And that’s what Nick committed himself to doing, biting down his anger that he’d missed a shot at the Secret Service bomb detail. Now those guys were pros. He’d wanted to see them work, they were so legendary. They did site preparation, and when they were done working an area over, you knew it was sanitized, that the dogs had sniffed no explosives or wires, that the spectrometers had uncovered no unusual radio waves for command detonations, that no sniper’s nests or shooting platforms had been uncovered.
And it was outdoor work! It was doing something! It was getting back into the field, away from all this political nonsense and being just a clerk-jerk. And, the truth was, what Nick hated most of all of it was sitting in the office. He knew he wasn’t thorough enough, that he tended to make small mistakes. He cursed, silently, as his fate overtook him. But he kept his face flat and mild.
When it was over, Herm Sloane, who wasn’t too bad a guy, slid by and said, “Too bad, Nick. Know you wanted to slip out tomorrow. We’re just bogged down.”
“No problem,” said Nick, trying for cheer, which was his usual way of dealing with adversity.
“I don’t know who’s worse,” Sloane added conspiratorially, “my guy assholing it all over the place or your guy sucking it up all over the place.”
“It’s pretty fucking pathetic,” Nick said. “You got those Charlies for me?”
“ ’Fraid so, old pal.”
Sloane handed over the stack of files that he had triaged into the Charlie category. Nick looked at them sadly. It was hours and hours of work. He knew his investigation on the death of Eduardo Lanzman was falling apart. It wasn’t happening, because he couldn’t get to it.
The names were prosaic, pitiful, and as he glanced through the files, he saw the usual litany of failure and hatred, the usual roundup, the usual suspects. Little men with large grudges and imprecise grips on reality, who were only to be reckoned with because they had or could get guns.
And then Nick saw the name of his hero:
Bob Lee Swagger.
Bob the Nailer, he thought. Jesus Christ!
In three fourteen-hour days, Nick managed to eliminate fifty-six of his seventy Charlies. It was exhausting work, sitting there, phoning this office or that, tracking down that parole officer or this one, going through phone books and the state prison records division, talking to cops and lawyers and the various parish morgues. Of the fifty-six, more than half, twenty-nine, had simply died since, for whatever reason, they had been placed on the Secret Service Active Suspect List. Nick suspected therefore that the list was very old; so many old men. Another sixteen were serving jail time. Five were currently in mental institutions—these were the real crazos, whose difficulty in dealing with authority over the long term had finally gotten them classified pathological and who were now rusticating in some picturesque bayou bin. Six more had vanished, left the city or the state, simply disappeared off the face of the earth. They were now, happily, somebody else’s worry. That left fourteen to be accounted for, tracked, located, what have you; it was not easy work but he went at it with a great deal of effort.
And it left Bob the Nailer.
Nick had first heard of the great Marine sniper sometime in the early eighties, in an article in one of those Soldier of Fortune-type magazines that he used to read at the time. He remembered the cover photo of the lean young man in the camouflage paint and the intense eyes, and the beautiful Remington rifle he was carrying and the cover line: THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN ALIVE. The stories were incredible; whatever the guy shot died. Bob the Nailer had eighty-seven confirmed kills in Vietnam; he did some jobs for the Agency, it was said; and, his masterpiece, he’d hit a North Vietnamese battalion moving on an isolated Green Beret camp and held it down for two days, killing thirty-odd men in the process, saving the Special Forces’ bacon.
That was when Nick himself was trying to be the great shooter, back in his ass-kicking SWAT days, before Myra and Tulsa. Thinking back now, it all seemed so clear and innocent; you were a trained man, you went against bad guys, and because you were so good, they got nailed.
That was when he’d sold his soul to the rifle, when he was, however briefly, an acolyte in the cult of the sniper. He shivered a bit at the vanity of it, remembering what his pride had turned into in Tulsa.
Still, all these years later he had a place in him full of respect for Bob. Bob had never wavered, had let nothing stand between himself and what he wanted to be, and Bob had tested himself in the crucible of the actual, while Nick had only tried once and failed spectacularly. His bullet had gone exactly where he had not wanted it to.
So it was with a sense of facing his old self and his old beliefs and the mistakes of his own youth that he set about to track down Bob the Nailer. And like many memories, this one proved easy enough to unearth. Bob was not hard to find, that is, the traces of Bob. He’d checked into the Robert Oliver Hotel in the French Quarter on February 3 and checked out on February 4. Two days. Nobody much remembered him; the only vague reports Nick could scare up told of a tall western-styled man, very leathery, who said nothing, kept to himself, was gone all day, and left without fuss. Had a funny camera with him, some expensive Jap thing probably.
Business of some sort, Nick thought. He’d heard that Swagger hadn’t been able to stay in the Marines because of his injuries. Probably today he was some kind of traveling salesman or something, or an Arkansas farmer into the big city for the hell of it, a wild few days or something, take some pictures like any tourist, and go on back to the South Forty.
But it occurred to Nick to ask a more fundamental question. Why was the guy on the Suspects List at all? Who put him there? What gets you there?
He ran Swagger through the FBI computer and learned he had no record, at least no felonies listed anywhere. He checked him against the National Crime Index and again came up with nothing. Calling the Department of the Navy, he learned that Bob had retired at the rank of gunnery sergeant with physical disability pay after twelve years active service and close to three years in the hospital undergoing joint reconstruction and extensive physical therapy and had no blemishes on his record. He checked with the Veterans Administration and found out that Bob had never sought or received any kind of psychological testing, or counseling or anything like that. There seemed to be nothing on him at all. Now why the hell had he ended up on this list? And who was tracking him enough to note that he was here in New Orleans?
He called Herm Sloane.
“Hey, Herm—”
“Nick, we’re really pressed for time up here? What is it?”
“I just have one question. These Charlies, where do you get them? How does a guy get on the Charlie list?”
“Well, the Alphas are usually developed from intelligence, usually from the Bureau investigations of dangerous groups, from other Justice Department or DEA sources and our own intelligence unit; um, the Betas are usually guys with minor criminal records, guys who’ve made lots of public threats, who have an authority complex and tend to attract attention; and your Charlies are letter writers. We keep all the threatening letters the president gets, or threatening-seeming letters. Why?”
“Oh, there’s a Charlie here that surprised me.”
“Listen, call Tom Marbella at Treasury in DC. He collates the letter files; he’ll let you know what’s what.”
Some minutes later, Nick managed to track down Marbella and Marbella said he’d check it out, let him know, and some time after that—it was the next day, actually—Marbella called back.
“Okay, I’ve got the file up on my computer terminal now. Your boy seems to think he should have won the Congressional Medal of Honor,” said Marbella.
“Hmm,” said Nick, a noise he made when he wanted to indicate he was on the phone still, but that he had no attitude or information to convey.
“Three weeks ago, he writes a letter to the president, explaining that the Marine Corps screwed him out of the Congressional Medal of Honor that was his by rights, just like his dad’s, and th
at he now wanted his medal, and would the president please send it on?”
“And that gets him on a Secret Service list?”
“Hey, after sixty-three, anything gets you on a Secret Service list, friend. We take no chances. We win no friends, but we take no chances.”
“Is there anything threatening in the letter?”
“Uh, well, our staff psychiatrist says so. It’s not an explicit threat so much as a tone. Listen to this. ‘Sir, I only request that the nation give me that which is my due, as I served my country well in the jungles. It’s quite important to me that I get this medal [exclamation point]. It is mine [exclamation point]. I earned it [exclamation point]. There’s no two ways about it, sir, that medal is mine [exclamation point].’ ”
Nick shook his head. Like so many others, the great Bob the Nailer, the warrior champion of Vietnam, the master sniper, had yielded to vanity too. It was no longer enough merely to have done the impossible on a routine basis and to know that you and you alone were of the elect. No, in his surrender, Bob, like so many others, wanted celebrity, attention, validation. More. More for me. I want more and I want it now. It’s my turn.
That’s what Nick ran into all the time on the streets. Somehow in America it had stopped being about us or we or the team or the family; it was this me-thing that turned people crazy. They expected so much. They thought they were so important. Everybody was an only child.
But it seemed so un-Bob-like somehow.
“It sounds pretty harmless to me,” Nick said.
“It’s the exclamation points. Four of ’em. Our reading is that exclamation points indicate a tendency toward violence. Not an inclination, but a tendency, a capacity to let go. That’s the theory at any rate, though the truth is, we’ve found that letter writers almost never go to guns. They just don’t. For most of them, writing the letter is the thing that satisfies them, they sit back and everything is nice. Still, this guy is supposedly a hell of a shot, or was at one time. He used four exclamation points. And we do have it on record that he did go to New Orleans—”
“Yeah, I’ve confirmed that—”
“And so we put him on the Charlie list. Check him out, see if he deserves an upgrade to Beta—”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“I know the Charlie list is shit, Memphis. Nobody likes to do the Charlie list. Usually the guys just out of training end up doing Charlies. You sound, um, a little old for Charlies.”
“Look, I do what my boss says, that’s all.”
“We appreciate it. Glad to have the Bureau’s help.”
“How did you know he was in New Orleans?”
“Huh?”
“You said, ‘And he was in New Orleans.’ How did you know that?”
“Uh,” said Marbella, “it says so. Right here in his file.”
“But where did that information come from? I mean, a snitch, another agency, a cop shop, the Pentagon, the VA?”
“Hey, it doesn’t say. You know, this stuff comes in from all over, some of it pretty raw. What’s the big deal?”
“Is somebody watching Swagger?”
“Shit, man. I’m the last guy to know. And it doesn’t say a thing here. It’s just raw data, Memphis. Some of it’s accurate, some of it isn’t. It’s up to you to check it out, okay, bud?”
“Yeah, sure. Hey, thanks a lot,” Nick said. He hung up.
What should I do? I should do something.
He called Directory Information for the state of Arkansas, learned quickly that Bob Lee Swagger had no listed or unlisted phone number. He called the Arkansas State Police, and found that Bob Lee Swagger was not under investigation or indictment of any sort, but from that he learned Bob’s address, which was simply Rural Route 270, Blue Eye. Finally, he called Vernon Tell, who was the sheriff of Polk County, Arkansas, and after giving the FBI identification code, quickly got to the sheriff himself.
“Bob Lee? Bob Lee just lives up the mountain by himself. That’s all.”
“Any problems with him?”
“No, sir. Not the most sociable fellow in the world, no, sir. Bob Lee keeps to himself and don’t like people picking at him. But he’s a good man. He done his country proud in the war, and his daddy done his country proud and Earl’s daddy Lucas was actually the sheriff back in the twenties. They’re all old Polk County folks, and wouldn’t hurt nobody didn’t hurt them first.”
But it bothered Nick that Bob lived alone, away from society, with a lot of guns. The profile of the loner gunman had proved out too many times to be coincidental.
“Any drinking or substance abuse problems?”
“Mr. Memphis, believe me, it would be a lie if I didn’t tell you some years back, Bob Lee had a problem with the bottle and had some wild times. He’s always in pain, you know, because of the way he was hurt in the war. But I believe Bob Lee has found himself in some way. All he wants from life is freedom and to be left alone.”
“What about medals? Has he ever said anything about medals? Are medals important to him?”
“To Bob Lee? Let me tell you something, son—were you in the war or anything?”
“No sir, I wasn’t.”
“Well, son, the only people that are interested in medals are the ones that are fixing to run for office some day. I went from one side of Burma to the other with General Merrill’s Marauders in 1943 and 1944, and the only man I ever saw who wanted a medal or cared about a medal later became the only governor of Colorado to be impeached. No, son, Bob Lee Swagger don’t give two damns and a jar of cold piss about medals. I’ve been out to his place a time or so and you’d be hard pressed to find an indication anywhere that this man was one of the bravest heroes our country ever produced.”
Somehow, that pleased Nick.
And that night, when Herm dropped by, he said, “Nick, you got any Charlies to butt on up to Beta or Alpha classification?”
Nick answered, “Yes,” and he had three names, men who seemed dangerous but whom he had not been able to turn up.
Bob Lee Swagger was not on the list.
At last he was out of the office. Sitting in a swamp, as a matter of fact, but at least, indisputably, out of the office.
He sat in the back of a Secret Service van, with Herm Sloane and his partner Jeff Till as Till, the expert, fumbled and cursed at a control console. The van was all dressed up with electronic gear.
“Not a goddamn thing,” said Till.
“Are you sure it’s reading?” said Sloane.
“I’m not sure of a goddamn thing,” said Till, a little neurotically. “All the lights are red, we’re on the right directional beam, but believe me, I am getting absolutely nothing but hum and static. It’s making me crazy.”
Nick let the two chums take turns cursing the equipment that flickered wanly in front of them.
Outside, there was nothing but bayou and hanging cypress and the swish and rustle of swamp water and small, mean creatures squishing through the mud. Somewhere three hundred yards ahead—at least in theory—there was a farmhouse that doubled as the headquarters of the White Beacon of Racial Purity, a rabidly antiblack group said to be floating around the fringes of the New Orleans loonies culture. These were fat-bellied white guys with tattoos and Ruger Mini-14’s, their favorite piece, far to the right of the Klan, good old, mean old boys who’d dropped out of the Klan because it was too dang soft. That is, if they existed. Nick was privately of the opinion that it was a policeman’s fantasy, or rather an easy out; any inconvenient crime could be blamed on the White Beacon, and thereby consigned to the unsolved files without much in the way of an investment in time or energy. He had once spent a week trying to get a fix on them, concluding that there was nothing but vapors of hate and rumors feeding on rumors.
But, on a tip that Sloane had gotten from a detective in the New Orleans Gang Intelligence Division, he and his partner and, as local representative, the reluctant Nick Memphis had come out well past midnight in the Service’s electronic monitoring vehicle in orde
r to penetrate the farmhouse—no warrant was necessary if the penetration was done via parabolic microphone—and see what the White Beacon boys were up to, if there were White Beacon boys and if this was the farmhouse where they were meeting. Nick knew at least three sly old Gajun detectives who’d drink themselves goofy in merry recollection of having sent three Northern federal whiteboys out into the swamps for a night, listening to the cicadas. But he said nothing.
“It can’t be a goddamn overlapping signature,” said Till. “It’s just junk equipment. It isn’t even digital, for Christ’s sake.”
“Maybe the beam isn’t getting through the trees,” said Sloane.
“Maybe it’s the goddamn junk equipment,” said Till again.
But Nick felt as if he was in the space cruiser Enterprise, it was so high-tech.
“What’s wrong with the equipment?” he asked. “Man, if we have a big bust, we have to requisition our EV from Miami.”
“We been trying to get an upgrade for years,” said Till. “This piece of shit always goes into a zone two weeks before the Man does. But it was built in the sixties and it’s so far from being state of the art, it can’t even pick up HBO! It’s a piece of shit!”
“You need an Electrotek 5400,” Nick said innocently.
“Jesus, yeah!” said Till. “Sure, but I don’t have a million bucks lying around to spend on listening in on people. Hell, all I’m trying to do is protect the life of the president of the United States, that’s all. How’d you ever hear of an Electrotek? That goddamn thing’s top secret.”
“Guy told me. Said there were seven in the world.”
“No, they built five or six more. Yeah, wouldn’t it be sweet if we had one. Man, we wouldn’t have to go to this fucking swamp. We could go to the parking lot and tune in.”
“It’s the Agency and DEA that have them, right?”
“And certain overseas clients with very high and tight connections.”