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 onto 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.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“You won’t help?”
“It’s not that. It’s that I found a piece of evidence in Chicago that’s very suggestive. Unfortunately, because of that gunfight, it got taken out of the chain-of-custody linkage. That means you folks can’t never use it. I have to follow up on it, because only a rogue can do that, and I have to do it fast. This is a fluid situation, the people behind this are very clever, and now that they know I’ve made a connection to them, they will retrace their tracks, wipe them out, wipe the slate clean, make sure no evidence, no witnesses, no anything survives. I was trying to move against them before that could happen.”
“You cannot ‘move against’ anybody, Mr. Swagger. You are not authorized, you have no arrest powers, you are not an FBI agent. I know you’re a lone wolf type, but you will only screw things up. Please, for Nick’s sake, come in here and make yourself accessible. You have friends here, people who knew about and remember Bristol. Take advantage of that good will; don’t squander it on cowboy stuff.”
“What happens to the investigation during all this headquarters bullshit?”
She hesitated for a second, her silence a harbinger of bad news.
“A new temporary supervisor to Task Force Sniper has come aboard. He’s a headquarters guy, and his job is to smooth over things. We have been directed to prepare the report for release to the press. The report finding Carl Hitchcock and Carl Hitchcock alone responsible for the murders of Joan Flanders, Jack Strong and—”
Swagger felt the floor of his stomach give out. He had a dizzy flash, then a headache.
“I thought you’d agreed the baked paint debris on the weapon indicated—”
“There will be an appendix dealing with other possibilities. As yet, we’ve interviewed over seventy-five new persons of interest and come up with nothing concrete. We have Chicago and Ohio and now the New York State Police telling us to declare the case closed.”
“So he wins?”
“Who wins?”
“You know who.”
“No sir, I don’t.”
“Of course you do. Only one man connected to this thing has the power, the influence, the ruthlessness, the—”
“Swagger, listen to me very carefully. That kind of thinking has no place in modern law enforcement. We work from facts, not theories. We let the facts point to the guilty. If we have theories, they twist the way we see the facts. So far we have not turned up one fact indicating that someone else is behind this. No matter what you surmise or what seems conspiratorially logical to you by the rules of too many movies, we cannot and will not operate that way. Let me further warn you that any action you take to investigate or intimidate a private citizen, a rich one or a poor one, a violent one or a passive one, a professional or some Joe on the street, may well be viewed as assault, and it will be prosecuted extremely aggressively, if the Bureau has anything to do with it.”
“There’s a campaign to ruin Nick. You know it, I know it. To ruin him because he bought into my read on the case and made time to run it out. Someone hated that, couldn’t allow it, and set out to destroy him. So right now, ma’am, it looks like his only chance is me, not you. I don’t know what you headquarters people are doing. You’re just letting somebody railroad your best man, and it ain’t right. It is not right, I don’t care what the law says. Now tell me, please, confirm for me, who is behind this campaign against him? I know you’ve examined it.”
“I am not able to share any investigative product with you, Mr. Swagger. No names, no information. It’s for internal use only.”
“I have—”
“You don’t have anything, Swagger. The Bureau will take care of Nick fairly, I guarantee you. If you go off on some crusade, you lose our protection. As it is now, Nick’s last official act was to call the Cook County prosecutor’s office and inform them that the missing witness was undercover FBI and therefore should not be identified and pursued in alert bulletins. You’re a free man now because of that decision, which frankly I think is a bad one. Don’t do anything to hurt Nick, to make him look bad.”
“Someone’s got to protect him. You guys aren’t doing a goddamn thing, it sounds like.”
“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 insur
ance 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.
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