No matter, Nick thought.
The key thing is, he’s got to hide his package.
Something else came to Nick.
Eduardo, you’ve been hit now, you’ve been whacked by guys with axes, they’ve cut your fucking heart out. But somehow—Jesus, man, you had a set of balls on you—somehow you crawl into the bathroom and on the linoleum you write a message in your own blood. No, not the name of your killers, but something else.
You write—ROM DO.
What’s it mean? What’s the message?
ROM DO.
“I want you to go back to the airport where you picked me up, and then repeat this journey.”
“You kidding?”
“I am not.”
“Okay, pal. Hope you got a big expense account.”
The cabby swirled the vehicle around and returned to the terminal.
“Don’t stop. Just follow the same route.”
Nick watchcd the scenery roll by.
Along here you were made, he thought. You looked up, you saw a car following you that wasn’t a taxi, you hit the panic button. You saw them, maybe reading their profiles through the windshield or maybe recognizing the vehicle. But it had to be here, along this dull, limited access road, with no escape, no place to hide, not even a place to stop.
They reached the parking lot of the motel again.
“Okay, pal?”
“Shut up,” said Nick.
He sat there, trying to think.
ROM DO.
ROM DO.
He looked around for ROM DO. But the only words he could see from the parking lot were inside the cab. JERRY NILES, it read, in caps, up there on the sun visor.
Dobbler felt absurd. Here he was among country types in the very small and rude town of Blue Eye, Arkansas, a few hours west of Hot Springs. There was nothing friendly about the place. What had happened to the famous American small-town hospitality? People looked at him sullenly. It was one of those one-horse places, a scabby, peeling town square around a Confederate monument. A banner floated above the main street, proclaiming to all the world THE BUCKS ARE STOPPED HERE. Hunting. Dobbler shivered. He felt trapped in this godforsaken nightmare, sealed in by the mountains everywhere he looked, towering claustrophobically over the town.
The mountains scared him. Heavily encrusted with pines and on this rainy morning shrouded in mist, they looked as if they could kill you. He didn’t want to go up there but he had to. That’s where Bob would be.
Dobbler really had no idea what to do. With the cassette in his briefcase, he knew the only safety lay here. That is, if he could find Bob Lee Swagger. No one else could stop them. That was the irony. In America, with its FBI and its hundreds of police forces, no one could stop them except Bob Lee Swagger, the man with the rifle.
If these people knew anything they weren’t talking, especially to an outsider like him, in his lumpy suit, with his eastern beard. They probably thought he was gay. He’d better watch himself. High school boys might beat him to death with shovels or festoon him in a dress and drag him behind a pickup truck through town to the boundary of Polk County. But he had to have a plan. There had to be a plan.
He had thought he might go back to the now-notorious Bob sites, the burned church, Bob’s own still-sealed-off trailer eight miles out of town or the Polk County Health Complex, where Bob had so flummoxed the FBI—and RamDyne. But when he’d visited all these places that morning, he’d found them returned to banality, their brush with glory and the national media completely over.
Maybe guns were the hook. He had gone to a gun store on the edge of town and tried to start up a conversation. This was a big mistake. The owner looked at him as if he were from Mars, and asked him rudely if he wanted to see something or what.
“That one,” he said nervously.
The man took a large rifle off the rack, opened the bolt, and handed it over.
It was very heavy.
“Is this like the one Bob Lee Swagger used?” Dobbler asked.
The old man’s eyes narrowed. Then he allowed, “Sir, in these parts some folks don’t think Bob done what they all say he done. They say if Bob had taken a shot at the president, we’d be havin’ ourselves a new president. Now that rifle’s a Savage 110 in thirty-ought-six. Are you serious about buying or do you just want to cuddle on up to it and pretend you’re Bob Lee Swaggcr?”
This hostility had frightened Dobbler; he handed the rifle back and fumbled his way out of the shop. Now it was three hours later and all he’d done since was to wander around foolishly, wishing to hell he knew what to do.
I know he’s here, he thought. This is where he’d go, he’d have to go.
Dobbler looked up into the mountains. They all looked the same to him, menacing. It reminded him of his first glance into the yard at Norfolk State, the terror and vulnerability he felt. He resolved to develop some steel. He resolved to be courageous. He determined to go up to the mountains, yes, to go up there and somehow face the man he had to face. Tomorrow.
Dobbler got into his rented car and drove back to the motel, feeling utterly beaten. He went to his room, realizing he’d wasted his first day entirely and that it wouldn’t take Shreck and his goons long to figure out where he’d run to. He had no place else to go.
He got out of the car and walked to his room. He fumbled with the lock and stepped into darkness. He wished he had stopped to buy something to eat, feeling suddenly feeble.
He turned on the light.
“Hello, little buddy,” said Bob the Nailer. “Believe you and I have some talking to do.”
He was afraid she’d have a date or a car pool arrangement, or something. But Nick was lucky as he sat parked just across the street from the Federal Building on Loyola at 5:35 P.M. Sally came out of the building alone, crossed the street, went into the Payless Parking Garage, and emerged three minutes later in a gold Honda Civic.
He followed her into the traffic, trying to remember where she lived, or if she’d ever said. He simply latched on behind as she headed out I-10, east, until she reached the lakeside, then followed the sign that pointed the way to Gentilly Woods. He watched as she stopped at a Fill-a-Sack. When she came out a few minutes later with two plastic bags, he decided it was time to move.
“Sally! Hey, Sally!”
He dashed across the parking lot to her, but when she heard his voice and he saw suspicion flee across her pretty face, he knew in a second he had no chance at all of pretending he’d just bumped into her.
“Nick! Are you trying to get me fired! What are you doing here? You followed me. You followed me!”
“All right. Yeah, I did.”
“Well, you’re lucky I didn’t have a date.”
“I know that. You’re the most popular woman in New Orleans, I keep forgetting.”
“Nick, you’re in a lot of trouble. You could get me in a lot of trouble.”
“You haven’t told anyone I’ve been talking to you on the phone?”
“Hold it right there. You haven’t exactly been talking to me on the phone. When you want something, like a top secret government report, then you talk to me on the phone. When you don’t want anything, then you don’t have the decency to give me the time of day. And why do I think you’re here now? To tell me how much you like my dress?”
“It’s very pretty.”
“To tell me how much you like my new cologne?”
“Hey, it smells great.”
“To tell me how you’ve missed me?”
“I’ve missed you a lot.”
“What do you want, Nick? You always want something. And it’s not even me. You don’t want to kiss me or sleep with me or anything. You just want some favor that’s going to cost me my job.”
“It’s real easy. It’s so easy. It’ll take you two minutes. I know you can do it.”
“What is it? Steal Mr. Utey’s billfold? Sneak an M-16 out of the armory?”
“Run some numbers for me. You can do it. You’re tied into the muni
cipal numbers, I know you are.”
“I knew it. Boy, if you aren’t the predictable one. Nick, I just can’t—”
“Do you think I’d do this if it weren’t important?”
“It’s always important. It’s always just one more little thing. Why don’t you just go to Hap Fencl and explain. He likes you. Everybody likes you.”
“Ah … it just wouldn’t work out. Trust me. Sally, I need you to get into the New Orleans Municipal Motor Vehicles Registry. I need a name or a number or … well, I don’t know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh. Taxis. Didn’t I say that? Taxis. I’m looking for … well, I don’t quite know what.”
“When?”
“When?”
“When! When do you need it by?”
“I was hoping … I was hoping you’d let me take you out to dinner. Then I was hoping you’d let me drive you back downtown. Then I was hoping you’d run upstairs. And run the numbers tonight.”
“God, Nick, you deserve some sort of award for shamelessness. I mean, this sets a new record even by your standards.”
“Sally … I can’t even tell you what this is about or what I’ve been up to or who I’ve been with. But—please, trust me. This is so important.”
“Oh, Christ, Nick. Do you have a quarter?”
“A quarter?”
“A quarter.”
“Yes.”
“Give it here, then.”
“Sure. What—”
“I do have a date. I’ll go break it.”
“Oh, um—hey, with who?”
“Norm Fesper.”
“That guy? He’s a defense lawyer, for Christ’s sake. Oh, come on, you can do better than that!”
“I just did,” she said, walking away to make the call.
They kept her locked in a room in a Quonset hut. The room smelled of rust and old paint, but it was warm and dry. She had a television. They brought her food three times a day, bland, nutritious institutional stuff. They brought her magazines, and someone changed the linen every third day. Between eleven and twelve and then again between three and four, they took her for long walks across the empty, rolling fields. She could see mountains in the distance.
She had two guards. Both were dour Latino men who avoided direct eye contact and treated her with what might be called gentle firmness. She was a practical woman: she understood that hating them was pointless.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Are we in Virginia or Maryland? I know it’s somewhere in the East.”
They would not answer. But she knew it was the East, because it was turning cold. She had forgotten the cold, living all those years in the desert. But now the cold insinuated itself into her life, crawling down the black wool sweater they’d given her to wear over a jumpsuit, or into the bed when she slept. There was frost on the window when she awoke, and the days were hard and crisp, the sky aching blue.
Finally, she was brought before a man. There was no mercy in his eyes; he looked like a deputy sheriff she’d once known who’d shot three men over his career. Here at last, she understood, was someone worthy of her anger.
“Where am I? Why are you doing this to me?”
“We’re not doing this to you, Ms. Fenn. Your friend Bob Lee Swagger is doing this.”
“That’s bullshit. This is bullshit. It’s all bullshit. Bob Lee wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”
“I’m not here to argue with you about that. Bob Lee Swagger is a traitor and a murderer. We have to apprehend him. He is a danger to his country.”
“More bullshit. Bob Lee Swagger would never do anything to hurt his country. He fought and bled for it for three long tours in Vietnam. He was wounded terribly for his country. He was in a hospital for over a year for his country. He loves his country.”
The man waited patiently for her to finish.
“He became an assassin and a spy, bent on destruction. He must be stopped. We’ll use you to stop him. It’s our duty to this country.”
“I don’t know who you are, or why you think you can do this to me, but when I hear the words ‘duty’ and ‘this country’ in your mouth, I want to puke. I think you’re just a mob of gangsters and what you’re trying to save isn’t the country but your own asses.”
“You’re here to help us stop him. That’s all we care about at this point. I’m telling you this on good faith, because I don’t want you to hate me. I want you to be willing to cooperate with me and with your country.”
“You’re not my country.”
“I am your country,” he said. “I’m the part of your country that’s willing to stand up for what must be done, for what is necessary.”
“Mister, if you think you can get the best of Bob Lee Swagger, then you’re just another fool who’ll end up in the ground.”
It was sheer bravado, of course, and even as she said it, she wished it were true and prayed that it were true and knew that it couldn’t be. There were so many of them: this horrible leader, the little creep Payne, with his tattoos and beady, scary eyes, and all the robotlike Latinos, and some white trash, all with guns, all with attitudes. It was a mob, a manhunt, a posse. Who was Bob Lee Swagger to stand up to all this anger? He was just a man, she knew, and she knew what happened to men.
They were going to take him from her.
“How did you—”
“I still have some friends in this place, mister. They told me some Eastern cookie-boy was asking questions.” Then he lapsed into barren silence.
They drove for what seemed hours. Bob pushed the white pickup far into the mountains. They drove ruthlessly up dirt roads, slithered through puddles and blew through fog banks, and crawled along the edges of cliffs. Now and then they passed a run-down old trailer or some dilapidated cabin. Once a shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom and Dobbler had a sense of vista: he looked, and saw a roiling green wilderness of mountain, forest, and ravine. He shivered. A terrible place.
Dobbler at last said, “You—you killed a lot of men a few days ago.”
“Well, they were fixing to do the same to me.”
“I know all about you. I’ve been studying you for months.”
“I remember you,” Bob suddenly said, “from that scene in Maryland. You just looked at me, mister. I could tell what a specimen you thought I was. You thought I was some kind of special wild bear or something.”
“You are an amazing man. You’ve been pursued by one of the most ruthlessly efficient intelligence organizations in the world, comprised mainly of ex-CIA people and ex-military. You’ve destroyed them. They may kill you yet, but effectively, you’ve already won. And they know it, too. You’ve beaten them.”
Bob spat out the window.
“Mister,” he said, “it’s not over till I put your Colonel Shreck in a goddamned body bag and his pal Payne, too. And get my girl back. And clear my name. Now why the hell are you here?”
“Two reasons, really. Because they have to be stopped. And because you’re the only one who can stop them.”
“You been cashing their checks for a mighty long time. A little late to come up on the right side of the game.”
Dobbler held out his briefcase.
“What I’ve got in here is a tape that shows what they do. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was all spy plots, greater good calculations, trying to work to save the country. And I guess I was into denial. Do you know what that is?”
“I know more than you think.”
“Yes, you do. Of course you do. And yes, you would know denial. Anyway, I—I looked at the tape. That was the end of the denial.”
“What’s on the tape?”
The doctor paused.
“Auschwitz in the jungle.”
At 10:12 she said the dinner part was over.
“You’re really trying, I’ll give you that. And it was a very nice dinner. You’re a very decent guy. I always knew that. But you want your numbers, don’t you? You’ll make me pay for a couple of hours wi
th you. I’ve got to do you the favor, right.”
“Ah—have I been pushing it? I mean, did I bring it up?”
“Well, we got through your year of law school and my broken engagement to Jack Fellows and why I quit the Kappa house at Ole Miss the same week I broke up with Jack, and how long it’s been since you’ve been out with a girl—we got through all that just fine. But about six minutes ago—I think it was my crush on Sam Hawks, the high school fullback?”
“Yeah—”
“That’s when the meter was up and you had paid me all the attention you were going to pay me. Now it’s AB Nick, All Business Nick, that’s what the women call you. All those years with a crippled wife and you never even looked at any of us. Men like you don’t grow on trees, I’ll tell you that. Now let’s go and get your numbers, all right, AB Nick?”
“Sure.”
He paid the check and they drove down to the Federal Building.
“Now, what is it I’m looking for?”
“Okay. I want you to run municipal taxi drivers’ licenses two ways. First, by numbers. I’m looking for numbers with a sequence of R, O, one, one, one, space, D, O, something like that …”
“Wow, that’s not much.”
“Okay, and then I want names. From the licenses. I want all the names that start with either ROM or DO and all the names that start DO and end ROM. And variations on ROM DO or DOROM?”
“Nick?”
“What?”
“Nick, what on earth—?”
“I think a guy trying to reach me with something left me a clue. I first thought it was the name of an organization But now I see that’s all wrong. He was trying to tell me how he hid what he hid for me. And the only place he could have stashed it was in the cab that brought him to his death. So he either memorized the driver’s name from the hack license over the right half of the windshield on the visor, or the license plate number as the cab drove away. See, he had to have a way to ID the cab. So I—”
“Okay. Okay. I’ll try. I can’t promise anything.”
She leaned over abruptly and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“What was that for?” he said.