“Yes, sir,” said Nick. Bob hung back, letting Nick do the talking. Great, Nick thought, I’m in so deep now there’s no way of ever getting out.
“Now, I have twenty-seven-thousand-five-hundred-odd subscribers, Mr. Memphis. Do you want me to print out a whole list or something?”
“Sir, is there any way you can break it down by chronology? That is, early subscribers, that sort of thing. First subscribers. We’re quite convinced that our man would have found out about you early and been one of the first subscribers.”
“Hmmm,” said Porter. “You know, I don’t think I could run a program to shake it out that way; I’ve set the whole thing up to run alphabetically. Whenever I get a new subscriber, I add him to the list and the thing just inserts it where it should be.”
“I see.”
“How did you get your subscribers, Mr. Porter?” asked Bob.
“Well, I’ve taken out classified ads in SGN and in the slick gun mags. And of course there’s a subscription form in every copy of the magazine.”
“No, I mean originally. When it was first started. That first year, what was that, 1964? How’d they start it off?”
“Well, as I understand it, it was started informally as a newsletter of match results. And now and then a small technical article. The men were all driven to communicate what they were working on. And people who were just interested in the sport or the experiments or what have you began to ask to get on the mailing list. And I think they first started selling subscriptions, yes, it was 1964, after the newsletter became an actual magazine.”
“Those first subscription requests. Say, the first thousand. Any idea what became of them?”
“Oh, Lord. Did I throw them away? I got all that stuff from old Milt Omahundro who used to put it out. God, I—No, I think I’ve got some old cartons out in the garage.”
“Could we see them?”
“Sure, This way.”
And he led them out into the garage, where against one wall a pile of cardboard boxes stood.
“Oh, Lord, I just don’t—”
“Mr. Porter,” said Bob. “Tell you what. If you get me some coffee like you offered before this young man said no, I’d be happy to go through those boxes for you. And I’ll make damn sure it’s as neat when we leave as it is now. Fair enough?”
“Well, that’s the best offer I’ve had in weeks,” said Porter.
Bob and Nick got busy, and it was Bob who worked the hardest. Taking off his coat and folding it neatly, he threw himself against the task with that same thorough intensity that always numbed Nick. He’d pause to take a sip of the coffee now and then, but mainly he just plunged ahead.
He’d make a good cop, thought Nick, who had never been outworked before.
It was in the last box and it was Bob who found them: the first thousand or so subscription forms to Accuracy Shooting, now yellowed with age. Many were simply letters that had had checks enclosed and still bore the imprint of a paper clip or the punctures of a staple; some were index cards or postcards. Only a few were forms. It was a box of old memories crumbling into dust. Hard to look at it and think that something so utterly banal—a box of forgotten letters and forms—might hold a key to something so monstrous as the shooting of Archbishop Roberto Lopez in New Orleans.
“I’ll be,” said Porter. “That takes me back awhile. I’d forgotten all about those. Didn’t even know I still had them.”
“Sir,” said Nick, “what we’d like to do is write you out a receipt for this material, then return it to you when we’ve completed our investigation.”
“Oh, I don’t know. If I’d have found them, I might have thrown them out myself. Why don’t you just take the damned things and if you lose them, so much the better.”
“Yes, sir, but I’d be happy to write out the receipt.”
“No, you just go on and go. I’ve got work to do.”
The next day, Shreck drove alone down through Virginia and into North Carolina, following complicated directions. There, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just over the state line, he turned down a private road for perhaps a mile until he came to an electronic gate. He got out of the car and pressed the buzzer on an intercom system.
“Yes?” came the voice.
“My name is Shreck,” he said.
“All right,” came the voice.
The door slid open, and Shreck got in and drove for another two hundred yards. Sitting in the shadow of a six-hundred-foot hill was a handsome ranch house, rambling, bright, and open. Shreck had always lived in apartments, almost monastically: but he had a moment of awe when he saw the spread—it was beautiful, and if he ever had a place, this is the sort of place he’d have. Whoever this guy was, he had money. He parked and got out. A cement ramp led up to double doors. The house had no steps.
Shreck walked up the ramp, found the door open.
“I’m in the shop,” came the call over the loudspeaker.
Shreck walked through the house, through its wide doors, past the sun deck. Out back he could see the rifle range, the white targets lodged against the base of the hill.
At last he reached the rear of the house, and stepped through another wide door. A man who looked ten years older than he was sat curled in a wheelchair and was very carefully turning a single brass shell in his hand as he worked it with some kind of metalworking tool, a keylike handle that embraced a brass cartridge case locked in a vise.
“Hello, Colonel Shreck.”
“Hello, Mr. Scott.”
Lon Scott wore his gray hair short and neat above the long face and aquiline profile of a blue blood. His eyes were dark and ropes of veins showed along the muscled ridges of his forearms and hands. But his body was horribly twisted, the spine bent like a bow, his dead legs awkwardly spindled beneath him. He couldn’t exercise his body, so it had acquired a packing of fat, and his stomach bulged under his belt. Once beautiful, he was now grotesque.
Shreck tried to let nothing show on his face, but he knew a trace of horror had crept into his eyes; and he knew Scott noticed.
“Not very pretty, is it? That’s what a bullet in the spine can do to a healthy growing boy, Colonel. Turn him into a geranium.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I just—”
“Don’t worry. I can handle it. Now, my friend Hugh Meachum said you had some bad news for me. Let’s have it, Colonel. You don’t look like the sort of man who pulls his punches.”
“Yes, sir,” said Shreck. “It’s a loose end. A detail that won’t go away. New Orleans. The man we were using as our asset.”
“The Marine?”
“Yes. He was supposed to be dealt with; by some freak he survived a point-blank chest shot. Must have missed his heart by a hair. And now he’s back, teamed up with an FBI agent.”
“This Marine. A good man?”
“The very best.”
“As good as you are? I understand you’re quite the warrior.”
“Better.”
“But you have a plan?”
“That’s correct. It’s our feeling that he’d be unusually responsive to something from shooting culture. For example, he may have identified the rifle of yours that he used in Maryland. It’s our idea to put an ad in The Shotgun News for a book of some sort, a privately printed volume as is common in the culture, on famous target rifles or shooters or some such, and if he sees it, he’d want to approach the author. And we nail him.”
“Why do you need my permission?”
“Well, sir, in this business, we find that as close as we can come to the authentic when we fabricate, the better off we are. We can’t just make stuff up. We’ve got to build a legend that he can verify himself from other sources. This is a very careful man. And that’s why we need … well, information as well as permission.”
Lon Scott nodded.
“My past? My family? That sort of thing?”
“Yes, sir.”
Scott seemed to have a funny moment here; it was an odd shiver, something between a
shudder and a snort. As if he almost laughed or almost choked.
“My father,” he finally said. “My poor old father.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see,” said Scott, following intently.
“There are alternatives,” said the colonel, who had now, with much effort, mastered the blank look in the face of Lon’s infirmity. “We can hope to ride this out while Swagger and this FBI agent peck away at us. Our tracks have been hidden well, but … but they’ve consistently surprised us. Eventually, they just might stumble onto something, and possibly by that time it would be too late. My theory of war has always been aggressive offensive operations. I was once called a meat grinder. But I believe you ultimately spare lives by responding aggressively.”
Lon listened raptly, only stopping momentarily to hawk up a wad of brackish phlegm from somewhere in his throat to dribble it into a spittoon that the colonel had not until then noticed.
“There are risks, of course. The first is that we must feed him your name. I understand your privacy is important to you.”
“My name has not been in public print since I stopped bench resting in the early sixties. I’m sure I’m forgotten now. It frightens me, of course. It’s such a small thing … but of course it opens up the faint possibility of inquiries that might lead to associations and linkages … well, who knows? Pandora’s box. These things take on a life of their own.”
“Yes, sir. It’s just that I feel there’s no other way. Swagger would see through everything else. He’d nibble us to death for years. We’d be stuck. We must eliminate him, or everything will be gone.”
Scott sighed. Melancholy seemed to overtake him, too.
“My, my, my,” he finally said. “After all these years.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I suppose if this man isn’t stopped, he puts Hugh at risk as well.”
“Yes, sir,” said Colonel Shreck.
“Well, I owe Hugh a considerable debt, Colonel Shreck. He’s a great man. How long have you known him?”
“Since 1961, sir, when we were training the Bay of Pigs invasion force in Guatemala. He’s watched over my career ever since.”
“That’s Hugh. He takes responsibility. He cares. He lets you become what your talents allow. Without him, I’d have lost myself in my bitterness. I made a deal with Hugh Meachum and it’s paid dividends to both of us. I’m with you. Whatever you say, whatever you require. I’m yours.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. As I say, Mr. Scott, your name, your family, his—”
“Well, you know, you’ve certainly hit the jackpot there. My father was a famous man, a celebrity back in the thirties. The story of what he accomplished with the Tenth Black King and what it led to … well, it would make a great American book. And in the shooting world, his name even to this day is instantly recognizable. Yes, I’ll get you some things that you’ll find helpful.”
“Thank you.”
“But I want something from you in return.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I want in all the way. If I’m bait, then let him come to me. To me here. We’ll go all the way. I’ll do my part. This place is perfect; remote, access to a mountain, everything you need. Your boys can drive him up Bone Hill.” He gestured over his shoulder and Shreck could see the Blue Ridge foothill out back, its flanks covered in scrubby vegetation, its knob bald. “That’s where he’ll die, atop Bone Hill.”
This was exactly what Shreck had been playing for. Once again, the great Lon Scott had hit the bull’s-eye.
“That’ll make it much easier, sir,” Shreck said.
“Now what?” asked Nick. “We’ve got over a thousand names here. One of them may be phony, the pseudonym of a man who disappeared himself close to thirty years ago. How are the two of us going to winnow them down?”
“He can change a name, Memphis. He can change an address, an appearance, a way of talking. One thing he can’t fake. He can’t fake legs.”
Memphis looked at him. Bob crouched in the half-dark of the motel room, his face lost in shadow.
Nick had to admit it; yes, it was very neatly thought out, elegant perhaps. But he had to take it a further step.
“Is there some kind of register of handicapped persons I don’t know about? I mean, we can’t call a thousand men whose addresses from thirty years ago we have and ask them if they’re paralyzed?”
“There is. We break it down by state, get a list for each state. Then you call each state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. You call and you find out who on the list has a handicapped license plate. State computers ought to be able to shake it out real fast.”
“Damn!” shouted Nick. “Goddamn right, yes, yes. Then, in fifty phone calls we’ve winnowed the thousand down to just a few. How many can there be? And we can check them out.”
“That’s it, Pork. I’d bet a dollar against tomorrow one of those men will be Lon Scott. Be nice to find out how come he’s been hiding all these years, and how it was his famous rifle ended up in the hands of an outfit that kills important people for a living.”
Nick began calling the next morning in a rented loft space in downtown Syracuse, near the university, as soon as the phone company got the phones hooked up. Using his federal identification code number, which authenticated him to the supervisory personnel, he was able to begin the computer searches in six states in a couple of hours. But it was exhausting, excruciating work and Nick was astonished to find in himself something he’d never allowed before—dreaminess.
He saw himself on the road, he saw himself somewhat like Bob: free, beholden to nobody. It occurred to him: Gould I invent my own life instead of allowing the Bureau to invent it for me? He’d been a man of many masters and eager to do their bidding; now he considered that he could be his own master.
Meanwhile Bob took the calls that came back on the other line.
“Agent Fencl, FBI,” he’d say, trying to subdue his Arkansas twang. “Yes, sir, but Agent Memphis is on another line. May I take your information please? I’ll see that it reaches him. Yes, ma’am. Yes, could you spell that please? Yes, and is there an address? Thank you very much, you’ve been very helpful.”
It took three days. In the end, they had seven names—that is, seven men who were among the first thousand subscribers to Accuracy Shooting and who had been issued handicapped license plates by their state department of motor vehicles sometime between 1964 and today.
“Wow,” said Nick. “All that work for seven names. Now, if I were in the damned Bureau, all’s I’d have to do is call up the offices in the states of these guys, and have them check them all out. I’d get reports back in thirty minutes. But I suppose our next move is to individually check these seven guys out?”
“Yep. Of course I don’t know what the original Lon Scott looked like. But I do know that he dropped out of sight in 1963 and hasn’t been heard from since. So seems to me, one thing we ought to find out is how old these boys are, and we can reject anybody who wasn’t at least in his twenties in 1962; and we can reject anybody who wasn’t already crippled in 1962. Maybe that’ll get it down some.”
“No, wait a minute,” said Nick. “No, we’re going at this wrong. Look, think about it this way. The guy we’re looking for, the real Lon Scott, has one distinguishing characteristic—that is, he has a new identity. Now, the classical way in which you build a new identity is to take over the identity of a child who was born on or about the same time you were but who died in the next few years. See, nobody ever correlates birth certificates with death certificates. So you get the name of a child who died a few years after he was born from a graveyard or an old newspaper obituary; then you write to the state department of birth registration and say you’re him and you get a copy of his birth certificate. Then you use that as the basis of the new identity. Right?”
It was right. Bob nodded, for the first time looking almost as if impressed.
“Go on,” he finally said.
“So we call the counties in which th
e seven names reside, we call the death certificate registries, and we find which of the seven has died. And if we find one of those to be the case, then we know that somebody’s resurrected the name to use as the basis for the new identity. And wouldn’t that be our man?”
Bob looked at him long and hard.
Then he said, “You finally said something worth listening to, though you explained half to death. Now get busy.”
“The ad runs today,” said Dobbler, “in the ‘Books and Magazines’ section of The Shotgun News, just a few lines. Here’s the copy.”
He handed it to Shreck.
ART SCOTT: AMERICAN SHOOTER. The true story of the fabled marksman of the thirties who won the National Thousand Yard Match four times in the thirties and forties and twice more in the fifties with his famous TENTH BLACK KING Model 70 .300 H & H Magnum. Complete with pictures drawn from family archives and load data. Postpaid, $49.50, or order from James Thomas Albright, P.O. Box 511, Newtsville, N.C. 28777, 704-555-0967; Visa, MasterCard.
“It doesn’t even mention Lon Scott,” said Shreck.
“It can’t. Too obvious. It has to be subtle! If it’s obvious, he’ll smell a trap and never come close. He’s made the connection to the Tenth Black King, I guarantee you! You can’t force these things!”
He almost shouted, forgetting to whom he was talking.
Shreck just took a pace back.
“How do we know he’ll spot it?” he asked.
“We trust him. He might not find it right away. But as he travels he’ll talk to people who will have seen it. He will find it, that I guarantee you. And he’ll obey the instructions in the ad.”
The phone number reached, through several blind linkages, an answering machine in RamDyne headquarters.
“The message they hear simply tells them to leave Visa or MasterCard numbers, and to give their addresses,” said Dobbler. “So they leave their voices on the tape. Now this is very important. You see, we have the taped interrogations of both Memphis and Swagger, Memphis recorded in the interrogation in the swamp and Swagger during your discussions with him back in Maryland. So we’ve made a voice scan and reduced their voices to an electronic signature, which is in turn coded into a computer. Every call we get is automatically filtered through the computer and it is instantaneously checked against the vocal signatures. When we get a match, it lets us know.”