I--" "Actually, it's not just coincidence, me running into you. It took some digging to find you."

  The young man's eyes narrowed with hostility.

  "I don't give interviews if this is some press thing. I have nothing to say."

  "Well, see, the funny thing is, I ain't here about you.

  I'm here about your dad."

  The boy nodded, swallowed involuntarily.

  "My father's been dead since 1971."

  "I know that," said Bob.

  "What is this? Are you a cop or anything?"

  "Not at all."

  "A writer? Listen, I'm sorry, the last two times I gave interviews to writers, they didn't even use the stuff, so why should I waste my--"

  "No, I ain't a writer. Fact is, I pretty much hate writers.

  They always get it wrong. I never encountered a profession that got more wrong than being a writer. Anyhow, I'm just a former Marine. And your dad's death is mixed up in some business that just won't go away."

  "More on the great Trig Carter, eh? The great Trig Carter, hero of the left, who sacrificed his life to stop the war in Vietnam? Everybody remembers him. There'll probably be a movie one of these days. This fucking country, how can they worship a prick like him? He was a killer. He blew my father to little pieces, and crushed him under a hundred tons of rubble. And nobody gives a fuck.

  They think Trig is the big hero, the victim, the martyr, because he came from a long line of Protestant swine and sold out to anybody that would have him."

  But then his bitterness vanished.

  "Look, this isn't doing any good. I never knew my father, I was less than a year old when he was killed. What difference does it make?"

  "Well," said Swagger, "maybe it still makes a little.

  See, I was struck by the same thing as I looked into this.

  There ain't nothing about your father nowhere. Excuse my grammar, I never had a fancy education."

  "Overrated, believe me."

  "I do believe you on that one. Anyhow, he's the mystery man in this affair. Nobody wants to know, nobody's interested."

  "Why is this of interest to you? Who cares?"

  "I care. Maybe your father wasn't the poor guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, like everybody says.

  Maybe he was more important than people think. That's a possibility I'm looking at. And maybe the folks who pulled the strings are still around. And maybe I'm interested in looking into this and maybe I'm the only man who cares about your dad--" "My mother was a saint, by the way. She taught, tutored, worked like hell to give me the chances I had.

  She died my freshman year at Harvard."

  "I'm very sorry. You were a lucky young man, though, who had parents who cared and sacrificed."

  "Yes, I was. So you think--you have some conspiracy theory about my father? Do you have a radio show or something?"

  "No, sir. I'm not in this for the money. I'm just a Marine trying to get some old business straightened out.

  Believe it or not, it connects with the death of still another member of that generation, a boy who died in Vietnam.

  That was another great loss for his family and our country."

  "Who are you?"

  "I was with that boy when he died. May seventh, 1972.

  He bled out in my arms. This is something I been working on a long time."

  "Urn," said the boy.

  "Look, I know you're busy. You must be. But I was hoping you'd have a cup of coffee with me. I'd like to talk about
your dad. I want to know about him."

  "He was quite a guy," the boy said.

  "Or so I hear." He looked at his watch.

  "Hell, why not? I have nothing else to do."

  CHAPTER forty-three.

  Bonson was debriefing the team in the Rossyin safe house. It was not a happy time.

  "I warned you he was good. You people were supposed to be the best. What the hell went on?"

  "He was good. He was professional. He read us, burned us and turned us when it suited him," came the answer.

  "Sometimes people are just too good and they can do that to you. That's all."

  "All right, let's go through it again, very carefully."

  For what seemed the tenth time, the team narrated their one day of adventures with Bob Lee Swagger, where he'd been, what they'd learned, how indifferent to them he seemed, how swiftly and effectively he had slipped them.

  Bonson listened carefully.

  "Usually there's a moment," one of the ex-FBI agents said, "when you can tell you've been burned. There was nothing like that this time. He just disappeared."

  "I figure he made it out back, cut through the neighborhood behind us and called a cab from another little shopping center about a mile away. Or maybe he went up to the roof and waited until nightfall and slipped away."

  "You didn't see him interact with anybody?"

  "Nobody."

  "He had no contacts?"

  "He made those phone calls."

  "We did get that, sir."

  The agents had written down the numbers of the phone booths and through them tracked the destinations of the calls, which turned out to be the American embassy in London, first the general number, and the next day the office of the Marine NCOIC of the embassy guard.

  "We could have inquiries made."

  "No, no, I know what he was asking about. He's very smart, this guy. He looks like Clint Eastwood and talks like Gomer Pyle and yet he's got a natural gift for this sort of thing. He's very--" It was at this time an earnest young man entered the room.