I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

by Stephen Hunter

  “There’s only one printer in South Carolina?”

  “In the FN USA headquarters, yeah. How big do you think it is? We’re talking a gun company, not IBM.”

  “Okay,” said Banjax, who had no picture in his mind for a thing called a “gun company.”

  “So you’ve made your guy. Hello, Mr. Pulitzer Prize. Why, good morning, Miss Senior Editor, Big New York Publisher. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  “Yes, I know. Woodward’s—”

  “David is a smart boy.”

  “You said you had a photo.”

  “I do. But it’s not in the package.”

  “Why not? If you’ve got it—”

  “I want you to authenticate this thing first. Then you contact me by, hmm, I don’t know, wearing an orange toilet seat around your neck to work one day. That’ll be a spy-type tip-off.”

  “I’m out of orange toilet seats. Will pink do?”

  “Wear a hat one day. Guys your age never wear hats. It can be a baseball cap, a stocking cap, I don’t care, a Sherlock Holmes cap. Wear it, we’ll note it, and you’ll get the photo by courier that afternoon, your bureau. If you’re not an idiot, you’ll figure out that the photo has to be vetted by top photo professionals, to make sure it’s legit. Can your failing newspaper afford that?”

  “If I can get it before they turn the bureau into a bowling alley, yes.”

  “Otherwise it goes to Drudge.”

  “I hear you.”

  “David, fast, fast, fast now. We can work fast. Can you dead-tree folks stay with us?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Good. Now take your tape recorders—no lookee, see?—and get out of here. Go stand in the corner while I drive away. No peeking. And welcome to the big leagues, Woodstein.”

  30

  Swagger awoke from ugly dreams with a start. The phone was ringing. Not his cell phone, the room phone. He blinked, trying to remember. Oh, yeah, Indianapolis. Near the Notre Dame campus, for its theoretical richness in wired coffeehouses. An Econo Lodge; it looked like the best room in Nowheresville, decorated in a nice shade of babyshit brown.

  He stared at the ringing monster on the nightstand. This was not good. If it had been his cell, it could have been anybody, but if it was this phone, it meant someone was already on him. On the other hand, maybe it was housekeeping. He looked at his watch, saw that it was almost eleven. He’d sacked out here at 3 a.m. after a dreary bus ride.

  He picked up the phone.

  “Yeah.”

  “Bob?”

  It was Nick.

  “You figured out where I am.”

  “We are the FBI, you know. We do this kind of thing for a living.”

  “I—”

  “No, you just listen to me. In words of two syllables, what the fuck is going on? I have some big gunfight in Chicago with a dead officer, two dead gangbangers, and a missing witness thought by many to be an FBI undercover. That sounds like a Bob Lee Swagger operation. I have the Chicago cops, I have the Cook County prosecutors, I have my own Chicago field office all screaming bloody hell at me, and of course I have my own director furious at me because he warned me Swagger couldn’t be controlled and I assured him I could control Swagger and then I assured him I’d sent you home to rock on the porch. Oh, and I have the New York Times alleging on its front page that I’m dirty. Hmm, I think we could agree, it’s kind of a mess.”

  “I sure wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” said Bob. “Can’t help with the papers. Never read ’em. I get my news from Fox.”

  “I need you in. I can have Indiana state troopers at that motel in ten minutes if it’s an issue of security. I need you cooperating with the Chicago people, playing by all the rules. Maybe, just maybe, we can make fleeing the scene of a crime go away. And when we get all that straightened out, then maybe we can see where we are on the sniper. Oh, and I need Denny Washington’s Sig back. For his widow.”

  “I will personally return it to her when this is over. Right now, I may need it, even if it’s only got four rounds left. Maybe I can put ’em where they’ll do some good.”

  “Swagger, listen to me.”

  “Nick, if I go to Chicago I’m stuck there for weeks. I have to move fast. These people now know I’m on to them, and they will go back over their tracks and wipe everything out and I’ll be left with nothing but suspicions. And when it all dies down, they’ll come to Idaho, and just like Joan Flanders, they’ll put a little cross on me from a long way out and put a 168er dead bang center into me.”

  “Chicago thinks this was a gang hit on Denny Washington, who had busted several Latin Kings leaders on big murder ones over the past few years. He was a very good cop and he did them a lot of damage. So they targeted him and took him out. The shooters were Kings; you just happened to be in the car.”

  “No way,” said Bob. “That’s how it was supposed to look, but the signature of this outfit is that it sets up its hits inside fraudulent narratives, which you guys get roped into every goddamn time. But tell me, did you see the piece? It was a submachine gun—”

  “Bob, it’s a mob town from way back. That doesn’t prove a thing. Every Italian restaurant in the greater metro area probably has a Thompson hidden in the wine cellar.”

  “This was no Thompson. It was a suppressed Swedish K, an agency favorite in the ’Nam. I had an SOG tour, I saw the cowboys with them all over the place. That’s a rare piece of spook hardware, probably aren’t two hundred of them in the world, put together in the late sixties by company armorers at Tan Son Nhut. You don’t get a subgun like that from the wine cellar or the local machine gun store. You have got to be wired into spookworld to pry one free, ex-spook, some kind of mercenary, some kind of spec ops professional, someone in the big game one way or the other. It’s exactly what Graywolf would have in its arms vault, and it’s just made for maximum firepower with minimum noise, exactly what’s needed for street gun- downs.”

  “The report just said European machine pistol.”

  “The Chicagos didn’t know what they had. I did, because I saw it up close after the shooting. Get your weapons people to look at it, and I guarantee you they will be impressed by the high quality of the workmanship, the genius of the engineering, and the absence of a serial number or any identifying marker. That baby’s as black as the hubcaps of hell.”

  Nick was silent.

  “Nick, I have a lead. Washington and I found something that points in a certain direction. We were headed to the station to enter it into evidence. But now that Washington is dead, I’ve broken the chain of custody, which means it can never be used as trial evidence. It can only be used by a rogue, someone unaffiliated. Let me follow it, and before I do anything stupid, I will clear with you. But if I come in now, all that is lost, Denny Washington’s death is meaningless, and what we found goes away. I can’t let that happen. I want to run the lead and lay it before you. It’s only a matter of a few hours doing some basic research. You keep my involvement secret, you let me operate the way I have to operate, and I will clear with you before I jump. Just cover for me a little while longer.”

  “See, that’s the other thing. There may not be ‘a little while longer.’ This reporter today published some bogus documents all across the front page of the Times alleging that I’m on the take from some gun company to get them a contract. I may be gone at any second. Then what happens to Swagger?”

  “Swagger’s been on his own before.”

  “Swagger’s been lucky as hell before. That luck will turn; it’s way overdue.”

  “Nick, I’m begging you. Let me hunt. I will bag you something big, I swear.”

  “You’ve got six hours,” said Nick, and hung up.

  It took nearly the full six hours. Bob called his broker in Boise, asked how he could obtain a copy of the final stock market report from—he checked the letter from Bonson to Ozzie, still wearing his rubber gloves—September 23, 1972.

  His broker didn’t know of an Internet archive, but h
e himself had a brother who worked in a big New York brokerage and would place that call. In the meantime, Bob checked the phone book, discovered a nearby place with computer rentals, and called. They delivered an Apple MacBook Pro, and he got online from his room, checked e-mail, news accounts, read the Times piece on Nick—aghhhhh!—and got a call finally from his broker, who said his brother had suggested he try the Wall Street Journal, which had its pages all archived online. The broker had another client who had, he knew, a son-in-law on the international accounting desk of the Wall Street Journal, so through that client and his son-in-law, a tenuous but impressive skein of fragile connections all beholden to or fond of the person next to them in line, an e-mail with an attachment containing those pages arrived in Bob’s e-mail account a few minutes later.

  And the son-in-law was as good as his word. There it was. Bob held his breath because getting things open wasn’t his strong suit, but he managed to do just that. As a document it would be hard to manipulate, because he could only go through one long column at a time, to say nothing of the fact that he hadn’t broken the code yet. That would be the first order of business.

  It turned out to be the easiest thing he did that day. Bonson, all those years ago, was a very busy man and kept his professional espionage communiqués simple and the codes hiding them even simpler; he knew that was how far under the radar he was, even then. So what looked like a simple letter containing a list of stock recommendations was instead organized to yield a message, once the key was determined and the pattern figured out. It had to be simple, so that a man without training could piece it together.

  It was. His pattern was a backward regression. Thus the first stock recommendation in the letter, ITGO PAK, yielded a K; the second, AMJWEL, an E, the third, KOMEST, another E, and the fourth, NOPINC, a P, for a first word of keep. This went on a few progressions, then, as the stock abbreviations were necessarily short, began again, usually on the fifth letter. Bonson, rushing, even made some mistakes. But three hours later, Swagger ended up with

  Keep item secure. It may prove useful later. Do nit share any hint of it with anybody, and don’t not release to press, no matter how it clears clients.

  The clients? “Clearing” them? Would that be Jack and Mitzi, and would “clearing” them have some reference to the bank robbery, with two guards shot dead, that they were suspected of committing? So did it mean they were not guilty of that? That proof would be a nice thing for them to have, even at this late date. It would open a lot of doors. The item? What could it be? He realized he’d have to go back and read more carefully about those days to even come up with a guess. But whatever it was, Ozzie Harris, in his travels through leftist America in the early seventies, somehow got hold of it. He held it. For years and years he held it. Possibly he contacted Bonson again over those long years, and Bonson could see no use for it and continued to order Ozzie to hold tight. Eventually, as Bonson joined the Agency and began his rise, and his career of careful betrayal, he may have forgotten about it. Or maybe he was saving it for some reason, with some great goal in mind. But then he ran into one Bob Lee Swagger and ended up looking all Jackson Pollack—except for his legs—on a metal warehouse wall, and if he’d been controlling Ozzie Harris all those years, he’d left that one thing undone. Ozzie, dying ten years later, knew all along that it had major bearing on the case of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly. In the end, only Jack and Mitzi had been there for him, and Bob saw how it would be of use to Ozzie in “clearing” them, and so he told them about it, maybe gave them the key to his apartment, and they’d gone to the place, looked under the bed, reached up into the structure, and Jack had yanked it free of the four yellowing strands of Scotch tape that had held it in place for so many years.

  But when they realized what it was, they also realized it somehow had value. Great value. Somehow, it could be used to leverage millions of dollars to them, a lot more than “clearing” them ever could. That was the game they had tried to play, possibly seeing it as their reward for long years of service to the cause but not seeing how dangerous it was. Typical of the type: they love the violence of the game but can’t believe it will ever turn, as it always does, monstrous and eat them alive. Whomever they had tried to leverage was such a monster and decided on a different course. He didn’t want to give them the money; he gave them, instead, a bullet in the head in their broken-down Volvo in the alley behind their soon-to-be-foreclosed house. And this monster, whoever he was, found it so important to him that he not be connected to the case and that he obtain the whatever it was, the MacGuffin, the whoozie, the whatsit, that he buried that enterprise in a larger, camouflaging enterprise, a false narrative about an insane marine sniper, who’d snapped when he found that someone else had more kills in ’Nam. And he’d hired the best mercenaries in the world to make it go down just right. Joan Flanders and Mitch Greene were assholes, sure, but guess what, nobody’s asshole enough to end up like that, with a 168er punching your guts or brains out to help someone keep his dirty little secrets buried. And Carl and Denny, even less did they deserve their parts in the drama; to this guy, they were just action-movie extras the hero blows away, without names or pasts or lives. He was protecting himself; he had money, he had juice, he had influence, he was part of this whole thing and always had been. There was only one man it could be, because there was only one player on the board big enough to make it all happen. And that would have its own set of terrible problems to solve, formidable obstacles to climb, penetrations to be made, confrontations to win. But Bob couldn’t bring himself to say the name and face those challenges yet. It filled him with depression and it sucked his energy: so far to go, so hard a trek. Instead, he looked at his watch and saw that it was time to call Nick. He knew he had to do it fast or he’d decide against it and instead go hunting again, as in the old days.

  He picked up the cell, dialed Nick’s number. Not only was there no answer, there was no voice mail.

  That was odd.

  He tried again and found the same, tried three more times. Finally he called the general 1-800 FBI number, waited for a human to arrive after two minutes of robo-voices, got an operator and asked for Special Agent Memphis. He was transferred to what had to be a ten-year-old intern and told that Special Agent Memphis wasn’t available. Would he care to leave a message? Bob thought a second; then he said, “Give me, uh”—what was the name?—“Special Agent, uh, Chandler, I think it’s Jean Chandler.”

  Clicks, pops, silence, at least no Muzak.

  “Chandler.”

  “Special Agent, this is Bob Lee Swagger—”

  “Swagger! Where are you? Everybody’s trying to find you.”

  Nick hadn’t told anyone. Would she have time to set up a trace on the call? He guessed not, then second-guessed himself and started to hang up, then third-guessed himself and decided he had to know and he could bail out fast if it came to that.

  “Ma’am, I’d prefer not to say.”

  “You have to come in. We need you here.”

  “I am not out of control. I told Nick I wouldn’t do a thing without his say-so. I will stick to that. May I please speak with him?”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “I’d prefer to call you back. You’re not tracking me? You’re not setting me up or nothing?”

  “We don’t operate that way.”

  “Give me a number and a time. I’ll call you tonight.”

  “I won’t track you, Swagger. I have things to tell you and you have things to tell me. This is not a good place for a conversation.”

  Christ, she was stubborn!

  He hated being at the cusp of the decision, but he remembered his earlier conversation with her and how she’d seemed to adore Nick. So maybe she was still on Nick’s team.

  He gave her his cell number, knowing that she’d already written it down from the caller ID feature.

  He left the room, looked for a fire escape, found none. He went back to the room, went out on his balcony. The motel backed ont
o fencing and an alley, now deserted. Through trees, some kind of university structure was visible. But no one could see him. Groaning, remembering how the limberness had seemed to lessen with each day he aged, he pulled himself from the balcony railing by way of the gutter and got to the roof. His hip still ached a little from an old wound, then a bad cut in Japan, but he made it. No one saw him. He went to the front of the building, looking over the parking lot and the busy avenue. If cops came, he’d see them come and could maybe, somehow—

  The cell rang, some absurd ringtone, out of vaudeville. Had to get a new one.

  “Swagger.”

  “Nick’s been benched,” she said.

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s not formal. He didn’t have to turn in his badge and gun. It’s not a suspension. The director said he would appreciate it as a ‘favor’ if Nick went home while the Times story was the big news in town. The idea was he would not be suspended and have to turn in his things, nothing goes on the record, but at the same time, he would take no part in Bureau business until the situation clarified. He turned in his cell phone and the key to his office and went home at three; he is officially out of the loop for now, while Professional Responsibility investigates these charges the Times has raised. He will be interviewed sometime next week. So he can’t be called, he can’t be consulted, he is officially out of the game, and if you reach him somehow and try to talk, you compromise him, and I know you don’t want to do that.”

  “No, of course not. He’s not dirty. For God’s sake, you know that. He’s not dirty.”

  “I agree. However, the Times claims its experts have matched fonts on two letters, proving the incriminating one came from this FN outfit in South Carolina. That’s why you have to come in. You may have to talk to our investigators and give a deposition on your arrangement with Nick and make them see that he can’t be dirty. If you avoid that, you do him no good at all.”