“Beyond any standards. Better than my own. Whoever loaded it knew a thing or two about precision reloading for accuracy.”
“Do you know who it could be?”
“Oh, I have an idea or two.” He moved on to other matters.
“Why didn’t you know you were being set up in New Orleans? I mean, you knew there was some other game going on, that they weren’t quite what they said they were.”
“You’re right. I was a goddamn fool. I think I wanted that Russian shooter, that T. Solaratov, so much it blinded me. I’d been thinking about him for so many years, not knowing who he was, only what he’d done, but just dreaming about going up against him. So I got careless and I got greedy. It’s killed more than one man and it sure as hell nearly killed me.”
“Was there a Solaratov? Does he really exist?”
“I sure don’t know. What I do know is that these boys must have studied me like a bug on a pin for a long, long time. That’s how smart they were. They knew how to get inside and turn me like a key. Burns my ass even now thinking how stupid I was and how those smart boys played; I feel like I’ve been raped from the inside out.”
“They probably had a psychiatrist run a study on you. CIA is heavy into psychiatry now, it’s doctrine. And there’s a lot of CIA doctrine in this RamDyne.”
On the subject of his recuperation, Bob would say nothing, other than that a friend had helped him. But Nick put it together; he knew it was a woman, the woman who’d called him. With that fake country-western accent.
About his ordeals, after the bloody escape from New Orleans, Bob was not eloquent.
“Yep,” he said, “thought my hash was salted many a time. But somehow, I kept going.”
Nick had a funny moment here, calculating how he and Bob had been weirdly circling each other through this whole damned mess, how many times they’d moved through each other’s wakes. He shivered.
“I have to tell you if you ever get caught I can’t be of much help. If these guys have been as professional as you say, they won’t have made any mistakes. That setup in Maryland? It’ll be—”
“It is,” said Bob. “That was my first stop after I died. All those signs of that place are gone. The trailer that was their headquarters? Towed away. Turned out they just took out an option to buy an old shooting club property, put up twenty-five thousand dollars, then let it lapse. It’s back for sale now. Didn’t surprise me much.”
“Yeah. And on the other hand, the forensic and ballistic evidence against you is overwhelming. I’ve read the Bureau lab report. They got your rifle with your fingerprints and your reloaded cartridge and … the bullet. They couldn’t read the markings because the bullet was mangled and—”
“Yeah, I saw that in the papers. That’s why they haven’t done any shooting tests on the rifle.”
“Yes. If they get to court, they don’t want to say they tried but couldn’t get a match. It makes them look bad in front of a jury.”
“I get you.”
“But they have a very sophisticated test that analyzes the metallic residue left in the gun barrel. And it said positively that the bullet that hit the archbishop was consistent with the metallic residue. That’s going to be hard to beat.” .
“I figured out how they did it, or how it could have been done.” He explained the concept to Nick.
“Okay,” said Nick, “yeah, I understand. Same bullet, slightly larger bore, paper-patching. But … you have to find some way to convince a jury. The jury won’t be able to follow something that technical; they’ll just look at the neutron analysis test—and Mr. Swagger, you are one screwed turkey.”
Bob nodded.
“They did a very careful job on me. But just maybe nobody’s quite as clear on all this as they think.”
“Let me tell you right now,” Nick said, “your best course is to hire a good lawyer. I can call the Bureau and we can work out some kind of deal. With my evidence and—”
But Bob was just looking at him.
“Son, I don’t think you understand. These boys killed my dog.”
“I’m telling you, this is the twentieth century. You just can’t go to war on people, not in America. And that kind of attitude will—”
“Now, you listen here, Memphis. Even if I could walk out on this thing now as a free man, I wouldn’t. Those boys would scatter and slip into new identities or whatever it is they do. We’d never catch them. They’re too damned slick. They’d have gotten away with it. And in a year or so, when it was cool, they’d be back in business. What I mean to do is tether a goat and draw them in. They’ll think they’re hunting the goat, but the goat is hunting them. And who’s the goat? I’m the damned goat. The only thing is, this goat has teeth. This goat bites. Now this is hard, hairy work, Memphis; there’s going to be some shooting and some people are going to die. It won’t be pretty and we’ll be all alone. It is a war. I didn’t start it, but by Christ I mean to finish it. Now, Pork, tell me—are you in or are you out?”
Nick thought of the pig-gleam in Payne’s eye; and this RamDyne with its willingness to do the hard thing; and he thought of how he’d been brutalized; and he thought of how confident and smooth and big these guys thought they were. And he thought about how they’d committed a war atrocity and gunned down women and kids.
And he thought about how he’d been dying to get back on a SWAT team.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”
Something hard and metallic flickered in Bob’s eye, like the shine of a brass cartridge as it catches a glint of light before the bolt locks vault-tight behind it.
“Now, what?” asked Nick. “I’ve got some great ideas about Annex B. It seems to me—”
“Hold up there, Pork. First thing is, we’re going to see a man about a rifle.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Partial body found in bayou,” proclaimed the cheerful headline.
“Go ahead,” said Shreck, “read it.” Dobbler squinted.
Lafayette Parish
The partial body of a man was found floating yesterday near Spencerville, Lafayette Parish. Sheriff’s deputies said the victim, who has been identified by fingerprints as Tomas Garcia Montoya, of McDonoughville, was evidently the subject of an alligator attack as his body, from the chest down, was missing.
Cause of death, however, was listed as a gunshot wound to head.
Montoya, a Cuban émigré, had listed his occupation as “consultant” but was known to police and other New Orleans law enforcement agencies as a paid informant. He was 54 years old.
Deputies speculated that he may have also been a victim of the escalating drug warfare in the state’s rural parishes, in a struggle for control of the city’s drug routes between old-line mob interests and newcomers representing the cocaine cartels of Central America.
Montoya was shot in the head by a heavy caliber rifle bullet.
“Only a large-caliber center fire rifle bullet does massive damage like that,” said Lafayette Parish coroner Robert C. LaDoyne. “This man was shot, judging by the wound channel and tissue displacement, by a hollowpoint bullet of .30 caliber or more.”
Parish deputies said it may represent the coming of a new kind of professional killer to the parish’s drug wars.
“Mob boys favor the silenced .22 from close range,” said Deputy Ed P. St. Etienne. “The Colombians like little machine pistols, and fire a hundred bullets into their victims. This boy is something entirely new.”
“He’s not new to us, is he, Dobbler?” said the colonel.
“No,” said Dobbler, swallowing. “How on earth—? He’s dead! We saw the—”
“Dobbler,” snapped the colonel. “Look at me.”
Dobbler looked into the colonel’s forceful dark eyes and felt the full might of his wrath.
“Tommy Montoya was a free-lancer we used when we operated in the South. He was with Nick Memphis. Now he’s dead, sniper-dead. That means one thing and you’d better get used to it fast. All right? Comprendez, amigo?
”
Dobbler swallowed miserably.
“Yes,” he said. “I see.”
“Swagger is alive. How, why, I don’t know. I don’t even give a fuck, because it doesn’t matter. What matters is this new reality: he’s teamed with the one man in America outside the proper circles who’s seen our file. So right from the start, he knows more than anybody who’s come after us before.”
He looked hard at Dobbler.
“In case you don’t get it, Doctor, we have a war on our hands. This motherfucker wants to track us down and blow us away. But what we’re going to do is blow him away first. Are you listening, here, Dr. Harvard Psychiatrist? No bullshit; we have to get close, put the muzzle against his head and blast his brains all over the landscape. Or he’ll do it to us.”
The colonel’s glare was unsettling; Dobbler swallowed.
“What do you want me to—”
“What I need from you is an idea how they’ll operate. Their relationship—how’s it going to play out? Will they get along? Will they fight? Do they make a good team?”
“Ah,” said Dobbler, unprepared, “ah, Bob will be the strong one. He’ll dominate the younger man. The younger man is no problem. Bureau trained, he’ll be orthodox and plodding. No, Swagger is dangerous because of the unconventionality of his mind. He’ll come at us out of instinct, brilliantly, improvising madly. He’ll—”
“Where will they head?”
“Bob will head home. If he was in New Orleans to meet or rescue Memphis, then he’ll take him to the Ouachitas. It’s where he’ll feel safest. And the sense of safety is—”
“The chances of us making an interception are nil. Not in his territory. All right,” said Shreck, leaning forward, “let me ask you a question. Have you ever hunted?”
“Hunted? Good God, no. I mean, it’s so … bar-baric.” A faint look of distaste came across Dobbler’s face, unintended.
“Yes, well, you put all that aside now. You just became a hunter. It’s your job to work out a way we can lure this tough old boy and his new pal into ambush. Hunt him, Dobbler. You don’t have to kill him—we’ll take care of that—but you have to hunt him.”
Dobbler nodded apprehensively. And he noticed something he’d never quite seen before.
He swallowed.
Shreck is scared.
Some days later, Nick Memphis was in a contrary mood.
“Now what the hell is this?” he said. “Why are we—”
“I think I liked you better when you were Baby Googoo, and you just looked up at me with your mouth open. Now you won’t shut up. Talk, talk, talk, like a woman. Now, don’t say nothing here. You let me do the damned talking. Got that? I don’t want you explaining something to this old coot and putting him into a coma.”
There was no give in Bob’s voice as he looked through the dust-spackled windshield at an extremely spacious ranch house on a spread just outside of Fort Supply, in western Oklahoma.
“You better—”
“You just smile, boy. This old man isn’t going to want to give up his information easy to strangers, but he knows more about what he knows about than any man alive. Come on, now.”
Bob got out of the truck. He wore a straw Stetson and had found a gray jacket to go over his denim shirt; suddenly he looked strangely like some kind of cowboy royalty.
“I still don’t—”
“Button it, Pork. You’ll see.”
An old lady sat in a rocker on the porch at the top of the stairs. She just watched them come, made no gesture of welcome. She fanned herself; it was hot and dusty out and the sun lurked over the hills behind a gassy spread of clouds.
“Howdy, ma’am,” Bob sung out.
“Whachew want?” the old lady asked.
“See the colonel.”
“Colonel don’t see nobody these days.”
“Hell, I have me a line on a pre-’64 70 in .270 once owned by a famous bad boy. Thought he might be interested.”
“He’s got enough guns.”
“No such thing as enough guns, ma’am, I’ll beg your pardon for saying so.”
The woman eyed him suspiciously, then got her weary body up and yelled inside. “Rate? Rate, you in there? Fella out here says he gotta line on a 70.”
“Well, shoo him in, then, honey,” came the call from the dark interior.
Bob walked in and Nick followed.
The room was large. The man who owned it had at one time or other killed every creature large and dangerous that walked upon the earth, and now the heads of his victims looked down upon their slayer, who was a plump man in his seventies sitting in an Eames chair reading a copy of—Nick blinked, double-checked to make sure, but, yes—The New York Review of Books.
He didn’t rise. The beasts stared from the walls. Most of the furniture was wooden and sleek and expensive, and Indian blankets and pottery were all over the place. And so were books, hundreds and hundreds of books. And rifles. Nick had never seen so many rifles and so many books in one place before.
“And who might you gentlemen be?” asked the fellow. He removed a blanket from his lap to reveal a six-shooter, high chromed, seven-and-a-half-inch barrel, and he had merry, clever eyes. There wasn’t a morsel of fear in him anywhere. Nick had never seen a man who had less fear.
“Name’s Bob Jennings, from over in Arkansas. Do some trading in fine firearms. This here’s my associate, named Nick.”
“Well, Mr. Jennings, I must say I know most of the fine gun dealers in this country, having spent much money in their abodes. Can’t say I’ve heard much of you.”
“I’m new to the business, sir,” said Bob. “Just starting my reputation. But you know that fellow the FBI killed, that Bob Swagger?”
“That bad boy took that shot at our president and hit a poor cleric instead?”
“That old boy, yep.”
“Heard of him.”
“Well, he had a pre-’64 .270, rebarreled with a Douglas and restocked on a piece of English walnut by Loren Eccles of Chisholm, Wyoming. It was serial number 123453, which means it came off the line in about 1949. A fine rifle. He was a man who much loved fine rifles.”
“I just believe he was. Some say if he’d have meant to shoot the president, he’d have hit the president.”
“Well, who can say? Now, it so happens that his property will eventually come out of FBI impoundment and it so happens that his father, Earl, had a sister named Letitia who happened to be my mother. Bob Lee was my cousin, though I hadn’t seen him in years. An ornery soul, if I recall from childhood. Now as his only living relative, it so happens his guns will therefore come into my possession and knowing how you treasure the Model 70, I might be persuaded to see it come your way.”
The shrewd fellow looked Bob up and down and then lit out with a cackle and a yowl.
“I think I see a family resemblance,” he said. “My, ain’t life just full of surprises?”
“And since no man alive knows more about the Model 70, I can’t think of a better man to receive that rifle, sir, than Colonel Rathford Marin O’Brien, author of The Classic Rifle, the premiere big game hunter of this country and our greatest living expert on the Model 70 rifle, Winchester’s best.”
“It sounds like a piece I’d be interested in. Lord knows, I’ve spent lots of foolish money on interesting rifles. If I didn’t have so many damn oil wells, I might not be such a spendthrift, but I’m too old for women and I tired of killing some years back, so interesting rifles and the folly of New York intellectuals are my last remaining vices. And what would the price be?”
“Sir, I’ll not insult you with talk of money,” said Bob. “I’ll trade you that damn rifle even up, for information. That’s all I want. Some talk.”
“They say a man who asks for little is always meaning to take a lot.”
“Maybe they say that, sir, and maybe it’s right. But I know Bob Lee Swagger thought you were a great American and he’d be pleased to have one of his rifles come to rest in your collection. And h
e’d consider it an even bargain and a good swap.”
“All right, then, boy. Ask your damn questions. What I know that could be worth that much—properly authenticated, that gun would easily go fifteen thousand dollars at the big Las Vegas show—is mighty interesting to me.”
“The Tenth Black King.”
O’Brien looked at him, his hard eyes gleaming with sudden insight.
He glanced briefly at Nick, found him uninteresting, then returned to Bob.
What the hell was going on? Nick was thinking.
“Hell, boy,” said Colonel O’Brien. “The Tenth Black King is a damned mystery.”
Dobbler could no longer stand his office. The walls seemed to press down on him and his mind had ceased to operate. He had sat there for hours, trying to think of ways to get at Bob and he had come up with nothing.
So now he was wandering around the RamDyne complex, ducking now and then when a 747 would scream in on the flight path to Dulles. He knew that sometimes his unconscious could solve a problem if he did not let his conscious deal with it directly. It just happened, under the surface, so to speak. He prayed for such a leap in insight now. But he only saw blue sky, airplanes and crummy buildings.
He’d come at last to a large corrugated shed toward the rear of the complex. It bore the sign, OPERATIONS MOTOR POOL/NO ADMITTANCE TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.
Why did he enter? Because it was there. No one stopped him as he slid in and in the darkness he blinked to adjust his eyes. He found himself in a garagelike structure of some size, in the center of which a number of men were bent over benches, working intently. The odor of gasoline, grease and some kind of chemical solvent filled the air like a vapor. He heard the click and snap of metal parts. He smiled at one of the workers, who just worked away contemptuously.
He saw then they were working on guns. Machine guns or assault rifles, complicated, dangerous-looking. They were snapping them, assembling them, greasing them, goofing around with them. And there were bullets too, crates of bullets, and some of the men were fitting the bullets into magazines. They all looked like barbarians. They were wild boys, yardbirds, the same breed of tough, scary trash that had frightened Dobbler into Russell Isandhlwana’s comforting ministrations. Some had crew cuts, some ponytails, all had tattoos and bad teeth. And the guns: he could tell. They loved the damned guns.