Jesus, if he had a rifle with a good night scope. With infrared, he could do Bob right here as he ambled with his buddy toward the stairway up to the second-floor balcony, place the dot in the center of the back and squeeze. Blow his spine out. It would be over in the space of time it took the bullet to eat up the yardage.
But the only thing he had was his Remington sawed-off in the custom rig running down his left side, under his fatigue jacket.
“It’s him?” asked Eddie Nicoletta.
“Yes, goddammit,” Payne said sharply.
“Shit, man, they look like they don’t suspect a thing. Man, we could do it, Payne-O, you, me, the guys. Hit him hard and fast. Kick in the fuckin’ door, you let fly with your double-ought, I empty a clip, then it’s over, man. We’re fuckin’ home free, plus we’re heroes.”
“You think he don’t sleep with a piece cocked and locked? One tenth of a second after you’re through that door, you’re dead. The guy’s a fuckin’ champ, and you know it. Now shut up and let me think.”
He turned to the Electrotek technician.
“Can you put the directional microphone beam on their room?”
“No problem,” said the man. “If there’s not a lot of white noise in the air, we’ll get ’em big as day.”
Suddenly, the door to the young one’s room opened and he went running down the balcony and began banging excitedly on Swagger’s door.
“Fuckin’ guy’s excited, Payne-O.”
“Hurry up,” Payne said to the technician.
Swinging the long foam-covered boom, the technician sighted in, twisted knobs.
“Bring it up,” said Payne. “And get the tapes going.”
Two voices began to crystallize over the babble as the man worked his digitized control panel.
“—more promising, really. I’m telling you.”
Yes, it was Memphis, emerging out of the background noise.
“I don’t know.”
Swagger now. The voice was bell-clear, its drawly Arkansas rhythms stretching it out.
“Look, listen to me on this just once, okay?”
Bob was silent.
“She said she’d brief me on the organization of the computerized files and the code word structure. That’s a start, at least. It’s better than chasing this wild-goose hope that there’s some information buried in diaries thirty years old.”
“Memphis, I don’t like going in without a backup gun around.”
“Listen to me, Bob, please, just this once. If we can get Annex B it gives us names. Not names like ‘Payne’ and ‘Shreck.’ Those are the up-front guys. Annex B gives us the real powers—the people who don’t carry the guns but figure it all out and give the orders. Names. Addresses. It’s the only way we’ll take these guys down. Otherwise we lose. Bob, I have to go to her and try and get her working with us again.”
There was something that sounded like a transmission breakup but then it came to Payne that Swagger was sighing.
“I hate going into any place blind,” he finally said.
“It’s an old man who wrote a book about a shooter who died in the fifties. You don’t need backup. What you need is a little patience. You’re going to have to sit there all afternoon and read those diaries. Maybe you’ll come up with something, maybe you won’t. But that was your idea, not mine. Meanwhile, I’ll get down to New Orleans, and meet with her and we’ll have some idea of what we’re up against. Then … then we can go to the Bureau. With the evidence, we can get indictments. We can bring them down, we can save our own lives. We can bring it off.”
But Bob just repeated, “Hate to go into any place blind, no backup.”
“He’s a cautious bastard, isn’t he,” said Nickles. “Scary son of a bitch.”
“That’s why he don’t make mistakes,” said Payne.
“I called,” Nick was saying. “I can get a cab to drive me to the Richmond airport. I can get an eight A.M. flight to New Orleans and get there by ten.”
The conversation trailed off.
Finally, Bob said, “Shit. Meet me back here at noon day after tomorrow. And be careful, dammit. Be careful. You won’t have any backup either.”
“I’m just going to New Orleans,” said Memphis, radiant with delight, sounding like a man in love.
“Christ,” said Eddie Nickles. “Do we follow him?”
Payne studied on it. Then he said, “We ain’t got enough guys. We can always nail this fucking weenie kid. No. Swagger’s the one. We’ll stick with Swagger and nail him tomorrow.”
Dobbler was alone in his office. It was late, past eleven, and he thought maybe he’d try to scrunch up on the sofa instead of going home. Then, tomorrow …
Well, tomorrow would take care of tomorrow. Bob would go up the mountain. Panther Battalion would go up the mountain.
But Dobbler knew he was too excited to sleep. His mind was abuzz with possibility. He looked at his watch again. Only seven minutes had passed since. Time was crawling.
He decided to work. He sat at his desk, looked at the Bob Swagger folders before him, one for RELATIONSHIPS and another for SOUTHERN HERITAGE and another for PARENTS and still another on SHOOTING. Yet he could not bring himself to open them. What was there to be learned at this late date?
Then he looked at his in-basket. Funny, he hadn’t noticed it before, a brown interoffice envelope. What could it possibly mean? He hated interoffice mail; it always equaled trouble. He had an impulse to throw the thing in the wastebasket.
Sighing, he opened it anyway. It was a good thing he did.
In the command tent by the deserted airfield seven miles from Lon Scott’s place, Shreck was almost asleep when the call came. It took him a while to quite understand what Dobbler was raving about. But then it came through.
“Yes. They tried for weeks and weeks to get into the FTD computer network and finally they did! Anyway, they ran a program to dredge out all the FTD shipments—”
“What are you talking about, Dobbler?”
“Flowers. Flowers! Bob has sent flowers to someone once a year for ten years. Anyway, a guy in Computer Services, they got into the FTD system at last. We thought it was a dead end, but he kept trying, he got into the system, he managed to break the code for the Little Rock florists, he called out all their orders, he broke it down by dates, and every December eleventh for the past ten years, a shipment has gone to a woman in Ajo, Arizona. Roses.”
“I—”
“Colonel Shreck, there is a woman in Swagger’s life. It’s the only woman he knows. It’s the woman he loves. Her name is Julie Fenn. It’s his great friend Donny Fenn’s widow!”
“Ajo, Arizona?” Shreck repeated, thinking. Finally he said, “Good work, Dobbler.”
Then he called an aide. “Go get Payne,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Payne left before dawn, having booked a 10:30 A.M. flight from Richmond to Tucson by two. The whole thing struck him as pretty fucked up. Bob would probably be finished well before that time. What was the point? The woman was irrelevant by then. But he would not question Colonel Shreck.
As he drove off, the men of Panther Battalion were up and making ready for the day. Payne knew this part of the ritual, the preparation for battle. He’d done it himself perhaps a thousand times in the last twenty years. He could feel the tension in the soldiers and also their coarse energy and eagerness to get started. In the darkness, men cursed and jostled tightly, or laughed. Cigarettes glowed, a few men coughed, a few shivered.
But it secretly pleased him to be leaving. As no man ever had except the gook who got inside the wire with his rusted rifle and bayonet, Bob had scared him. He’d shot the fucker in the chest, seen the blood fly, watched him go down. And then he’d gotten up. He’d tracked them. He’d dusted two boys in the swamp. He was a major massacre waiting to happen. It frightened Payne, knowing that he was not capable of what Bob had done.
As the camp disappeared behind him, Payne discovered a sense of release. Let these toug
h kids go against Bob Lee Swagger. They’d get him, because they had no respect and did not know who he was or care what he had done. To them he was just another gringo. That was what it would take to finally get Bob Lee Swagger: stupidity and overwhelming firepower superiority.
But he knew Swagger would get more than a couple of them.
Bob awakened at around nine-thirty and showered slowly, taking his own sweet time. The men in the surveillance van kept the directional boom aimed on his room, and heard only the sounds of the shower, the easy noises of a man preparing to encounter a relatively benevolent world for the first time. There was no sense of urgency or despair, no track of fear.
He left the room at ten-fifteen, checked out of the motel, threw his bag into the trunk of the rental car, then moseyed into the Howard Johnson’s and had a nice breakfast. Two eggs, scrambled, three pieces of bacon, toast and jelly. He bought the Danville Courier, and read it at a leisurely pace. The directional boom, in the van discreetly parked two hundred yards away behind the Pizza Hut, stayed on him the whole time.
“Ma’am, could I have another cup of coffee?”
“Why, sure. Nice day.”
“Sure is.”
“Now let me think, did you take cream and sugar with that?”
“No, ma’am. Black is how I like it.”
It took him close to forty minutes to eat. Then he stepped out in the bright sun, a tall, powerful man in jeans and a denim workshirt with a corduroy sport jacket with pearl buttons, put on his sunglasses, and climbed in to be off.
“Bravo Six, this is Bravo Four, the package is on the way,” said the observation team leader into his radio. “The package is on the way.”
Sitting in the operations shack next to the Millersville Airport where four black-painted Huey helicopters waited, Shreck received the message grimly.
“General de Rujijo! Have your sergeants get the first four squads onloaded the slicks,” he said.
The Latino officer grinned, his white teeth glowing.
He turned, and barked in Spanish. Men began to deploy to their ships in seconds, heavily armed, faces blackened with paint, rifles at the high port, festooned in gaudy belts of ammunition for the heavy automatic weapons, black berets at a rakish tilt. With a shrieking whine, the choppers coughed to life and the rhythmic beating of their engines and the roar of the dust their rotors sucked from the earth became a part of the drama.
“It is a good day for a battle, I think,” said de Rujijo. “My men are very anxious. They will make me proud, I know. And now we have this thing finished.”
Shreck nodded, but said nothing. He looked at his watch.
It would take Bob about a half an hour to drive the last thirty miles to Skytop.
He picked up the phone and dialed Lon Scott.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Scott, he’s on his way. Half an hour.”
“All right.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel fine. Are we set?”
“I guarantee it. The report says he’s expecting nothing except some old papers.”
“Good,” said Lon Scott. “I’m curious to meet him.”
“Don’t be curious, sir. Just help us kill him. When he comes in the door, you take your hand off the photocell; in two minutes we’ll have the first four squads, that’s twenty-four heavily armed men there. In ten minutes there’ll be more than 150 troopers ringing the hill. Don’t mess with him. Let him run clear.”
“Oh, I understand,” said Lon.
Headquarters had never been so deserted. Dobbler felt as if he were alone in the building. Nearly everyone else was so caught up in the drama they were either down there in North Carolina with Colonel Shreck and Panther Battalion or had gone home. Dobbler also had the odd sense that people were peeling off, slipping away to new lives. Rats deserting a ship, that sort of thing.
Dobbler was finished typing. He was afraid that in the excitement of finally getting Bob, his own contributions to the project would be overlooked. So he’d sat down and typed a long nine-page memo detailing, as modestly as possible, his own role in the Bob Lee Swagger episode. After all, it had been considerable—he had designed the mechanism by which Bob had been initially trapped, he had designed the mechanism by which Bob’s “second life” had been terminated, and he had found the woman to whom Bob turned.
He was doing so well here! It was wonderful! And now it was only a matter of waiting. He checked his watch, saw that it was mid-morning and knew even as he stood there that Bob had to be on his way into the trap.
He decided the report was too important to leave to RamDyne’s indifferent internal mail system. He walked through the deserted corridors and crossed into Shreck’s building. He tried his office door; it was locked. Damn!
“Dr. Dobbler?”
“What! Oh, you surprised me!”
It was one of the security guards.
“Uh, I have to leave this report in Colonel Shreck’s office. Do you have a master key?”
“Dr. Dobbler, he don’t like nobody in his office.”
“The colonel himself just called. He needs the report.”
Dobbler was amazed at his own assertiveness. He knew his confidence was growing but he hadn’t been this assertive since before the arrest. The man’s weak eyes blurred in confusion; he could not meet Dobbler’s authoritative glare. In seconds, the security man had yielded, opened the room, and allowed him in.
“I’ll wait out here till you leave,” the guard said.
“No, I’ll close up. I have to get some papers too.”
“Yes, sir,” said the man, in some confusion.
Dobbler went in. In a strange way, he didn’t dare turn on the light. He also felt strangely excited. He was violating Shreck’s space, albeit harmlessly, but the experience felt titillating.
But the room was as unimpressive as always. It seemed to have no personality whatsoever; the colonel kept his eccentricities, if he had any at all, under the tightest of discipline. There were no pictures on the walls, the desk was bare, there were no loose papers about. The place had the scrubbed, nearly antiseptic sense of the professional military to it; in the dim light, Dobbler could see the whorls the buffer left in the wax on the linoleum floor; those sweeping circles, catching and reflecting the light, were the only evidence of spontaneity in the place.
Dobbler set the report down on Shreck’s barren desk. The colonel could not miss it. It was time to leave, but he didn’t want the experience to end. He hadn’t felt this powerful in years. His eyes hooked on the old wall safe behind the colonel’s desk; he had a massive stab of curiosity and mischievousness. The safe was exactly the same as the one in his office, which he rarely bothered to lock. He wondered about the combination—could it be the same, too?
Looking around for just a second to make certain of his isolation, he walked to the safe, and spun the dial. He pulled. Nothing happened.
He laughed.
Of course not. How stupid.
He turned. And turned back, and gave the handle another tug.
It popped open.
The observation post was concealed on a hilltop a mile away from the entrance to Skytop. Young Eddie Nicoletta had drawn the duty because he’d been with Payne on the observation mission in Blue Eye and had eyeballed him through a scope. He was sitting in a hole about four feet deep and looking out a small viewer’s slot in some ersatz bushes just inside a ridge line. Before him was a Celestron 8, an eight-inch surveillance telescope, state of the art, forty-three pounds of Schmidt-Cassegrain optics that could be dialed up to 480x, which is where he had it now.
It was tiring peering through the aperture of the lens, which was seated at right angles to the tube itself, a huge fat wad of curved steel atop a squat tripod. Nickles’s head hurt and his neck ached.
The Celestron 8 was trained on the road running into the place called Skytop, and a bit of the ribbon of macadam of the two-lane highway that ran by it. Now and then a truck or a car would materialize out
of the wobbling, foreshortened perspective, seem to assemble itself out of pure bolts of light, and purr through his range of focus. Jesus, a mile away and you could see faces! It was said you could read a newspaper at a hundred yards with one of these things and Nickles believed it.
But every once in a while, he just had to look up to keep from losing his mind. What he saw then was the half-mile dirt road up to the house itself, though he couldn’t see much of the rambling, one-story building beneath the trees. It was enough to tell that it was good-sized, the house of a man who was well off or better. Behind it was a swimming pool, some cement walkways to what appeared to be a shooting range (why cement? Nickles wondered) and beyond that, dominating the property, what they called Bone Hill.
Bone Hill was heavily forested about halfway up its three hundred feet or so of bulk, but then it gave way, as it steepened, to coarse grass and scrawny trees. Its top was bare except for the grass and a few stones strewn about.
That’s where he’ll go, Eddie Nickles told himself. When the first chopper arrives and the greasers with their combat gear come crashing out, that’s where he’ll go. He’ll go up. He’ll run up, and he’ll run and run and pretty soon there’ll be no place to go.
Nickles got to see it all happen. That pleased him.
“Bravo Four! Bravo Four, you there, goddammit?”
It was Shreck.
“Ah, sorry, Colonel. Yeah, I’m here, nothing much going on.”
“Keep your goddamn eyes open, Nicoletta. He ought to be here any minute now.”
“Yes, sir,” said Nickles.
He put his eye back to the eyepiece, and watched as a Coca-Cola truck lumbered down the road out of the bright nothingness. Then the road was quiet. Minutes passed.
He saw the roof first, emerging over a crest, just a flash. Then it was clear, heading down the road, just as they said, the red Chevy they’d been driving last night, with a single looming, steady silhouette cut off behind the glare of the windshield.
His tension growing, Nickles watched as the face assembled itself from flecks of light as the car moved into the focus zone, a pair of hard-set eyes, a taut jawline, a sense of steadiness.