Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

He arrived late to the bureau, as befit a star. He actually didn’t like big story days, because he was somewhat self-conscious; he preferred to not appear when he had a big one riding above the fold. But he had to be here, and so he made the most out of his victory lap, modestly accepting the congrats that came to him, the looks of admiration, the winks and thumbs-up. Still, he had to admit, it was pretty cool, though not quite as cool as when his editor told him the document master had confirmed that both docs had come from the same printer and that page one was taking the piece. He’d been so lucky; Will Rashnapur, who covered the Justice Department, had a Bureau source and had been able to get a Xerox of the original FN proposal quickly. That was the hang-up and it could have taken weeks, but whoever it was delivered within twenty-four hours, so the freight-train momentum of the scandal was maintained.

He sat at his desk and began his ritual. First, he turned on his monitor and onlined the Post , the LA Times , the WSJ, the Tribune , and none of them had caught up, although on its Web site the Post had rushed a denial from the FBI PIO and another no comment from FN, as if gun companies ever spoke with the press. He checked Drudge and was gratified to see “Paper-FBI Agent in Snipergate took free air, steaks and a night at Carousel from gun boys.” He Googled “Sniper Nick” and got a thousand hits, the first fifty of which were simply repeats of an AP follow-up that some poor schmo had put together at 4 a.m. after the Times’s first edition broke on the Net.

Someone lurked. He looked up; it was Jenny Fiori, the TV liaison.

“Okay, hero,” she said, “take your pick. Matthews, Olbermann, or O’Reilly. More audience at O’Reilly, but he’ll just call you a commie and yell at you. More prestige at Matthews, but he won’t let you finish your sentences. Olbermann will be the most fun, unless his leg starts twitching, at which point he turns nasty. Some dweebs at CNN also want you, but that doesn’t look like much. I’d go with Matthews.”

“I like Chris. He’s okay. You can’t get me off cable and onto one of the big networks? Katie? Brian, that guy-”

“The nets don’t give you enough time and New York frowns on them. It’s usually about making the anchor look smart. You can do any of the cable from here with our hookup, or just go over to Matthews, it isn’t far.”

“Okay, sure, Matthews.”

“Great. I’ll get it rolling. Hey, what’s with the hat? Are we trying to be colorful now?”

“Uh, no, I forgot I had it on.” He shucked it.

He checked his phone messages. Oh, so fun. His agent, “Call me.” Two other agents, including a famous one. The local station, WRC, for a nooner, the girl should have gone through Jenny and could be safely ignored. Someone he knew at Esquire , someone at the Atlantic, someone at TNR . A couple of FBI-hating civilians. Someone calling him a rat.

Then he went to e-mail. Over seventy, not bad.

“Way to go,” said Anthrax, of New Orleans.

“You the man,” said Jefferson, of Florida.

“Did you discuss this with God first?” wondered a Mrs. Salatow, of Cape May.

“You red shit,” observed ex-PFC, from North Carolina.

“Why are you tearing down the FBI?” wondered Gordon. “Do you want the terrorists to win?”

“You’re doing a great job, David,” said Bill Fedders. “Call me if you need any more help.”

And on and on it went, the queue lengthening even as he tried to read through it all. Finally it was too much.

Time for lunch.

“Killer, join us?” said a colleague. “Thai, that little place on K.”

“That’ll be fun,” he said, pulling on coat and hat.

“You’re a Yankees fan? Never would have guessed.”

“Yankees, baseball, right? Where they hit that thing with a club?”

Then they saw he was being ironic and laughed, and off they went and had a fine, merry lunch.

He got back late, again okay for a star. He ran the afternoon blogs, saw that he had heated up the boys at Power Line but was a god on Huffington, and the Daily Kos seemed close to declaring him a new religion. Calls from some tag-along foreign pressies-Australian, Japanese, Dutch, the Swedes and their pals the Danes-all wanting to do phoners. Ho-hum. Another call from WRC, a call from NPR, some woman who claimed she’d met him at a party.

It was almost time for the 4 p.m. meeting, and no, nothing had-

“Oh, David, this came for you, meant to drop it off earlier,” said Judi Messing, who administered the office as its receptionist.

He took it. Big envelope, manila. He breathed hard.

Okay, maybe so.

He felt it; yes, there seemed to be a sheet of photo-thickness paper inside.

“David, the meeting. Don’t be late,” someone called, rushing past. “They’ll be singing your praises.”

“I can’t come. Something just came in.”

He saw all the reporters gathered in the conference room and the assistant bureau manager running the show, with the big man himself off to the side, hiding behind those half-lens reading glasses he’d affected for twenty-odd years. David watched through the glass, as if observing a pantomime, while each boy or girl self-promoted his or her own stories, and the great man handed out nods of acceptance or frowns of denial. There was a lot of laughing, as there always was, as the very smart people who constituted the office enjoyed each other’s company, camaraderie, shared values, sense of irony, dedication to professionalism, and, of course, ambition.

He felt above it.

I have transcended, he thought.

Now it was time. He looked around-nobody nearby; someone taking dictation; someone on the phone, too busy to attend the meet; Jack Sims, notorious curmudgeon, boycotting as he had famously for twenty years; researchers sitting at their screens still grinding away; yadda yadda, the same old. God, he loved it. It had taken most of his life to get here, and it had seemed so far away for so long, but now he was actually a member of the bureau in the biggest, fiercest town of all, for the greatest newspaper that ever lived and breathed, and he counted, he was one of them, he was part of it, he moved, he shook, he influenced. Yet for an empire it was a seedy palace: it looked, to continue with the customary metaphor, like a second-tier insurance company branch office, decorated in early-twentieth-century political posters. Some trophy front pages also hung about, but mostly it had the industrial cheeriness of the New Office Interior Design, littered with piles of crap, stacks of crap, pieces of crap, little doohickeys that reporters always got sent, for some odd reason, and a few morale-boosting quotations taped to the walls from men like Breslin, Mencken, Liebling, and Baker, the latter of which was the most helpful:

Q: Mr. Baker, what do you do when you write a column and it’s just not there, you know, you just haven’t done it right, it’s not very good, you know it’s not your best?

A: Publish it.

David always got a smile out of that truth. Anyway, now he opened the flap and slid the paper out, seeing that yes, it was a photograph, though upside down. He turned it around and his eyes drank up the details.

The first thing was the target. He thought it would have a black bull’s-eye, but it was of a configuration he didn’t understand: the predominant feature was a heavy black square about three by three inches in the upper quarter of the face. It lay across and occluded the top of a collection of circles within circles which seemed to form the nominal “target” of the thing. He looked at the printed label up top and made out “I.B.S. Official 300 Yard Bench Rest Target.” Whatever. The sheet was mounted in a frame of some sort. The bullet holes actually weren’t in the center of the circles or in the box either, but just off the box at about ten o’clock in the third ring. The cluster of shots had landed nowhere near the center, but the three men gathered about the target appeared joyous.