Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

He could see into the big room, well-lit but empty. Junky Walmart furniture mostly broken down from daily use, piles of magazines from Guns & Ammo to Pussy & Juggs. In other words, the debris and squalor of men living together. Coke cans, paper plates, candy bar wrappers, like any day room in any guard post anywhere in the world. The guys were upstairs, he guessed, having a feeling of dense sleep above him, hearing the wheeze of one, the fart of another, the dream-driven toss of a third.

He slid along the wall, peeked into the kitchen and saw the cookie hadn’t arrived yet to throw the day shift breakfast on. Beyond it lay the security HQ office, he could tell, because although he did not see into that room directly, he saw the gray glow of security monitors on the wall through the doorway. A man or two would be in there; so would the arms safe and, he’d bet, in that would be the package, the whatever. Wouldn’t that be the safest spot on the ranch: in a room guarded 24/7 by armed guys with orders to shoot to kill? It made sense, if anything made sense.

He didn’t let rogue thoughts fly. He suppressed the notion that a) Tom Constable had simply destroyed the object (he wouldn’t; holding it would thrill him too much; he would think there’d always be time to destroy it; it had some kind of meaning to him), or that b) he’d lock it in a safe in his bedroom, where his various wives and now visitors stored their jewels, or c) he had it with him, wherever he was, just to keep it near and dear, or d) he put it in a safe deposit box in the biggest vault in the world. Nope, none of those: couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, no way.

Bob stepped around the corner.

“Hello,” he said.

“Huh?” said the security officer, rising from a soft chair where he’d been watching not the bank of monitors on the wall but a television showing some kind of spaceship thing.

Bob hit him in the face and eyes with the Kimber pepper and down he went, coughing spastically, and before he could reorient, Bob had him trussed in plastic cuffs pulled tight.

“You shut up, partner, or I’ll have to hurt you harder.”

The man spluttered, groaned, bucked, and Bob put a knee against the back of his neck.

“I can close you down the hard way if you don’t do what I say.”

The man went limp. But then he said, “Mister, do you have any idea what you’re fucking with? You are going to be so messed up.”

“Anyone else here? A partner, another patrolman? You alone, bub? Tell me or I’ll hit you with two or three more shots of pepper, and son, you won’t like that a bit.”

“I’m alone,” the man said. “Down here. But there are six very tough guys upstairs, so my advice to you is to run like hell and hope you get off the property before you get them pissed.”

“I didn’t come this far for the fun of it,” Bob said.

Bob looked around the room, and yeah, there was the secure steel door of what had to be an arms vault, snug behind a combination lock the size of a dinner plate, very old-style.

“You keep the rifles in there, right? But because the guys go in and out, you only keep it day-locked, right? You don’t want to fuck with the big combination six times a day, right?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“We’ll see about that.”

He raised the man to his feet and shoved him ahead.

“Key or more pepper?”

“Shit,” the guy said, and gave it up. He nodded toward the desk drawer. Bob reached in, pulled out a big key ring. He went to the arms vault and inserted a key in the day lock and pulled on the heavy door. That easily, it swung open.

Bob pushed the guard in, then followed.

“Y’all planning for the invasion?” he asked.

Serious weaponry: not the Ruger Mini-14s but a rack of M4s, all with high-tech red-dot optics, several crates of 5.56 NATO and 12 gauge, four short-barreled pump shotguns, some chemical crowd control gimcracks, a rack of gas masks. On a metal shelf in the back, he found some papers, someone’s copy of Atlas Shrugged , and a nice but well-beaten briefcase with the initials JTS, for John Terrence Strong, he guessed. He opened it, saw only a small cardboard package, four by four, white, that bore on its corners yellowed strands of old Scotch tape.

Got it, even as he realized the absurd ease with which all this had happened.

He grabbed the case, pulled the guard with him, closed the vault.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said to his captive. “If I had a brain in my head I’d snap your spine and be done with you, cowboy. But I’m a nice guy, see. So you and me, we’s walking out the door like buddies, to the motor compound in the back. Then I’m popping tires on all the other vehicles, and you and I are going for a ride. I’ll toss you out somewheres along the way, and tomorrow night you can have dinner with the wife and kids. You’ll be out of a job but not out of the rest of your life.”

“Mister, you are in so much trouble. You put that goddamn briefcase back or-”

“Let’s go, bub.”

He led the now cooperating man through the back entrance, and as he stepped through the door, someone hit him a perfect shot in the brachial plexus, the nerve group that ran from his shoulder to his neck, and his body went useless and puttylike on him. He fell, and the others were on him in seconds with their hard professional knowledge of leverage and application of force and pain. In another second, his own hands were snared in flex-cuffs. He was hauled roughly to his feet.

Whack! the man he’d taken hit him in the face, and for his troubles was shoved hard to the ground by another dark figure.

“You’ll be minding your manners now, mate,” said his persecutor.

Then he turned to Swagger, smiling. “Well, damn me eyes, look and see what the cat has brought in from the meadow.”

It was Anto Grogan.

Nick was alone in the house, as he had been for much of the week. Sally was finishing up some big case and wouldn’t be home until much later. Nick had read, watched DVDs, listened to music, and otherwise filled the time of his exile. But enough with the Lean Cuisines nuked, stirred, renuked, and stirred again. No more macaroni and cheese!

He looked out the window. Finally, they’d all gone away, the entourage of reporters who’d set up shop in the front yard to bedevil him. The weather had turned cold, it was late on a Friday night and nothing happened in Washington on a Friday night, so all the boys and girls of estate4.com had gone home early.

He should have shaved, but what the hell. He slipped on a sports coat, went into the garage, and pulled out. God, for just a few seconds the liberation was its own reward, the sense of being outside the house, away from the same four walls. He drove aimlessly through Fairfax and finally decided, since it was late and the line would be down, to head to Ray’s the Steaks in Arlington. He slid through the Northern Virginia night without much difficulty, found parking on the street, and headed into the old house that had become one of the most popular restaurants in the area.

“Is the kitchen still open?” he asked the maître d’.

“You just made it, sir.”

“I can eat in the bar if it’s easier.”

“No, we’ve got tables. This way, please.”

He followed the man through the three-quarters-full room to a corner table for two, approved of its darkness and obscurity, and took a seat. In a bit, he ordered a drink, since he sure wasn’t on duty and wasn’t carrying anything except his credit cards.

“Bourbon and water.”

“Preference, sir?”

“Sure, Knob Creek, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes sir.”

He studied the menu and ended up with what he always ordered-house salad, filet, medium rare, mashed-and since Sally wasn’t here, he allowed himself to enjoy the luxury of skipping the asparagus. He sat, meditating, enjoying the mellow power of the bourbon to confer its merciful blur on things, and tried to figure out what to do next but of course knew that whatever he decided would be preempted by the Bureau’s next move.