Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“Just don’t get caught.”

Bob slapped the backpack he carried.

“Infrared gear. I can see in the dark. No lights will show on the outside. If anyone comes into the house, I’ll go to ground. Nobody’ll see me. I can be real still. The sniper thing again. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

It was a different America. He hadn’t seen this America. He’d been in the America of the United States Marine Corps, in mud and jungle and slatternly, jerry-built outposts and tempos, under monsoon weather or baking heat, and only glimpsed this America on the TV in the squad room, if there was a squad room. But everywhere in this house the late sixties and early seventies still lived, like some sort of Camelot, some sort of holy time when we were young and green and firm and the world was filled with possibility. Mr. and Mrs. Strong were narcissists for sure, in that they had dozens of photographs of themselves and their actions on the walls, as well as souvenir front pages-pentagon bombed, thousands disrupt downtown, campus admin building occupied, cops use teargas on demos, two killed in bank robbery, and finally wanted couple freed-as well as political campaign buttons, flyers, gas masks, anything that spoke of the realities, and maybe the fun, of the Movement.

A whole section was devoted to their day of freedom; Bob ran his infrared over the framed newspaper front pages, with its famous picture of Jack and Mitzi in midleap, full of the joy of freedom, as the famous radical lawyer Milton Tigermann had just checkmated the Justice Department into dropping all charges against them because the means used by pursuing detectives over the years, from FBI to Massachusetts State Police, were so flagrantly illegal. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird,” Jack’s comment; it made the two even more famous. Swagger’s eyes ran through the coverage, including the bitter sidebar interview with a Mrs. Samuel Bronkowsky, mother of four, identified as the widow of one of the two bank guards slain by robbers-robbers thought to be Jack and Mitzi but uncaught and made more unindictable when the bank’s surveillance film was stolen from the evidence closet of the Nyackett Police. And thus Mrs. Bronkowsky left history, her cause unmourned, her husband forgotten, her economic situation unsettled.

History turned on the next wall to great men, big men, giant men. These were the portraits Bob didn’t recognize, but they were helpfully identified as if in a hall of fame, people with names like Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Che and Fidel of course, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Gavrilo Princip, and of course Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and some other big commie boys. Ho was there, and so were Chou and Mao, and someone called La Pasionaria.

The infrared gave the history a special green hue, as brought to life in the AN/PVS-7 goggles. He was a frogman swimming the bottom of the murky bay of radical America, 1969 to 1975.

Bill and Mitzi were everywhere in those days. Beautiful radical children, with wild piles and tendrils of hair and eyes wide as pie plates, elves, stars, charismatics, leprechauns of mischief. A hundred shots showed them with megaphone or loudspeaker, leading or addressing the masses. They were always sexy, in raffish war surplus cast-offs, with Indian bands about their heads, gaudy scarves, tight jeans that showed off their leanness, combat boots, sharp cheekbones, and everywhere they appeared they fronted rows and rows of hand-painted signs, like medieval kings leading an army of banners: stop the war now, stop the bombing, no more napalm, get out now, bring the boys home, legalize pot, lsd now and forever, and he realized that while they were painting, he’d been crawling through the bush, hoping not to get his belly blown open.

He checked for signs of search and came up with ambiguous possibilities. Yes, the cabinet locks in Jack’s office appeared uniformly scarred. But that could have been Jack’s own clumsiness with keys as easily as a professional burglar’s pick. There had indeed been an open window that allowed him to squeeze into the basement, and that lock too bore signs of picking-or of a careless window washer banging it with a squeegee.

He himself picked each cabinet, and inside, besides Jack’s secret stash of porno (he was a Penthouse guy), a pound of very nice hash, some prescription meds, there seemed to be nothing suspicious, certainly no obvious sign of something having been removed. But what would that be? A blank space on a shelf? An opening in a row of books? There wasn’t much.

He went over the office top to bottom, opening each cabinet, rifling through each book, looking in each drawer, searching for computer code words (and finding none). He’d wait to turn the machine on in the light, so that its glow wouldn’t radiate through the windows into the night. He thumped the walls for evidence of a safe hiding behind the bookshelves, but no safe seemed to present itself.

Nothing, nothing at least on a first pass.

He tried all the obvious hiding places, feeling under the drawers for tape strands that might indicate something had been secretly affixed in an out-of-the-way site, opening the battery casings of all the portable tape recorders, the cameras, the iPods that lay around, finally, laboriously-it took hours-opening each CD jacket, running from jazz to classics to heavy metal to songs of the Spanish Civil War, and in each finding nothing but a CD. He went to the bathroom, took the lid off the toilet for a waterproof bag-yep, but full of grass, not diamonds or other contraband-opened all the folded towels and washcloths in the closet. Went through the laundry hampers, the pile of folded clothes, the kitchen with its abundance of spices and herbs and exotic condiments from overseas; Mitzi was evidently quite the chef. Again, nothing, just life, lived by aging baby-boomer haute bourgeoisie with fading memories of the glory of the struggle, so long ago, when they were young and bold. It was a kind of counterbiography: for each demonstration they’d led, he’d been on a deep jungle mission; for each cop they’d confronted, he’d dropped a man with an AK-47; for each time they’d fled gas, he’d fled napalm or heavy bomber ordnance or some such. Same coin, different sides, and now the years have passed and what’s gone around has come around, and who’s the only one who cares why you assholes got your brains blown out but me, the guy you thought was a war criminal, a psycho kid killer. Ain’t it a strange fucking world, though?

He went upstairs and spent the rest of the night in the bedroom, the slow, methodical search, unfolding each item of clothing, paging through each volume-the house was stacked, crammed, jammed with books-emptying the wastebaskets and uncrumpling each wad of paper. Nothing, just the detritus of an involved professional life-notes on meetings, calendars, appointment books, nothing at all out of the ordinary. One of them spoke French and one spoke Spanish; there were many, many books in either language, and he went through them too, page by page, looking for notes either written in the margins (frequent and meaningless) or tucked between the pages. Nothing.

He worked through the morning, going to his low crawl during the daylight hours so that nobody walking by might catch a glimpse of shadowy movement and call the police.

He slept for two hours in the spare bedroom, then got up with enough light remaining, turned on Jack’s computer terminal, and didn’t get much beyond the desktop full of icons, because a code was required. He’d found no code; obviously Jack had committed it to memory. He tried number sequences based on obvious dates-Jack and Mitzi’s birthdays, the dates of big demonstrations, the date they almost got blown up in the house in New York, the date of the Pentagon bombing, the date they were freed from prosecution, that sort of thing. Nothing.