Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“I’m out of orange toilet seats. Will pink do?”

“Wear a hat one day. Guys your age never wear hats. It can be a baseball cap, a stocking cap, I don’t care, a Sherlock Holmes cap. Wear it, we’ll note it, and you’ll get the photo by courier that afternoon, your bureau. If you’re not an idiot, you’ll figure out that the photo has to be vetted by top photo professionals, to make sure it’s legit. Can your failing newspaper afford that?”

“If I can get it before they turn the bureau into a bowling alley, yes.”

“Otherwise it goes to Drudge.”

“I hear you.”

“David, fast, fast, fast now. We can work fast. Can you dead-tree folks stay with us?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Good. Now take your tape recorders-no lookee, see?-and get out of here. Go stand in the corner while I drive away. No peeking. And welcome to the big leagues, Woodstein.”

Swagger awoke from ugly dreams with a start. The phone was ringing. Not his cell phone, the room phone. He blinked, trying to remember. Oh, yeah, Indianapolis. Near the Notre Dame campus, for its theoretical richness in wired coffeehouses. An Econo Lodge; it looked like the best room in Nowheresville, decorated in a nice shade of babyshit brown.

He stared at the ringing monster on the nightstand. This was not good. If it had been his cell, it could have been anybody, but if it was this phone, it meant someone was already on him. On the other hand, maybe it was housekeeping. He looked at his watch, saw that it was almost eleven. He’d sacked out here at 3 a.m. after a dreary bus ride.

He picked up the phone.

“Yeah.”

“Bob?”

It was Nick.

“You figured out where I am.”

“We are the FBI, you know. We do this kind of thing for a living.”

“I-”

“No, you just listen to me. In words of two syllables, what the fuck is going on? I have some big gunfight in Chicago with a dead officer, two dead gangbangers, and a missing witness thought by many to be an FBI undercover. That sounds like a Bob Lee Swagger operation. I have the Chicago cops, I have the Cook County prosecutors, I have my own Chicago field office all screaming bloody hell at me, and of course I have my own director furious at me because he warned me Swagger couldn’t be controlled and I assured him I could control Swagger and then I assured him I’d sent you home to rock on the porch. Oh, and I have the New York Times alleging on its front page that I’m dirty. Hmm, I think we could agree, it’s kind of a mess.”

“I sure wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” said Bob. “Can’t help with the papers. Never read ’em. I get my news from Fox.”

“I need you in. I can have Indiana state troopers at that motel in ten minutes if it’s an issue of security. I need you cooperating with the Chicago people, playing by all the rules. Maybe, just maybe, we can make fleeing the scene of a crime go away. And when we get all that straightened out, then maybe we can see where we are on the sniper. Oh, and I need Denny Washington’s Sig back. For his widow.”

“I will personally return it to her when this is over. Right now, I may need it, even if it’s only got four rounds left. Maybe I can put ’em where they’ll do some good.”

“Swagger, listen to me.”

“Nick, if I go to Chicago I’m stuck there for weeks. I have to move fast. These people now know I’m on to them, and they will go back over their tracks and wipe everything out and I’ll be left with nothing but suspicions. And when it all dies down, they’ll come to Idaho, and just like Joan Flanders, they’ll put a little cross on me from a long way out and put a 168er dead bang center into me.”

“Chicago thinks this was a gang hit on Denny Washington, who had busted several Latin Kings leaders on big murder ones over the past few years. He was a very good cop and he did them a lot of damage. So they targeted him and took him out. The shooters were Kings; you just happened to be in the car.”

“No way,” said Bob. “That’s how it was supposed to look, but the signature of this outfit is that it sets up its hits inside fraudulent narratives, which you guys get roped into every goddamn time. But tell me, did you see the piece? It was a submachine gun-”

“Bob, it’s a mob town from way back. That doesn’t prove a thing. Every Italian restaurant in the greater metro area probably has a Thompson hidden in the wine cellar.”

“This was no Thompson. It was a suppressed Swedish K, an agency favorite in the ’Nam. I had an SOG tour, I saw the cowboys with them all over the place. That’s a rare piece of spook hardware, probably aren’t two hundred of them in the world, put together in the late sixties by company armorers at Tan Son Nhut. You don’t get a subgun like that from the wine cellar or the local machine gun store. You have got to be wired into spookworld to pry one free, ex-spook, some kind of mercenary, some kind of spec ops professional, someone in the big game one way or the other. It’s exactly what Graywolf would have in its arms vault, and it’s just made for maximum firepower with minimum noise, exactly what’s needed for street gun- downs.”

“The report just said European machine pistol.”

“The Chicagos didn’t know what they had. I did, because I saw it up close after the shooting. Get your weapons people to look at it, and I guarantee you they will be impressed by the high quality of the workmanship, the genius of the engineering, and the absence of a serial number or any identifying marker. That baby’s as black as the hubcaps of hell.”

Nick was silent.

“Nick, I have a lead. Washington and I found something that points in a certain direction. We were headed to the station to enter it into evidence. But now that Washington is dead, I’ve broken the chain of custody, which means it can never be used as trial evidence. It can only be used by a rogue, someone unaffiliated. Let me follow it, and before I do anything stupid, I will clear with you. But if I come in now, all that is lost, Denny Washington’s death is meaningless, and what we found goes away. I can’t let that happen. I want to run the lead and lay it before you. It’s only a matter of a few hours doing some basic research. You keep my involvement secret, you let me operate the way I have to operate, and I will clear with you before I jump. Just cover for me a little while longer.”

“See, that’s the other thing. There may not be ‘a little while longer.’ This reporter today published some bogus documents all across the front page of the Times alleging that I’m on the take from some gun company to get them a contract. I may be gone at any second. Then what happens to Swagger?”

“Swagger’s been on his own before.”

“Swagger’s been lucky as hell before. That luck will turn; it’s way overdue.”

“Nick, I’m begging you. Let me hunt. I will bag you something big, I swear.”

“You’ve got six hours,” said Nick, and hung up.

It took nearly the full six hours. Bob called his broker in Boise, asked how he could obtain a copy of the final stock market report from-he checked the letter from Bonson to Ozzie, still wearing his rubber gloves-September 23, 1972.

His broker didn’t know of an Internet archive, but he himself had a brother who worked in a big New York brokerage and would place that call. In the meantime, Bob checked the phone book, discovered a nearby place with computer rentals, and called. They delivered an Apple MacBook Pro, and he got online from his room, checked e-mail, news accounts, read the Times piece on Nick- aghhhhh! -and got a call finally from his broker, who said his brother had suggested he try the Wall Street Journal , which had its pages all archived online. The broker had another client who had, he knew, a son-in-law on the international accounting desk of the Wall Street Journal, so through that client and his son-in-law, a tenuous but impressive skein of fragile connections all beholden to or fond of the person next to them in line, an e-mail with an attachment containing those pages arrived in Bob’s e-mail account a few minutes later.