I, Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

  “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 the 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.

  “Yes, by special courier. I’m sending it to Rochester, New York, to the Donex Photo Interpretation Laboratory, part of the Eastman Kodak system there. They’re supposed to be the best commercial photo examiners in the country. We should know in a week.”

  “I don’t want to know how much this is costing me,” said Mel.

  “To save some money,” Jack said, “we could fire young Fong. Really, he’s going to fire us when he gets the chance.”

  “I am not Young Fong,” said Fong. “ ‘Young’ is Korean. I’m Chinese.” He said it pure deadpan, and everyone laughed. The goddamned kid was funny too.

  “Okay, so David, get busy on your calls. FN here, FN overseas, the Bureau, some governmental or law school ethics think tank. Hmm, Dershowitz ought to be good for a quote, maybe Schumer, anyone else?”

  “GSA.”

  “No, they’ll come in officially sometime later. Look for whistle-blowing pork barrel outfits. I’ve got some good numbers for you.”

  “What about gun people? Someone in the NRA who—”

  “No, no, they’ll just run your ears about the evil Times and how we use the Second Amendment for toilet paper,” said Mel.

  “I’ll call Remington,” said David. “They’re the ones that stand to lose their cash cow. God, whoever realized there was so much money at stake? Anyhow, I’ve developed a relationship there and I think I can get to the president.”

  “Good, David, and check with Fong Young if you have any other ideas and he’ll OK them,” Mel said, again to great laughter and Fong’s embarrassment. “Okay, meeting adjourned. Go, go, go, get away from me, I need to sneak a drink from the pint in my drawer.”

  Everybody filed off, and David trotted away to package the photo and begin his calls. A few people clapped him on the back, there was a punch on the arm, a thumbs-up and a wink, but best of all someone genuinely, and without irony, congratulated him.

  It was Fong.

  32

  She was right, of course.

  He sat in his motel room in Indianapolis, depressed.

  Starling, the young FBI agent, seemed to have dealt him a mortal blow. You have imposed a meaning on these events. You have not discovered a meaning. And your imposed meaning stems from your anger at Tom Constable, billionaire lefty, business genius, owner of lefty networks, famous playboy and sportsman, above it all, husband to movie stars, friend of Castro, hero to millions, shit to millions of others, such as me.

  The way you get Constable is simple: the man behind this thing has to be wealthy and powerful. He has connections in the government, he has immense resources, he knows everybody; in the end, he simply has the resources nobody else really does. Therefore you have assumed his involvement.

  You have no proof.

  It was true. Other than the marriage to one of the victims, there was not one single objective fact that connected the four deaths—five, counting Carl, six, counting Denny—to Tom Constable.

  The guilty parties could have been some other players entirely—political, criminal, governmental, any entity with some power and some leverage in the spook world, and these days that could be just about anybody.

  What do I know? he asked himself. Know as fact, know as reality, know as physical presence in the world?

  I know somebody made very good shots to kill the four. Very good. Too good.

  I know baked paint debris linked to the ceramic coating on the iSniper911 was found on Carl Hitchcock’s rifle, and the iSniper911, in skilled hands, was capable of permitting the kind of shooting that took down the four.

  Who knows? Maybe it was Carl. Maybe he secretly spent seven grand on an iSniper911, put it on his own rif
le, did the deeds, then took it off, tossed it in the river, put his old Leupold back on, and blew his brains out. Maybe he was so titillated by the accuracy the unit offered, he wanted to claim that as part of his legacy too. If he was nuts enough to conceive of the plan in the first place, anything is possible.

  Or maybe it was some other iSniper school grad, with the same anti-lefty agenda, and he just wanted to take out those bastards, but he didn’t want to pay the price. So he put the thing together; he was one man; he was somehow able to do it and was just sitting in his trailer enjoying the big show. Meanwhile, as he said he was, Tom Constable was going crazy with all the speculation and he wanted to put it to an end, and being a big-foot asshole, he put a lot of pressure on poor Nick, and it had nothing to do with nothing. And again, it was just coincidence that he was in the shotgun chair with Denny Washington when the Latin Kings decided on payback for Denny’s takedown of some Chi-town Two Four gangbanger now sitting in Joliet and getting cornholed each night by the Black Pagans or the White Aryans or maybe the crazy Salvadoran gang, MS-13. And the object that was in Ozzie Harris’s hands was nothing of relevance to this case; and the look of Jack and Mitzi’s house, its tidiness, which Denny picked up on, that was more coincidence; it was just that Jack happened to spend ten minutes straightening up that day. And the fluctuation in the mood of Jack and Mitzi? New meds, possibly?

  Ach. Ugh. Oof.

  He wished he were still a drinking man. The lure of the bottle was immense now. Boy, would it be nice to go for a fine dip in the bourbon pond, feel the world turn blurry and mellow, slide away greased by delight and optimism. Oh, it would be so nice now. The bottle was so tempting.

  He shook his head. His hip hurt. He’d left his new painkillers in his room in Chicago, which, incidentally, he was still paying for. It was a dull buzz, not a throb so much as a grind. Somehow the sword blade—that fight seemed so long ago, in a Japan he hardly remembered—had ruptured the surface of the stainless steel ball joint, and that irregularity had cascading consequences of unexpected pain. That had to be taken care of. He was tired of the limp; he was tired of being on the wagon; he was tired of looking for conspiracies where only coincidence existed on top of bad luck and strange but not impossible occurrence.

  Okay, he thought, train back to Chicago. Check out, settle up. Go to Denny’s funeral. Give the Sig to the police and cooperate with them. I am guilty of nothing; it was righteous self-defense shooting and I wasn’t even carrying illegally. Get your head out of the screwball conspiracy bag. Then fly back to Washington, clear it up with the FBI, and if they have made any progress, fine. If not, then that is the way of the world.

  Then back to Idaho. Back to the porch. Back to the rocker. Back to my daughters, to my wife, to the world.

  He called her.

  “Okay,” he said, “this one’s over. Coming home. Standing down.”

  He explained brightly how he’d been mistaken and launched off on a fool’s crusade, an old goat’s dream. But his new plan would change all that. He told her about going to Chicago to somebody’s funeral, then back to Washington to straighten things out with Nick and his people, and then he’d be coming home, for good. Gosh, it would be so great.

  “Bob,” she said, “I love you so and want you with me, but you are lying to me, and you are lying to yourself. I can hear it in your voice, and if you don’t get it settled in a way that satisfies you, it will suck the pleasure out of the peace you’ve earned. I know you. You are samurai, dog soldier, marine fool, crazy bastard, marshal of Dodge, commando, the country-western Hector. You are all of those things. They are your nature. The girls and I are just where you park when you’re not warring. You love us, yes you do, but war is your life, it’s your destiny, it’s your identity. My advice, old man, is win your war. Then come home. Or maybe you’ll get killed. That would be a shame and a tragedy, and the girls and I will weep for years. But that is the way of the warrior and we have the curse upon us of loving the last of them.”

  “You’re terrific,” he said. “You help me see clearly.”

  “If you have a problem, solve it the old-fashioned way.”

  “And that would be?”

  “The way your people and my people always solve problems. Hard work. Hard, hard work. Now hang up, have lunch, and get to work. Good-bye. Call me on DEROS.”

  All right.

  It was clear now: he had to locate some kind of connection between Tom Constable and the deaths of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly. Something real, something palpable, something authentic.

  What do I know?

  I know that Strong and Reilly knew Tom Constable; I saw the picture of the four of them, Joan Flanders being the fourth, at some dinner. But that proved nothing. That proved only that in a glittery, jet-setty kind of life lived by minor celebrities, people whose pictures got in magazines, these two couples had known each other socially. That indicated nothing meaningful, mere acquaintanceship. They were both strong left; why shouldn’t they have had a social relationship?

  The question was, did Strong have a way of reaching Constable, an e-mail address, a special cell phone number, a contact? That would indicate something more than a casual relationship.

  The second question was, how does a guy in a hotel room in Indianapolis with no powers, no contacts, no sponsorship, no authority, no resources, find that out—fast?

  Impossible.

  Can’t be done.

  It took him three minutes.

  He went to the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Web site, clicked on the Department of Education, found that of course it hadn’t been updated since the deaths; then he went to the departmental secretary, a Eustace Crawford, number given. He reasoned that secretaries know things, they see things, they get things. But nobody has talked to this one, because Jack Strong was never investigated; he was the victim of the obviously mad marine sniper who simply chose him for his symbolic value.

  Bob made the call, thinking, concentrating, ordering himself: verb-subject agreement. No ain’t, no don’t, no profanity. You are some mealy little nobody who makes his living doing things for other people.

  “Education, Ms. Crawford. May I help you?”

  “Ms. Crawford, I wonder if you remember me,” he lied. “My name is Daryl Nelson and I’m a special assistant to Mr. Tom Constable. I spoke to you many times in the last few weeks before the tragic passing of Jack Strong.”

  A pause indicated she didn’t, but there is a certain something in people that makes them reluctant to disappoint strangers.

  “Uhhh—Well, I suppose, Mr., uh, Nelson, you know it was so terrible around here, the deaths, they were such wonderful people.”

  “Yes ma’am, and I’m sorry to interrupt at this time of tragedy. Actually, I put this call off as long as I could.”

  “Yes sir. Well, I suppose, is it something I can—”

  “Ms. Crawford, you know that Mr. Constable was a friend of the Strongs, I’m sure; you’ve seen the picture in the house, the four of them, when Mr. Constable was married to the late Joan Flanders?”

  “I have seen that picture, actually. I loved Mitzi. The Strongs knew so many people. There was something so magnetic about them.”

  “Yes ma’am. Well, here’s the problem: Jack and Mr. Constable had a friendly e-mail relationship. Maybe too friendly. You know that Mr. Constable has a weakness for speaking his mind in public and he sometimes says unfortunate things.”

  “Yes. I remember that time he called George Bush a war criminal on Jay Leno.”

  “Yes, that sort of thing. Well, in private, it’s even worse. Here’s what he’s afraid of—that somehow some of the private e-mails Mr. Constable sent to Jack could get into the newspapers or, worse, onto the Internet; you know all these terrible blog people. It would be very embarrassing and I don’t think Mr. Strong would have wanted that.”

  “No, I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “Now, I know his e-mail has a secret code, of course, a sign-in. Obviously, I don’t know it
. But I’m guessing, in the normal course of actions, someone such as yourself in daily contact with him might have noticed what that code was. He might have even called you and asked you to check for messages that came into that account.”

  “I have some idea.”

  “Of course I’m not at all suggesting you give it to me. What I am asking is a favor. If you could get into his e-mail account and run a quick scan or a search of some kind; you might search for ‘Tom,’ or you might try the name ‘Ozzie’ or ‘O. Z. Harris,’ he was a friend of theirs in bad health in Chicago over the last few months. If you come up with a batch of messages, again, don’t open them.”

  “Do you want me to delete them?”

  “No, I would prefer if you would change the entry code, to something of your own preference. Our firm will make an official petition to the university to recover them, but their existence right now is very troubling to us, and to know that the code had been changed would be a very good thing.”

  Don’t let her say, Oh, I’ll just forget the e-mails and change the code now. It’s a very good idea irrespective of Mr. Constable’s wishes.

  But that seemed not to occur to her.

  “I’ll check,” she said.

  Two minutes passed, and then he heard the phone being picked up again.

  “Well,” she said, “if Mr. Constable was TomC@Starcrostdotcom, then there were quite a few. They turned up when I searched for the Ozzie Harris name. Quite a few in fact, as if they’d been talking heatedly about Ozzie.”

  “This would have been in September, just around the time of Ozzie’s death on September third?”

  “Yes, exactly. Just to check, I did open the first. Mr. Strong was going to write a book about the seventies, and he’d found some items or relics that he thought might be of interest to TomC and he hoped they could continue their discussions, which he thought would have an excellent outcome for both of them. That was Mr. Strong, always trying to help. He had such a feeling for the underdog.”

  “Ms. Crawford, that’s great. So you will change that code, and our conversation will be private, and I might say, you have earned Mr. Constable’s appreciation. He will reach out in some way to show that appreciation; that’s the kind of wonderful man he is.”