Game of Snipers

by Stephen Hunter

  “Mr. Swagger?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just heard from the cadaver team. The methane probe has turned up a batch of bodies. We have forensics on the way.”

  “Got it. Can you have the guys do a fine-tooth-comb search of this area? Maybe there’s something here worth looking at.”

  “They’re already on it.”

  “And I guess they ought to do the same to this shooting platform.”

  “Just waiting for you to come down. Be careful, now.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, then slipped and fell down the seven feet and landed on his rear.

  Men rushed to him, hands helping pull him to his feet, urgent faces projecting worry that he’d hurt himself seriously.

  “I’m fine,” he said, flexing, stretching, bending. “I only hurt my dignity. And my ass.”

  57

  The target zone, 1,847.5 yards out

  There it is,” he said.

  It was a building new to this ancient neighborhood, glassy and still clean, and full of optimism, when around it were so much blight, sadness, desolation, and dismay.

  It was night in the city. In this far zone, separated by a river from the storied downtown, there wasn’t much in the way of nightlife, street activity, vibrancy. In fact, the glory of the building had exactly the opposite effect that its designers had hoped for. Instead of livening up the street, by contrast it pointed out the tragedy of urban decay that surrounded it. Maybe it was a new start, maybe it too would lose its glamour and go the way of the sad brick and peeling paint that had claimed all the other structures. Who could know?

  “Is our trip over?” asked Alberto.

  “No. We will make a circuit of the block, then head out, find someplace to put up and stay the night.”

  It had been a long, dull trip across the United States. There wasn’t much to see from interstates at night, and they never entered cities, only the fringes, staying in cut-rate motels, eating fast food picked up from drive-thru windows. So to Juba, America was a blur of lights smeared by night, neon-basted plastic eat joints, and the ever-present cop fear. The last was misplaced, as, over the week of travel, no cop had paid them the slightest attention. Now, finally, chunk by chunk, five miles under the speed limit the whole way, they were here.

  “Tomorrow,” continued Juba, “you will take public transportation here and spend three hours in the neighborhood. Your job is to look for signs of police or FBI observation. Maybe, somehow, they already know, maybe they are just waiting. Maybe Bobleeswagger has figured it out and he’s up there, waiting for me to walk into his trap.”

  “I doubt it. It seems to me you have accomplished the impossible. You have been trapped three, four times, have escaped each time, and have left behind exactly nothing. They could know nothing. Menendez knew nothing, not that he could have told anyone anyhow, not with his brains on the ceiling.”

  Juba nodded. “We know that they have studied the ranch, studied the remaining evidence. They have found the shooting site, measured the distance to my targets, examined my shop, seen my dies, my powders, the bullets I acquired. They know what rifle I am shooting.”

  “What can they know from all that? Nothing, it seems to me.”

  “They know the range, they know that I will shoot soon, because my data is only good as long as the weather here is similar to the weather on the ranch. They will try to infer from that my target, my shooting site, and my schedule. Their computers will help them in all this, which is my biggest fear. A computer could put something together in a second that no human could in a century. That is why Bobleeswagger could conceivably be up there, waiting.”

  “He is just a man. And not as good a one as you.”

  “Maybe. But to underestimate him is to court catastrophe.”

  Juba drove around the building, which occupied a whole block. He could see nothing that indicated observation. Other than a random police car manned by two listless officers, he saw no signs of authority.

  “Maybe drive around again?” asked Alberto. “Just in case?”

  “No,” said Juba. “You are not thinking like a pursued man. What if, unknown to us, there have been burglaries in the area. So those two sleepy policemen aren’t as sleepy as they seem. Instead, they are carefully watching for cars that are performing reconnaissance for an upcoming robbery: orbiting blocks, parking and watching, hanging out in nearby stores. If they see a vehicle, sirens sound, and other cars arrive out of nowhere in seconds. No rifle, but they find your little bag of diamonds and rubies from the rifle, they check the wires and see that the authorities are desperately searching for two ‘Arabic-looking’ men our age, and, by morning, I am on a plane to a country I’ve never heard of where certain men with blowtorches await. You see, you must account for the unaccountable as well.”

  “You must be the most careful man who ever lived,” said Alberto.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next day, Alberto took the subway to the area, spent time in a coffee shop, had lunch at a sandwich shop, bought a T-shirt and a ball cap at a souvenir shop, and, through it all, kept his eyes open for unmarked sedans sitting idly by, dull, thick men on the lookout, chats into radio microphones, odd rendezvous where one unmarked car pulled out to be replaced by another. Of those phenomena, as charted out for him by Juba, he saw nothing.

  Back in the low-rent suburban motel, he said, “I saw no movement, no action, no sign. The building is completely unguarded and unobserved. I went into the lobby and found it without attention. I watched the people come and go. They were black, most of them. It is safe, I tell you.”

  “Tomorrow, you will go to one of those big stores and buy a disposable phone. I will make one call on it and it will be destroyed. The chances of an intercept are minimal, but we will take all precautions. If I am satisfied that all is well, I will arrange to take delivery of the key that admits me to a certain apartment in the building, and then I am where I must be. You and your little bag of diamonds and your junky little car—you will be free to go.”

  “I could stay,” said Alberto. “I feel now as though this mission, whatever it is, is my mission.”

  “No, go far away. Return to your life. Or buy a new one, if you want. Do not get involved in cartel affairs—”

  “I wasn’t, to begin with. They dragooned me. I am lucky to be alive.”

  “Yes, you are. So am I. You go, you disappear. If I am successful, you will read about it in the newspapers. If I am not, you will not hear a thing. If you hear nothing, tragedy has occurred.”

  “Is there a date for all of this?”

  “Yes, but I cannot tell you. You see why. Still playing against the tiny chance that somehow you’ll end up in deep conversation with the FBI. They’ll have the rubber hose, and you’ll want to cooperate.”

  “I would die first.”

  “Everybody says that. But the hose always wins. The only issue is, how quickly.”

  58

  Cyber Division, Zombieland

  The Theater of Insane Security continued into a second act. Mr. Gold remained in the lounge below Cyber Division, talking by phone with Memphis, while Swagger and Neill were nine feet away through the floor. It was feared by someone important with not enough to do that Mr. Gold would identify the brand of computers the FBI used and share it with Mossad. It never occurred to anybody that Mossad already had its own computers and wasn’t looking for new ones.

  “Okay,” said Neill, “this is what I’ve got.” He ran through the attributes listed by Swagger. “Everybody’s in accordance? That’s it, from 1,847.5 yards at a westward trajectory, in a south wind of four to six miles per hour, with sixty-five percent humidity, over a significant body of water . . .” And on and on, through all iterations of the attributes Swagger had determined were in play with Juba’s upcoming shot.

  “Can you think of another one
, Mr. Gold? Any breakthroughs?”

  “Not a thing,” said Gold, from nine feet straight down.

  “Anyone else? Chandler, you have anything?”

  “I think we’ve got it covered,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Nick. “So now we are going to run these attributes against the locations of appearances of high-level officials over the next three weeks, as recorded on the highly classified Secret Service master schedule. We begin with the Cabinet and the Executive. We assume any Cabinet or Executive officer to be the high-value target that would incite a plot. But we will move on to talk-show hosts, movie directors, star athletes, best-selling authors—whatever—anyone whose prominence might incite elimination with grievous consequences, not merely to morale but, really, to everything. We’ll come up with—”

  “It occurs to me,” said Mr. Gold suddenly, “shouldn’t time be a consideration?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we first became aware of this possibility upon acquisition of Juba’s south Syrian location, courtesy of Mrs. McDowell, where, after our raid, the intelligence indicated he was preparing a shot in America with an ultra-long-range rifle. That was fifty-four days ago. Since he was in preparation for the shot for some time before then, it means that their plans were suppositioned on something that had to be on the schedule and immovable for at least fifty-four days, and almost certainly longer. So does it not make sense to limit the inquiries by focusing on those few dates that were in place early enough for them to be planned against?”

  “Excellent,” said Nick.

  “Got it,” said Neill. He sent an email to his staff of programmers and analysts in the bay who were the actual mechanics of the cyberoperation.

  “I hope that cuts down on the possibilities,” said Mr. Gold.

  “Absolutely,” said Neill. “The name of the game is winnowing. Winnow, winnow, winnow. When we are down to what cannot be winnowed, we ought to have something.”

  The time passed—tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. In the big computer bay, people did what they had to do, lights blinked, strange whirring noises were raised by hard-drive fairies beating their wings furiously, a giant cleared his throat, printers yawned and printed in vacuum-cleaner-like hum, and the inquiry proceeded.

  “Our program will examine all the potential sites for the shot attributes, as observed from the national satellite recon database. They’ll bring the matches to us—that is, satellite recon images of potential shooting sites where the target will be accessible that fit the attributes. That’s when sniper genius Swagger puts his brain to work, and let’s hope he’s still not cuckoo from the kick in the head Brother Juba laid on him, or the fall out of the tree.”

  “No problem, Bill,” said Swagger to Jeff.

  Nick laughed.

  “The program can only do so much,” Neill continued. “That’s where human intelligence comes into play. The computers are as literal as a German schoolmaster. They don’t do ambivalence. But when we look at the results, maybe we’ll see ways in which something the computer is not impressed with might nevertheless be in play.”

  A young woman came over from Machine City.

  “You’d be surprised at how much stuff we’re getting,” she said, “but here is the initial output.”

  She put a stack of heavy printout paper in front of them.

  Nick looked. “Wow,” he said. “Well over a hundred.”

  “The field is too large,” said Neill. “We’ve got to find a way to trim it down. The more attributes, the fewer the possibilities.”

  “We’ll start with these, though,” Nick said. “Meanwhile, somebody smart thinks up some new attributes. I see long-set appearances by the big guy nine times, the secretary of state five, the secretary of transportation—why would anyone target the secretary of transportation? Swagger, who is he?”

  “No idea,” said Swagger.

  “A she,” said Chandler. “And extremely unlikely.”

  Nick resumed: “The secretary of the treasury four times, and on and on—”

  “It’s pretty obvious we should go straight to President Tr—” started Bob.

  “Stop right there,” said Nick. “We’ve moved on to target possibilities, but I don’t want to hear any names. Names carry connotations—history, backstory, political biases—all of which we must put out of our process. Thus, the gentleman you were about to call by name shall henceforth be known by his Secret Service code name, which is Mogul. To us, he is not a man, he is a cipher standing for an office only incidentally occupied by a human being. We are protecting the office, that is all. Is that understood?”

  “Since you brought it up,” said Bob, “it seems like I ought to ask something everybody’s been thinking.”

  “Been waiting for this,” said Nick.

  “If you read the papers, or breathe, you know in some quarters Mogul is not popular. What if in all our digging and probing and chasing, we come upon some evidence of Americ—”

  “Again, stop,” said Nick. “I don’t want to hear that. It is groundless speculation, and in this part of the forest, groundless speculation is poison gas. That is why we are proceeding on this one totally as a criminal investigation, not as some kind of coup. That is why I have tried to keep the Agency out of it and stay as low-key as possible with the Secret Service. That is why I have not made overtures to the White House. We need clarity, not a drunken-monkey orgy. If—and I say ‘if’—you come across any such thing, it is only to be discussed with me, not among yourselves. I will make a determination whether to take it to the Director. But if it gets out—if even the possibility gets out—that, using foreign assets, someone, somewhere, with influence and connex here in D.C. has set up the elimination of Mogul, you know as well as I do that a drunken-monkey orgy is definitely in the cards. Not good for anybody except the drunken monkeys. So, barring hard evidence of that scenario, noses down, eyes locked in, small picture, not big. Understood?”

  The lack of comment and response meant yes.

  “Okay, handing these out, look hard and see what you’re getting. Sorry, Mr. Gold, can’t show ’em to you.”

  This was the real work of the day. Swagger ran his eyes over the photos, which were hazy, blurry sky-down views of unknowable zones, each with a circle centered on the executive’s appearance location, the circle being 3,694 yards in diameter, putting anyone on the circle the required 1,847 yards from the center—that is, the target. That meant the shooter could be hiding anywhere on the circle.

  He tracked directions and angles without regard to identified targets. The best shot clearly would have been on the secretary of transportation, where Juba could have perched atop what looked like an oil storage tank in Illinois and gotten a bullet across the Mississippi into Busch Stadium, where she was slated to throw the first pitch at a Cardinals game. But it just made no sense.

  The Mogul sites were less promising, but not without a whisper of possibility. Of course, Mogul was so improvisational in his day-to-day, the long-term aspects seemed problematic. He might take off for golf in Florida that morning. He could do anything he wanted. He was the president!

  The best shot would have been at an appearance in Baltimore, where he was more or less slated to appear at a luncheon at The Center Club—prominent, big-money businessmen—in the USF&G Building. He might be accessible from a mile-plus out from the Exelon Building across Baltimore Harbor, but that would involve shooting through glass, which hadn’t been in the specs. Could there be another shooter who could fire at a raking angle from closer and shatter the glass, and in that frozen moment, Juba could take his long shot on the target? Well, theoretically, but . . . so many moving parts.

  At a certain point, it was time to break for dinner. But they didn’t break for dinner. Then it was time to break for coffee. They didn’t break for coffee either. They didn’t break for anything.

  Finally,
it was Chandler who said, “Everything we’re coming up with is vaguely possible but, for this reason or that, unlikely.”

  “And your point is?” asked Nick.

  “Maybe there’s a fundamental error at a crucial spot.”

  “Did you hear that, Mr. Gold?”

  “I did, and I think she has a point. But the question would have to be, at what crucial spot?”

  “Well,” Chandler said, “the servo mechanism that puts possibilities before us is the Secret Service master schedule, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of all the attributes, that seems the most fragile. I mean, Swagger measured the yardage. That’s a hard figure, empirical, unarguable. All the other things—the weather, the wind, the angles, all that stuff—is hard data. But the master schedule is assembled by people acting on information from other people. People talking to other people often have motives in the mix, even unconsciously, and there’s miscommunication, it’s imperfect, any of a dozen things can go wrong.”

  “All this is true. Do you want to call Secret Service and lean on them to recheck the schedule?”

  “Here’s my thought,” she said. “Maybe what’s upcoming isn’t considered a Secret Service enterprise. You know, requiring special planning, the movement of assets, additional personnel, ground recon, prior coordination with local authorities. It’s not special. It’s normal, run-of-the-mill activity. So it’s not on any schedule.”

  “How do we find out about it?”

  “Do what Mr. Gold said: assume that it has to be something locked in early. It’s been on the sched early enough for the bad actors to plot to it. So, chronologize the data by the length of time on the schedule. Not the master schedule of appearances, just daily operations.”

  “What have we got to lose?” said Nick.

  He made the call, getting his Secret Service liaison out of bed. However, that guy was good at the job, got on the horn to SS operations—a 24/7 shop—and the larger schedule was emailed over to the FBI in a matter of minutes.