Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“Phil, help me, I’m not clear on the rules here. Is it fair for me to ask him how he found out about it? I mean it wasn’t part of any official release, so he had to hear about it from someone. Can I ask him who?”

“Probably not a good idea, Nick. The press values its right of confidentiality and feels that if it gives up sources to law enforcement inquiries, it becomes an arm of the Bureau. Nobody wants that.”

“Agent Memphis, if you must know, and I hope you’ll appreciate my candor here, it was a guy I know, one of those gray elder types; he knows everybody and everything. I’d prefer not to give you his name, but he said he heard about this from someone he knew.”

“You don’t have to give me Bill Fedders’s name, Mr. Banjax. I already know it quite well.”

“Well, there you go. Anyway, ‘someone’ forwarded through ‘my friend’ an envelope with a set of Tulsa front pages and the unidentified FBI sniper marked heavily in highlighter, with question marks. Crude, but effective. Anyhow, I called the reporter who wrote the story fifteen years ago and he knew your name, even if he didn’t release it then. I don’t think he was sworn to any confidentiality agreement, and I don’t think I’ve skirted any confidentiality issues. I got it fair and square, nothing dubious. I take it you’re not denying it.”

“Is this off the record?”

“Of course. Sorry, I should have said that earlier. I’ll let you know when we go on.”

“Well, obviously, I can’t deny it. Yeah, I took that shot and missed and all sorts of terrible things happened. And some good things: I got seven years with Myra.”

“I heard that part too. Extraordinary.”

“Anyhow, it’s not going to do the Bureau any good to get this all mixed in with the ongoing investigation. It’ll cloud matters. I’ll tell you, man to man, that I have no beef with snipers, as the implication seems to be, based on my unfortunate tour as one. My job is not to find the sniper innocent by some trick, it’s to find out who’s guilty and put him away or prove the case so totally that even if he’s dead, there can be no doubt he was the guilty party, sniper or not. But it’s more complex than it seems. We have to be diligent. We can’t be nervous about media pressures or outside political pressures. If you look at the Kennedy thing, you’ll see that Warren was rushed, made mistakes, and there was hell to pay for it. I don’t want that happening here. That’s my only concern, not my career in the Bureau, my next promotion, the book contract I’ll get when I go, how 60 Minutes will handle it. If I have to leave the Bureau because doubts are raised about me, then that’s what I’ll do. It happens in Washington all the time.”

“I haven’t published yet. I don’t know that I will.”

“What is it that you want? I mean, exactly.”

“Well, look, we’re not kids here. We’re all professionals and we’re all under great pressure from management to produce. Now, I have to come up with something. I have to publish something. I can’t go in and say, ‘Oh, I spent three weeks and I came up with nothing.’ That’s just not good. So if I have to, I suppose I could go with the Tulsa episode. It does seem like legitimate information that the public needs to have. There is a great deal of interest in this case, and you folks did such a good job and worked so fast and got there in time to prevent any other killings, but it seems to have come off the tracks since then. We thought we’d get that report in a couple of weeks. Now I hear that as of last week, you came up with a whole new area of investigation and that you’ve sent a lot more people into the field. If that’s true, maybe we could put it on the record, explain it, put it in some kind of context, and get it into the paper. Get it into the paper the way you want it, not picked up thirdhand from a variety of other sources.”

“See,” said Nick, “from a PR point of view and a career point of view, that would be the right thing to do. But the direction and thrust of our investigation has to remain confidential. In fact, details may alert some people we have to look at. They act differently when they know they’re being looked at, and it clouds the issue. We have to make preliminary inquiries confidentially to see if this is even worth pursuing. I’m not saying there are other persons of interest than Carl Hitchcock, but I have a duty to be diligent. Is that all right, Phil, what I said to him?”

“It’s your call, Nick. I won’t tell you how to operate.”

“Okay,” said Banjax. “I hear you. That’s fine. But I don’t have much wiggle room myself. I can only say, I’ll try and keep Tulsa out of the paper, but if I get in a jam, I may have to go with you. I’d have to put it in the record and come at you with hard questions.”

“I will be very happy to discuss Tulsa with you, Mr. Banjax. Here, I’ll give you my direct number, call me anytime you want. If I have some development, maybe I’ll give you a heads-up. That’s all I can say.”

Bob finally slipped out of the house Wednesday morning at

2 a.m. and Denny Washington was waiting for him.

He climbed into the car.

“Man, am I hungry,” he said. “Anyplace still open?”

“You look like a homeless guy,” Washington said. “I’d bust you for looking like that in the old days. Today I have to call you sir and ask you if you need assistance.”

“Welcome to modern times.”

“Ain’t it the fucking truth, bro? Okay, I know an all-night eatery, a cop place. You don’t mind eating with cops?”

“If they don’t mind eating with me.”

They headed to a joint called Johnny’s, outside of which a lot of blue-and-white cruisers idled. The place was bright, first from the lights, and second from the more than a few white faces among the black, unusual in this part of town. Everywhere Swagger looked, he saw the blue-and-white checkered hatbands that were the unique signature of the Chicago officer’s cap. He was in a blue-and-white universe. Washington made his way down the aisles to a booth in the rear, nodding to the other pilgrims as he led Swagger through but making no intros, and Swagger recognized the faces, all tough urban warrior mugs, under hair either short and frizzy or a little vain. Why did some cops have such elaborate hair? Anyway, he and Linebacker Washington sat in the booth, ordered coffee, eggs, bacon, toast, enough for a battalion, and waited for the food to come.

“So are you going to tell me anything, Gunny? Or is it need to know?”

“It is need to know, but you’re on the team, so you need to know,” said Swagger. “First off, guess what? Mr. and Mrs. Crusader for Peace and Freedom were broke.”

“Broke?”

“Broke, as in ‘broke.’ Broke, as in, We can’t make no payments. He’d had an inheritance-that’s what they’d been living on-but they’d been into the capital for years and now it was down to nothing. They lived big, did you know? Always a houseful of guests, always the hosts, spent a fortune on wine and food and big dinners out. You’d think he was rich; wasn’t that part of the joke, the rich protesters, them rich people who believed in the rights of the poor? But they way overspent their salaries, which weren’t great, and his book royalties and speaking fees were down. He spent six years working on a book for a big New York outfit, and in the end they turned it down and sued him to get their money back.”

“Boo fucking hoo. You’re breaking my heart.”

“Yeah,” said Bob, “and here this was the land of opportunity. So they were desperate, or so it seemed.”

“I guess being a revolutionary isn’t that high-paying a job.”

“Oh, and he had to pay a girl three hundred thousand a few years back because he fucked her after promising he’d leave Mitzi. Then he changed his mind. They didn’t want it getting out, didn’t want any publicity, so that ate up a big chunk. So much for bringing higher morality to the world.”