Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“I wanted to talk about Nick.”

“You mean ‘Poor Nick.’ ”

“He is getting royally screwed. They say he’s finished and he’ll take you with him. Maybe me. Now, I don’t matter, because nobody’s shot at me yet, but you and he have been shot at a lot, and it’s no good that you guys get taken down in some political influence shitstorm.”

Fields made a show of being not impressed by her passion.

“That’s the way it goes in this town. He’s fighting the power: you got lobbyists for big rich, you got three departments who want to hang a ‘case closed’ sign on it and walk away, and you got the press. Those are tough odds. And in the end, we serve at the whim of the director. So far, he’s holding fast, but yeah, the pressure is mounting. If he decides to cut us free, wave good-bye as we drift out to the horizon, that’s the town. You have to get used to it.”

“I wish I could.”

“Seriously, you’ve done good work. Let me look around and see if I can place you somewhere. Oh, I know-in Fairbanks, going after Sarah Palin’s daughter for breaking curfew. How about the pirate porno squad, you know, enforcing those ‘fines up to $250,000’ for illegal showings of Debbie Does Dallas 32?”

“No, I don’t want to leave. I want to get this guy, whoever he is, Carl Hitchcock or not. I want to put him away. Or kill him. Maybe he’s one of the names in the notebook we haven’t cleared yet. I’d like to be there when he goes down.”

“Me too. That’s why I’m sticking.”

“Here’s what I’m asking: why can’t we do something? Do we just have to take it? Can’t we find our reporter? Who’ll tell our side and make Nick look good?”

“You’re so young, Starling. You must actually believe in justice or something fantastic like that.”

“I do.”

“Let me tell you what’s going on, and why this one is so touchy. We are fighting the narrative. You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything. Now ask me, ‘What is the narrative?’ ”

“What is the narrative?”

“The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘These are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin. See, Nick’s fighting the narrative. He’s going against the story, and the story was somewhat suspiciously concocted exactly to their prejudices, just as Jayson Blair’s made-up stories and Dan Rather’s Air National Guard documents were. And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin’-stroy anybody who makes them question all that, and Nick had the temerity to do so, even if he didn’t quite realize it at the time. That’s why, led by brother Banjax and whoever is slipping him data, they have to destroy Nick. I don’t know who or what’s behind it, but I do know this: they have all the cards, and if you play in that game, they will destroy you too.”

“Why can’t we simply destroy the narrative?”

“Starling, it’s everywhere. It’s all things. It’s permanent. It’s beyond. It’s beneath. It’s above. It’s in the air, the music, the furniture, the DNA, the blood, if these assholes had blood.”

“I say, ‘Destroy the narrative.’ ”

“I say, ‘You will yourself be destroyed.’ ”

She achieved a particularly cute and fetchingly petulant look, so totally charming that he fell in love with her until he remembered he had a wife and three kids.

“So you think it’s hopeless?” she asked.

“Starling-Agent Chandler, Jean, Jean, that’s it, right? Jean, listen, you do not want to get involved with these birds. They are smart and in their way they are ruthless; they will smile at you and charm you and look you in the eye, and for something they believe is the Truth, they will cut your heart out and let you bleed out in the sun. You do not need that. You have a bright future in a job you were meant to do, and if Nick gets the ax and if I get the second ax, that’s the way the ax falls. You go on with your career and put a lot of bad guys away and don’t get hung up in this stinking town. Nick’s gone, sad to say; I guess I am too, sad to say. You do not owe us a thing; you owe that cornball lady with the blindfold and the weighing pans in her mitt. She’s the one you owe, not us. I say again, old goat to young babe, do not get involved in this. It can only destroy you.”

“If we could somehow find its weaknesses. It must have weaknesses. In its very arrogance, there have to be weaknesses. We can’t just-”

“It can only destroy you. This is Dead Man Talking: it can only destroy you.”

From the Franklin Park warehouse, they took Mannheim to the Eisenhower and headed east in light, late traffic toward downtown, which loomed ahead like some glittery city of the future, idealized by darkness and dramatic lighting. On either side of the highway, the dreary flats of west Chicago told a different story.

Then Washington left the expressway, taking the South Pulaski exit, heading toward the precinct house on the South Side. He cut diagonally across the grimmer parts of the city, stop-and-go all the way, through old neighborhoods, under the el tracks, down old Chicago boulevards, because like all cops he knew the secret, speedy rivers in the city’s traffic map. Finally he settled on South Kedzie as he found less traffic and gunned toward the South Side, which lay beyond the Adlai Stevenson Expressway ahead.

As they drove through the night streets of Chicago, Bob told Denny Washington the strange and twisted story of Ward Bonson, naval intelligence star, brokerage king, CIA executive, and Russian mole, and how he, Bob, had tracked him through the deaths of Donnie Fenn, his wife’s first husband, and Trig Carter, prince of peace. How it had finally, so many years later, become time to hunt for Donnie and Trig’s killer; how he had tracked Bonson and left him smeared on a wall in a Baltimore warehouse.

“Whoa, Jesus. Man, you are a player. I had no idea you were anything but a broken-down NCO,” said Denny. “That is all right , Jack. Swagger, sniper, operator, counterintel genius, world-class detective, outsmarting the professionals.”

“I ain’t no genius. I just had the motivation. In his way, he killed Donnie. So Donnie didn’t die in the Vietnam war, he died in some spy game that this motherfucker and his clown brothers dreamed up. I tracked down Donnie’s killer and turned him to splatters. Justice don’t come often, but now and then it shows up for a second or two, helped along by a good trigger finger.”