Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

“What are you getting?”

“It has to be Hugh. He’s old, cagey, smart. He’s been in the game a long time. He knows what he’s doing. He’s no psycho; everything is rational, objective-driven. He’s subtle, he’s witty; in a funny way, he’s honorable. We left his kids alone, he’s left my family alone. I don’t know why, but I trust him for that. Like his cousin Lon, he’s a decent man, except for the few seconds when he killed the thirty-fifth president of the United States.”

“It’s your ass, so it’s your call.”

“Then I go.”

“I’ll have people close by, chopper teams, observation–”

“No, uh-uh. If Hugh has people, they’ll see it and hit eject hard, and that means he’ll hit eject. It only works if I go in alone, unobserved, no teams, no air cover, no radio nets, no backup. If I need help, I’ll call the state cops.”

“Swagger, still crazy after all these years.”

“I’m not saying I’m not scared or that I think this is wise. I am, it’s not. I just don’t see any other way.”

“That’s what they said about Iwo Jima.”

“We won Iwo Jima. Look, here’s my plan. I’ll call Richard, tell him about the letter, have him contact Marty, and set up a date for next week. Then. . I go on vacation.”

“Do you have a time-share or something? A condo in Florida?”

“No. But I have to get away. By myself, somewhere quiet. I’ll pick it at the airport. I have a lot to think about.”

“You seem to have done a lot of thinking already.”

“Not enough. I have crap in my head that I can’t figure. There’s something called synesthesia involved, which reflects a mind glitch that sees certain letters or numbers in color. Niles was a synesthete, as they’re called.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“So was Nabokov. He saw letters in color. Niles had a connection to Nabokov through synesthesia, and I think that’s why he used it to construct his bogus ID for Hugh. It was an expression of his and Hugh’s love of Nabokov, and it represented the kind of cleverness Nabokov used. Niles saw nine as red. I’m guessing the fake name that Niles gave Hugh all those years ago reflects a color or a number, probably a variation on red or nine. I’m trying to work that angle.”

“It’s thin,” said Nick. “I mean, even knowing that it’s a color or a number, a red or a nine for some reason, what use is that without a suspect pool?”

“Oh, I’ve got a suspect pool,” said Bob. “It includes everyone currently alive on the planet Earth.”

“Good,” said Nick. “That’s encouraging.”

“Then there’s something about the Charlie Harris letter. Don’t know, but I’m getting a buzz. Everything’s perfect, as I told you, but I get this buzz. Got to figure that.”

“The Swagger buzz. Admissible in all state courts. I have complete confidence that you’ll get your man.”

“I’m sure I will too. After all, Humbert got Clare Quilty at the end.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Another manhunt story. I’ll tell you later.”

Swagger!

It clawed me from unconsciousness. I awoke, as before, in a cold sweat, enfeebled, aged, overmatched. I tried to sort it out before my heart exploded and aneurism did finish me. I had directed Richard to work with a police artist to prepare a likeness of the “Jack Brophy” who had shown, possibly killed my driver, then disappeared in Dallas, and it took until that night, but. . could it be Swagger? No. Impossible. The odds were too distant. But I’d seen long odds cash in enough times not to see it as a possibility. I grabbed the drawing from my desk and bore down on it.

I had seen him, of course – that day in 1993 at the preliminary court hearing in New Orleans. I had sat behind the prosecutor’s table in gray herringbone and red bow tie. I looked like ol’ Perfesser Flibberty-Gibberty out of a Frank Capra movie, very much the Ivy paragon of diffident and eccentric genius. That was my style then, hopelessly tweedy of appearance, of mind.

I remembered: lanky, jeans, boots, some sort of cowboy jacket. For all my efforts, I couldn’t get a face. I had impressions, not images. I saw that stretched-out body, not accustomed to sitting, unsure how to arrange those legs. Wary – the word “wary” keeps coming to mind. He seemed to be watching everything evenly, without remarking, holding his cards tight to his chest, always calm, a kind of easy grace to his actions. It was easy to project that temper into a sniper, who’d need wariness, a gift for observation, patience, and could have nothing of the showy, boastful, immodest, or psychopathic about him. The work was too dangerous for show; it demanded contradictory gifts, the precision for equipment maintenance and the patience for detailed preparation, but also the imagination to project into space an enemy’s movement and predict where he might be; and beneath it all, the stubbornness to keep the imagination from inventing demons and letting panic take hold. Many men can be brave in batches, where sacrifice and support are the group norms; being brave on your own, out in Indian country, for hours and hours – that’s a trick.

So now, at 4:19 a.m., I looked at the likeness and racked my memory. Were they the same man?

I felt like Laurence Olivier’s Crassus in Spartacus, who learns with amazement that he’s seen Spartacus fight but can’t remember the details. I stared frantically at the rendering, trying to resolve it. Finally, I faxed it back through the layers of administration between me and the facilitators of my orders and required that the artist do his best to render the same face minus the twenty-odd years. I thought that might help. I also ordered the issue expedited.

The new version came the next day, and it did the trick.

There was no doubt: Bob Lee Swagger was hunting me, and if history was any guide, I wouldn’t survive that distinction.

Now I tried to imagine the fantastical circumstances that would bring him back in quest of me. How had it happened? What were the links, the whimsies, the chance connections that put him on my trail again, twenty years later, when I thought I was out of it? I couldn’t run an investigation for the simple reason that it would soon reveal itself to him, he would then know I knew, and the game would become infinitely more complicated. The first rule of my war against him was to prevent him from knowing I knew his identity. I did resolve that when it was over and I had him dead and buried, I would solve the mystery. It was that fascinating to me.

The first step was hard thinking: what could he know? Not what did he know, but what could he know, as a maximum? That would be our parameter for action. I had to apply the tenets of the New Criticism to my interpretation of his mind, to ruthlessly obliterate wishful thinking, daydreams, sentimentality about his nobility and heroics, his capacity for Hemingway’s classic grace under pressure, and think of him purely as an enemy who needed to be destroyed. I realized that he would come upon the “dead” Hugh Meachum sooner or later. He’d track me through Hugh.

Was there much on Hugh Meachum available? No; I’d been smart. No family pix, no glory wall, that Washington vanity, behind my desk, nothing written for the record. Moreover, the Buddings Institute of Foreign Policy, the feeble cover for me and many of my colleagues in Clandestine, was long gone and had left no records. A genius might tease out some information by tracking through real estate records to determine that the funding that staffed (if barely) the suite in the National Press Building for many years originated in Agency coffers, but I didn’t think that was the sort of work Swagger was capable of.