I, Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

  Swagger put eyes to screen, saw a black-and-white, herky-jerky, grainy, badly lit, artless, dead-hand image of some kind of room full of some kind of people in the costume of a long-ago period called the early seventies. Swagger saw bushy hair covering ears, bell-bottom jeans, lots of army surplus, no baseball caps, and through all of that divined from the listless lines of customers at two counters, waiting to get to a teller, that he was in a bank and that this was some kind of security camera, exactly like the one that immortalized Patty Hearst. He could see a tall, beardless but mustached hippie kid up at the window. Bank? That meant he was watching a robbery, and he knew at once that it was that fabled day in counterculture history, February 10, 1971, when, or so it was alleged by their haters, Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly pulled off the Nyackett Federal Bank and Trust robbery, leaving the realms of amateur radical criminals and joining the ranks of professional killers forever. Somehow it had been stolen from the police evidence room and somehow, through the political complexities of the radical underground in those days, it had been stored with Ozzie Harris, known for his probity, his toughness, his loyalty to the cause. He would be an earnest protector of the fates of Jack and Mitzi.

  Except that, Swagger saw now, as the action began and two strangers came in and suddenly, from postures both too influenced by movies and too freighted with uncertainty, drew guns, it wasn’t Jack and Mitzi. Not at all. Oh, they were radical hippies, yes, in Army surplus, watch caps, a droopy mustache on the fella, the gal with her hair all frizzed up as if electrified and a watch cap to encapsulate it, both wearing shades, but both not Jack or Mitzi, by body type, by coloring, by gracelessness, by the clutch of fear that enveloped them as they screamed at the poor girl behind the counter, as the other customers backed away in their own fear, the tall boy last, and the camera watched numbly from its perch above it all.

  So that’s why old Ozzie Harris, on his deathbed, wanted to will the thing to Jack and Mitzi; it proved undisputedly that they were not the perps of the bank holdup, who were some other, not this particular radical couple. That would take the cloud of interpersonal violence off the necks of Jack and Mitzi, remove the taint of murder for money. It was, in the way the imagination of the public sometimes works, possible that it would end their hated exile to the left and gain them readmittance to the parade of Normal Life. So it was a great gift old Ozzie thought he was bestowing on his friends, the only people who attended him as he neared death.

  What Ozzie couldn’t have guessed, however, was that for a reason not yet clear, the tape had a bigger importance to Jack and Mitzi, represented some kind of opportunity they could not turn down, a temptation they could not ignore. So that was the road they chose to follow, not to redemption but, like so many a tarnished pilgrim before them, to the bucks. Their final creed had not been Revolution Now or Give Peace a Chance but Show Me the Money. They tried to go big time and, like many a rat with ambition, ended up with brains on the windshield and cops eating doughnuts over their body bags.

  As for the true brigands in the scene, Bob knew that if he spent a few minutes on the Internet going through the radical rogues’ gallery that some Web sites had accumulated, he could tease out the names. But then Anto saved him the trouble.

  “I’m told by himself that the couple with the peashooters is Miles Goldfarb and his girlfriend, Amanda Higgins, soon to be dead in a shootout in San Francisco with FBI and police types. They’d fled the East for the West, and on unrelated charges were sought, betrayed, required to surrender, and shot to pieces when they refused. So is justice sometimes served.”

  Bob watched the drama unspool in the haunted, blurred silent imagery of a film that was nearly forty years old. It continued; the girl behind the counter got ahold of her senses and began to shovel money across the teller’s counter before her, as Amanda leaped forward to scrape it into a bag so movielike it should have had the helpful $ imprinted on it. Meanwhile Miles, with a long-barreled .38, stood behind nervously, waved the gun, shouted contradictory orders, stomped his feet, tried to control bladder and colon and hyperventilation difficulties, and waited for the bag to get heavy enough to signal success.

  It was such a different time and place. The two-handed shooting thing, invented in the sixties and seventies in the far West and popularized on Starsky and Hutch, hadn’t caught on yet, so all the gun handling was one-handed, and on the film it looked childish, particularly that big thing in the right hand of bandit Miles, and he seemed as scared of it as the others were. He kept waving it this way and that, hopping up and down like a clown with a cold pickle up his ass, very nearly out of control. Meanwhile, slightly higher up the coordination tree, Amanda scooped the bills into the bag, even stooping to retrieve a crumple that had fallen to the floor.

  A rule of the world: when the shit happens, it happens fast. And so it was in suburban Boston in the Nyackett Federal Bank and Trust, February 10, 1971. A blur suddenly exploded behind very-nervous Miles, as the men involved moved faster than 24 frames per second, and when stopped, they revealed themselves to be two Boston armored car guards, who had been alerted by passers-by. They too were one-handed revolver gunners, in their Ruritatian Elite Guard uniforms, complete to braiding and double-breasted tunics; they too were scared and excited; they too gestured foolishly with their weapons, but they did, or so it seemed, have the drop.

  As if he anticipated failure, Miles gave up without a twitch and yielded to the momentum of the transaction. His hands shot up before he even turned to see if the adversaries were armed, and that probably saved his life, for had he turned, almost certainly the very nervous truck guards would have fired away and dropped him, Amanda, the clerk, and any other poor soul whose body came to be in the line of their twelve-shot panic fusillade. Then Amanda turned, dropping the bag; her hands came up. And for just a second, the blurry frenzy turned to tableau: downward forty-five-degree angle freezing five human beings—clerk, two robbers, two guards—in perfect stillness while the moment downticked, or so it seemed, from violence. The poor clerk didn’t even have the thought to now duck, as her presence in that same line of fire was no longer required.

  Then it all changed.

  More blur, more craziness, more seventies mayhem. A person separated himself from the herd of frightened customers who’d fallen back to form a clot at the bank’s wall, his one hand out in some unusual fashion that one didn’t usually see in bank customers. That was because it held a gun, another revolver, surely a Colt or a Smith from right there in New England. It was the tall hippie boy first glimpsed at the teller’s window, now in the shape of pure counterculture wraith—a Prince Valiant hank of hair that flopped over ears, an out-of-place Zapata mustache—and he was himself in the costume of the day, the tight jeans, the Army field jacket, the crunching black of Navy blue watch cap pulled low. He looked like any kid in those days, except that now he held a revolver. He held it low, cowboy style, clearly an untrained shooter, but he was so close—less than six feet from the furthest of the uniformed men—he couldn’t miss. He fired six times in a second, discharging all his ammo, and he shot faster than the film itself ran through the camera, so that shots three, four, and five were not seen between frames, and only one, two, and six were documented. The powder was clearly smokeless, but it still produced a great fog of gun haze by today’s standards, and the muzzle flash illuminated itself as blades of sheer incandescence against the otherwise grainy texture of the filmed reality, as it spurted, then vanished. The guards, blindsided from the right, never had a chance, and Bob knew from reports that five of the six .38 bullets struck them, moving right to left, through biceps into chest cavity and blood-bearing organs. One simply yielded to death like a sack falling off a truck and went down graceless and stupefied, dead before he hit the floor. The other tried to respond and was halfway into turning to return fire when his knees pointed out to him that he was dead by giving way, and he went down to ass on floor, though still upright, then curled over in the fetal and died.

  Another m
oment of stillness, though in the back you could see the knot of terrified customers recoiling further into themselves; the clerk put her hands to her ears, because the gunfire was so loud. Miles hopped up and down in feckless panic; Amanda stood still, frozen by the eruption of killing violence so close. Then, again almost too fast, Miles and Amanda leaped over the fallen guards and bolted out the door, presumably to the getaway car. It was the new shooter who had the brains to dash to the counter and pick up the fallen sack of money, turn, command the customers to remain rigid; he did so by pointing a now-empty gun at them, although they didn’t seem to notice. Then he knelt, picked up Miles’s dropped revolver, and instead of fleeing in panic, backed out coolly, keeping the gun on the crowd. He pivoted and was gone.

  “Did you recognize him?” asked Anto, as the film ended in more opacity and scratches. “Yes, it was himself. He was twenty-one, had just been kicked out of his fancy university. He knew he had to return south, where his daddy would await with opprobrium and disappointment and put him to work in some dreadful department of his advertising agency. Little Tommy wasn’t yet ready for that life, so instead he floated about in the Boston underground in them days, grew the pile of hair and the guardsman’s furry brush. Too bad he didn’t have the hormones in him yet for a beard. He smoked pot, he got laid, he went to the demonstrations, he drank cheap wine, he met people, and he met other people. Somehow he volunteered to go along as tail gunner on a robbery attempt for some radical heroes of the moment. They never knew him as anything but Tommy, and he only realized later who they actually was, as all those boys and girls liked to play at IRA tricks like noms de guerre and suchlike. They was Nick and Nora to him, revolutionary pseudonyms. They gave him bus money and he left town that night for Atlanta—where you can bloody bet he shaved mustache and cut hair and became Mr. Neat n’ Trim, which appearance he clings to until this day—and ain’t been back to Boston ever since. The film was somehow stolen from the development laboratory by some kind of radical affiliate, and being hot was stored with a man who was loved and trusted by all them boys and girls of the time, the saintly commie journo O. Z. Harris. There it sat for thirty-odd years while Tom Constable built a life, enjoyed the lucky break of a father dying young and rich, and took that nice gift and expanded it into something gigantic and world famous.

  “So there you have it, Sniper. Are you going to take him down for a second’s madness all them years back? Are you going to make a mockery of the name? And what about the good? What about the thousands of employees, dependent upon his lordship for their sustenance in businesses that will surely collapse when the news comes of his fall? What about the more than two hundred million in philanthropy over all them years, perhaps driven by guilt over the lives of them two fellas he gunned down? That’s a lot of good in this bad world to outweigh the moment of craziness. And you’re being the one sittin’ in judgment? You, who’s killed and killed and killed, mainly poor men doing what they seen as duty to country and cause in their own land. And for that, the mighty Bob Lee snuffed them from a mile out. Some of them sure never killed nobody nor would have, as you know most private soldiers is just marking time till they’re homeward bound. You must have killed your share of peasants without a hint of politics or patriotism on the mind, just working-class slobbos on patrol against their will when the mighty sniper took it all from them with but three ounces of pull in one finger. You’re going to judge another fella who pulled a trigger, and he in hot blood, not our sniper way of cold execution?”

  Bob said nothing. He had not spoken since, “You talk too much,” which seemed from the Jurassic but was only from the Triassic BT—Before Torture.

  “You haven’t reached him, Anto,” said Jimmy.

  “I haven’t,” said Anto. “He won’t speak. He just looks off, his eyes going to hard little kernels of hate, like pieces of black corn. Give him a pistol at this second, and we’re all dead in the next. He’s a hard man. Unforgiving, like a bloody IRA gunman.”

  “I’ll cuff him about a bit,” said Ginger. “Loosen some teeth, maybe it’ll loosen some words.”

  “I’m not having that, Ginger. We’re the gentlemen sort of torturers, not the mad brutes bruisin’ our fists up. All right, Swagger, play it hard down the line. But I’m laying something on you now that may keep the sleep away, even if we leave you alone in the dark for some hours. You listen now: no better offer will you ever get, ever, never, no way in the whole black parade of a life full of so many wanton killings. Call it professional courtesy, call it sniper’s honor, call it me own damned sentimental weakness, but listen and then sleep, and then we’ll see if you can keep your silence.”

  Anto took a deep breath and sat back, peering intently at Bob.

  “It’s this. Here’s an offer you never thought you’d hear. Your life.”

  “Anto,” said Ginger. “Have you cleared this with his lordship?”

  “Hush now, Ginger. His lordship is off playing cowboy. So it’s on me, if you’re worried, but I tell you his lordship is no Clara Barton. So yes, boys, we’ll let him walk. We require only his cooperation, then his word. He can walk, go back to them daughters and that handsome woman and that farm or whatever piece of paradise it is. Think of it, Sniper. Put it in your mind: home, hearth, love. You’d bade ’em good-bye, but maybe prematurely.”

  The silence in the room grew uncomfortable. Bob simply looked off into nothingness, as if what Anto had said didn’t matter.

  “Next you’ll be offering him swag,” said Jimmy.

  “He would spit on swag, am I right, Sniper? He’s the ideal, of which us four are only poor third-gen copies. Swag would tarnish the holiness of his cause. No, not swag but something else will buy him for us. We need to pay him in honor.”

  “What are you talking about, Anto? Honor’s not a coin to be handed out.”

  “It is. Here’s the offer, Sniper. You agree to walk away from all this. Being a man of your word, I know you will. And for us, the issue is finished. We’ve done our mercenary mission for his lordship. But a rub’s coming and here it is: I then move not to Spain but to some other, nastier place, and I blow the caper from there. I give you his lordship on a platter by way of a confession to the federals, with copies to all the papers and nets. I put it on the bloody Internet. I offer up some specific pieces of hard evidence, so there can be no denying. Thus is brother Hitchcock cleared and reelevated to his rightful spot. Thus is his lordship felled. Thus I blaspheme the mercenary code, and I do it the coward’s way, in some land that lacks an extradition treaty with America. I live in decadence and guilt, go to drugs, kill meself in five years on an overdose of pleasure. I don’t expect his lordship goes on trial or to prison, but I am most certain that the done thing equates to the ruin of his reputation and the hounding of him over his last few years, perhaps even hastening that end. So, Sniper, there you go: right has been restored to the world, and you yourself are alive to see it happen. A better offer no man was ever given.”

  Swagger said nothing.

  “In his eyes, though,” said Ginger, “I seen the reflection of thought. They widened, narrowed, and looked to sky, signifying recognition and cognition. It’s in his brain. That’s a hell of a break you’re cutting the man, Anto, and he knows it. I’d never do it. Sniper, I’d put a Browning bullet through your head, I would. You’re lucky Anto’s running things here; he’s so much smarter than we are.” Then he turned back to Anto. “He ain’t ready to talk yet, but let him sleep upon it, and when he wakes up and faces either the water eating his lungs permanently or a world with more justice than he ever dreamed, maybe he’ll make the right choice.”

  “Maybe he’s just tired, Ginger,” said Raymond. “After all, he’s been up longer than we have, and I know I’m tired.”

  “All right, boyos,” said Anto, “get him trussed tight in flex-cuffs again, wrists and ankles; he’s got too much movement in them manacles. Take him to his cell; we’ll give him some sack time and take some for ourselves. Then we’ll get this thing
finished, one way or the other.”

  42

  It was like being a movie star, only without the fun part. When the car pulled into the driveway, Nick was swarmed as he walked to it, amid a whirring buzz of digital Nikons, lit up by the flashbulbs and the Sony Steadicam lights, as if they expected him to wave and bow and escort a goddess to the car. Instead the bright blades of light cut at him and he winced and hunched furtively like a felon. The questions hung in the air, and though he pretended not to hear them, how could he not?

  “Nick, how much gun company money did you take?”

  “Nick, will you resign today?”

  “Nick, was it worth it?”

  “Nick, will this ruin your wife’s career as well as your own?”

  “Nick, do you regret your love affair with guns? Has it ruined your life?”

  “Nick, are you in the NRA?”

  Nick ducked, bobbed, wove, sidestepped, and ultimately got into the limo with no dignity intact.

  “Go on,” he said to the driver, “back out, kill ’em all, I don’t care.”

  But the driver, a decent guy from the Federal Protective Service, just laughed and handled the issue coolly enough, and soon had Nick hurtling downtown along the parkwayed banks of the federal river amid the usual assortment of inspirational marble monuments, arching white bridges decorated with valiant steeds, and Greek-styled buildings that were designed, on such broad avenues, to glow white with the fervor of democracy. Yeah, well, whoever thought up democracy never heard of the Times, he thought.

  The driver got him there a little early and in by an obscure entrance on H Street, so when he dipped into the fortress of the Hoover Building, he was spared the Evil Clark Gable treatment. With a little time to kill before the meet with the director, he headed up to the Major Case Section, curious to see if his various IDs with their computer chips still admitted him or he’d already been classified a nonperson by the hall watchers, who had their ear to the ground as stealthily and efficiently as anyone. Yet all doors opened, the elevator stopped at all floors, and in another surprisingly quick transit, he stepped into what had been the work area he commanded, and before they saw him, he saw them, Fields and Starling talking at her computer monitor, a dozen others on phone or monitor, all intently absorbed in their tasks, as if this huge cloud weren’t whirling about them. He looked, saw his own glass-enclosed office with its glory wall still intact—the photos of his career, all the stops in hick towns and taco circuit cities, the triumphs, the setbacks, the pics of himself and Sally at this vacation spot or that, the pics of himself and the four men who’d served as director in his time, a couple of grateful senators and other DC lizard species, so forth, so on. The Robot sat erect at his desk, and though Nick should have despised the Robot, he really didn’t, as a man did what a man did to keep a career running hard, and the Robot hadn’t made a fetish of clearing out all traces of disgraced former team leader Nick Memphis.