For those involved, however, the trials and interviews and think pieces et al were really signifiers of nothing. It was just the assholes in the world catching up to what the people on the point of the spear had already done in their names. All that media crap wasn’t much for real endings. But there were real endings, possibly too many to choose from.
One came after the first trial and halfway through the second, when in all the ruckus, Nick Memphis found Special Agent Ron Fields sitting in the Nyackett, Massachusetts, courthouse cafeteria, waiting to testify. He had not been able to catch the fellow alone since the day it all went down.
“Hi ya,” he said, slipping in across from the big guy.
“Hi, Nick,” Fields said. “You got my note. Thanks for the commendation. It looks like I will get the sniper program,” Fields said.
“I hope so,” said Nick. “You deserve it.”
“Ah, Nick,” said Fields with his sloppy grin, “I’m just a dumbbell gunfighter and gofer. I’m best suited for Quantico and teaching SWAT. That Starling, she’s the bright one. She’ll be a star.”
“I bet you’re right on that one,” Nick said. “I wrote her up too.”
“Great.”
“But I’m glad you mentioned her. I wanted to ask you something.”
“Sure, Nick. But don’t expect subtlety. I’m the grind-it-up type.”
“You know what they’re saying?”
“Hmm,” said Fields. “Well, I’ve heard some stuff.”
“As I understand the story, it goes something like this. There’s this young special agent who’s pissed at the hosing her boss is getting in the press. And guess what, the fiancé of this young agent happens to work for a certain outfit located in Langley, V-A. He’s in photo intelligence. Anyhow, when this agent’s boss is in trouble and everyone’s calling him a crook, she and boyfriend come to the rescue. Boyfriend uses agency tech to dummy up a photo; this is, of course, after both put their heads together and figure out what a certain great newspaper knows nothing about. But first, they snitch a document out of an unguarded file, retype it on their own processor and replace it. Then they pass a reporter a document typed on the same word processor, and for a while, it looks as if the reporter has got a real scoop on his hands. Well, I’m telling the story all wrong, out of sequence, but you can figure it out, I’ll bet. The famous newspaper goes to press with its picture and gets slaughtered. Just gets massacred. Pretty damn funny, if you ask me. And the campaign the newspaper was running curls up and dies, and old Nick goes back to work, same as it ever was, and we even end up putting a bad guy away and who knows what might have happened if the guy in charge didn’t have this naive faith in some outlier named Bob Lee Swagger. Boy, would we be in a different world, I’ll tell you.”
“I’ve heard that story, yeah,” said Fields. “As I said, she’s a smart one. And that reputation should help her in her career. People look at her and say, don’t mess with Starling. It’s a ticket up.”
“It is. And try as I might, I can’t see that a crime has been committed. I mean other than misuse of government resources, but that’s not my bailiwick. If someone chooses to play a prank on a newspaper, what crime has been committed?”
“I can’t think of one either, Nick.”
“So, I’m going to let that drop. That’s my decision. But I look at Fields and I think, I’ll run it by him, just get his take on it; he’s a salty old dog.”
“The salty old dog says, sometimes it’s best to let things drop.”
Nick smiled.
“Then it’s dropped. She’ll be a star. You get Sniper SWAT at Quantico. Maybe I get assistant director.”
“If there’s any justice—”
“And the important thing is the bad guys go down or away. Let’s not forget that.”
“Never forget that. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”
“Cool,” said Nick, rising. “Okay, that’s a big help. I’ll let you concentrate on your testimony now. I’ve got to get back to DC and—Oh,” he said, “one other thing.”
“Sure, Nick.”
“How do you suppose she got it down?”
Fields smiled but his eyes showed bafflement.
“What’re you—”
“You know, my picture. The fake photo used info from a real picture. It was hanging on my glory wall. Sally and I in Hawaii on vacation, about four years ago. They needed a real photo so their computers could transfer and manipulate the information. That’s why it seemed familiar.”
“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that,” said Fields. “I mean, I guess she just wandered into your office one day and slipped it off the wall.”
“I suppose,” said Nick. “But she’s only five-two. She can’t reach any higher than six feet, much less manipulate something. That photo was in the top row, close to seven feet off the ground. And my office has a glass wall. So she’d have to do it in plain sight of the office, and she’d have to move a chair over to get up to it, and she’d have to have another photo to hang in its place, and all that would take time and anyone would notice it.”
“I guess she did it after hours.”
“But she’s only an SA. Special agents aren’t allowed in after hours unless they’re with an assistant special agent in charge; of course an ASAIC can come in anytime.”
“Huh,” said Fields. “Interesting. So you’re saying—”
“I’m not saying anything. The facts are saying that if someone took down that pic and replaced it with something else, it was done after hours, meaning by an ASAIC or higher, six-two or taller. Know anybody like that? Oh, and he’d have to be familiar with that wall.”
“Maybe she—”
“Maybe. But I did some checking. It’s interesting, yeah, her fiancé’s a CIA guy and might have had access to that lab. But did you know there’s a guy on Taskforce Sniper who partnered up early with a guy named Jerry Lally? Five years, a few gunfights, that sort of thing. And of course Jerry took a leave of absence, went back to school, got a master’s in chem and a PhD in physics and came back to work science for us. He’s now head of our photo interp. And let’s not forget that although CIA has the best photo lab in Washington, we have the second-best photo lab in Washington. Really, not one floor and a hundred feet from our office. And whoever did this little thing, he really knew our building forward and back, much better, I’m guessing, than a new special agent. No, this guy’d be an old salty dog.”
“Pretty interesting,” said Fields.
“And see, here’s the funny thing. Everybody thinks this guy is a big, lovable, loyal lunkhead, but if you look at his tests, his IQ maxes out, as do all his other tests. See, everybody thinks he’s a jovial door kicker, but maybe he’s the smartest of them all, smarter than his own boss, because he figures getting known as an egghead isn’t going to get him Sniper at Quantico.”
“Nick, you have some imagination. You ought to write a book.”
“Nah,” said Nick. “Nobody’d believe it. As I say, it’s dropped now.”
Then a bailiff came and called Fields as next to testify, and he rose, and Nick reached out to shake his hand and said, “You are the best, big guy, the very best,” and Fields smiled and was off.
* * *
Here’s another possible ending: a notice that appeared on page A-2 of a recent issue of the Times in the Corrections Box.
On October 29 of last year, a photograph appeared on page one of this newspaper purporting to show a federal agent in the company of executives from a firearms company attempting to land a federal contract with the agent’s employer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Times has since learned that the photo was a fraud and its publication was in violation of the newspaper’s own code of professional ethics. The Times regrets the error.
Still another ending could have been the marriage of Bill Fedders to Jessica Delph, who was younger than his youngest child. Bill had quite a run on the strength of his multiple testimonies against Tom Constable and emerged as some kind of med
ia hero. He was also smart enough to make phone calls to a half dozen or so representatives and senators at his earliest convenience and warn them ahead of the curve that Constable was going down hard and that they ought to begin this second to distance themselves from the sordid spectacle. All were grateful, all did favors in return, and Bill prospered beyond belief. He finally decided that, for some reason or other, it was time to retire the first wife and be seen about town with the trophy more than once a month. It just shows that in Washington, you can’t keep a bad man down. Perhaps God will punish him by giving him a few more children.
But maybe the best ending was the reinterment of the marine sniper Gny. Sgt. Carl Hitchcock (Ret.) in the consecrated ground of the USMC Cemetery at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Unlike his first interment, it didn’t take place in a heavy rain and it wasn’t sparsely attended. In fact, among the two-thousand-odd attendees, almost the entire shooting community turned out, from writers like Ayoob and Bane and Huntington and Taffin to editors like Brennan and Venola and Hutchcroft and Keefe; to the sniper researchers Peter Senich and Maj. John L. Plaster; to shooters like Tubb and Leatham and Enos and Wigger; to dozens of aging grunts who made it back from ’Nam because of Carl and the few men like him; to some of those men themselves, such as Chuck McKenzie and the other great marine sniper who never sought fame or recognition, Chuck Mawhinney, likewise the Army sniper Bert Waldron, even the widows of posthumous Medal of Honor winners the Delta snipers Randy Shugart and Gary Gordan; to gun rights authors and advocates like Cates and Gottlieb and Kopel and LaPierre; to SWAT sharpshooters from all over the nation; to the FBI team of Task Force Sniper, who in the end labored so hard and risked so much to bring this moment to life; to Marine officers and NCOs from the commandant on down; and finally to ordinary people who happened to be lovers of courage. And because reality is often trite and doesn’t acknowledge that thing the intellectuals call “the pathetic fallacy,” it followed that the sun was bright, the leaves green, the wind fragrant, and not a dry eye remained, no matter how battered and grizzled the warrior, especially when the ceremony closed down and that last, mournful note of taps hung in the air. It was sad, it was sad, it was so sad, but at the same time it was, for all of them, a happy time.
There was one other difference between this ceremony and the first one.
Swagger was not there.
And where was he?
It is known that after a week of depositions and debriefings in Washington, he took a train to Chicago and presented Detective Sergeant Dennis Washington’s widow with her husband’s firearm. It was all he could do after missing the funeral. He and Susanna and the three girls had a good time together and it was kind of all right but not nearly as good as it would have been if the big guy was there. They all promised to keep in touch.
Then, all presumed, he retired to his place in Idaho. But no one knows for sure, because he stopped answering his phones.
After all, he is the sniper. You’re not supposed to know where he is.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To begin with, two confessions of literary license: There is no such thing, yet, as iSniper911. I’m anticipating developments by a few years, as all the components exist and have been proven in the field, but no one has figured out quite how to pack them into one instrument, at least as I write now. Perhaps as you read that next step will have been taken.
Second, I am aware that the FBI’s marksmen’s rifles are built by H-S Precision; I chose to attribute them to Remington because it saved me the effort of explaining to readers who and what H-S was and because Big Green, as Remington is known, has provided the world with such weapons for 25 years, through its brilliantly engineered 700 bolt action.
On to thanks: Gary Goldberg, of course, was my majordomo throughout the writing of the book. If I had to know how a Garmin GPS worked or where the possessions of the intestate are taken in Cook County, Gary was the go-to guy. Through Gary, I reached the following: Amy Jo Lyons, Special Agent in Charge of the Baltimore office of the FBI; Jennifer Haggerty of the Cook County Public Administrator’s Office; John Stephens, for technical information on photo forgeries; Dr. John Matthews, founder of SureFire LLC, the great flashlight manufacturers, for information on modern suppressors; and Lew Merletti, former Director of the U.S. Secret Service, for fast, accurate feedback on equipment and tactics. I’m grateful to all and of course all errors of fact and judgment are mine and mine alone.
My readers’ circle provided helpful ideas and suggestions: Jay Carr, the former great film critic of the Boston Globe; Lenne Miller, my solid good friend since 1966; Bill Smart, late of the Washington Post, now of Montana, for info on Cowboy Action; John Bainbridge for skillful proofreading; Roger Troup, a great gun guy; and in L.A., my good friend Jeff Weber.
Kathy Lally, now of the Washington Post and the editor who invented me at the Baltimore Sun, introduced me to her cousin, the Irish actor Mick Lally, for a long discussion of the Irish accent in Dublin. Hmm, I think some drinking was done.
Weyman Swagger, now in ill health, for unflagging enthusiasm; and also, thanks for the use of the name, guy.
My wife, the journalist Jean Marbella, who rolls her eyes when the books on arcane subjects begin to pile up in the bedroom and announce the arrival of a new Swagger adventure, but hangs in through it all. Hey, at least they weren’t swords this time!
Otto Penzler provided me with le mot juste at le moment juste.
Michael Bane, for his enthusiasm and support via his great blog.
The professional researcher Dan Starer who set me up with Special Agent Royden R. Rice of the Chicago office of the FBI.
In the professional realm, my agent Esther Newberg, my publisher David Rosenthal, and my editor Colin Fox stood foursquare behind me all the way through this one. That makes it so much
easier.
And of course the great Marty Robbins, for providing the Ur-text to Chapter 55.
And for the record: I love Turner Classic Movies!
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
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3
4
5
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54
55
56
Acknowledgments
Stephen Hunter, I, Sniper
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