Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

It won’t be.

Because this time I’ll be waiting.

“Nicky, Nicky,” said Tommy Montoya, “oh, my boy, this is not like you.”

Montoya was Cuban, deep into spook life, who occasionally came across tips that he passed Memphis’s way as he did his jobs for various agencies of the federal government and perhaps for other customers as well. He was one of those edge-masters, a bit too clever for his own good, who’d some day be found in the Big Muddy or Lake Pontchartrain with a diesel crankcase wired to his ankle and a school of guppies living in a thoracic wound cavity. But until then, Tommy Montoya would lick the oyster dry and now he smiled, holding an opened bivalve in one fat hand, and his thick tongue darted out to nudge the gelid thing loose from its tray of shell, so that he could suck it down in one intense, sensuous moment.

Nick tried to avert his eyes. Christ, how could anyone eat one of those things? Nick was of the opinion that if it didn’t bleed when you cut it, you didn’t put it in your mouth. But the Cuban still had his uses. He knew things nobody else knew – the business, for example.

“Nicky,” he said again, “you know you go through channels. DEA’s got priority on those big eavesdropping rigs, you apply through – ”

“Come on, Tommy,” said Nick, in a hurry to get through Tommy’s coy games, because Howdy Duty was due in that afternoon and he wanted to be ready when the old Base got there, because if you got off on the wrong foot with Utey, you never got back to the right one, as Nick knew only too well.

So he was nervous and not handling this brilliantly. Besides, the bar on the riverfront was dark and seething with exotic men, and Nick, in a Stay-Prest blue poplin suit and a white shirt, felt as if he had FED stenciled between his hairline and his eyebrows in letters three inches tall and knew the long grip of his Smith 1076 was printing through the coat.

He plunged ahead, all illusion of finesse gone. “Say I needed one fast. I gotta circumvent the red tape. I got a big bust coming up but I’m afraid, say, there’s a leak, either in DEA or my own shop. I want ultrasophisticated listening technology and, just to make it worth somebody’s while, let’s say I liberated enough cash from a bad dealer to be able to pay the going tariff. So what’s my best move?”

“You ain’t wearing a wire, my friend? You’re not trying to bug a bugger or con a con man? You always seemed to me to be a pretty straight kind of guy.”

It was said of Tommy that he’d gone ashore with 2506 Brigade at the Bay of Pigs, and spent two years in Castro’s prisons – and that he had scars like star bursts on his back. He had that Latin thing – cajones , machismo, whatever – that lurid but nonneurotic willingness to do violence that radiated out of every pore of his ample body.

“No, I’m clean, man, that’s all. I just have to figure out how some guys got some powerful listening equipment into play out by the airport a couple of days ago. Where they got some stuff and got it quick, to set up a hit.”

“That guy had his insides cut to ribbons?”

“Yeah, that guy.”

“Ooooooo, Nicky, that’s a strange one. You know, you always hear things. Always. You know, the players, the teams, when something like this goes down. Except now. Nicky, my friend, would you believe, I ain’t heard nothing. It’s strictly from out of town. It’s got nothing to do with us, I’ll tell you.”

“Maybe not. Still, it’s kinda personal. Come on, Tommy. I’m just playing up the equipment angle. I have a source who swears the guy was some kind of Salvadoran spook, and I’m also hearing Agency on him, but the Agency won’t play ball with me and his records are so suspiciously clean it makes me wonder how come a guy could lead a whole life without ever getting a parking ticket.”

Tommy made a sour face, then with his tongue liberated another oyster. How such a thick man could do such an obscene thing with such quick delicacy really amazed Nick.

“I’m trying to figure how the hell the guys got in to whack the john. They heard him trying to reach me. With some gear. Now, where the hell you get stuff like that around here?”

“Well,” Tommy finally said, “what I think you want would be one of the Electrotek 5400 models. It’s a portable directional parabolic microphone, very state of the art, known for its capacity to penetrate even hardened rooms. We’re talking over a million the unit. Far as I know, only seven were built – four for DEA, two for the Agency, and one for a foreign client, very hush-hush.”

“What country?” asked Nick.

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to say, my friend. But they had themselves a nasty little war going on.”

“El Salvador! That’s it. Son of a bitch.”

He saw pattern before his eyes. It’s what he lived for: the magic connection between parts of a case.

He was thinking in great leaps: Electrotek goes to El Salvador in what year? Say, late eighties, when we’re pouring aid in. Okay, so this guy Eduardo Lanzman, he’s spook, but he learns something? Something big? Something dangerous? Scares his butt. So he thinks, who the fuck can I call? Obviously, it’s got spook business all over it, so he doesn’t want to go to his old pals in the Agency, right? Because he hasn’t shaken it out, doesn’t know quite who’s doing what to whom, who’s on which side – oh, I know how shadowy it gets – so he has to find someone outside – someone safe , someone he can trust – to tell. So he thinks of an old pal in DEA who might have some kind of perspective, except that guy is not in the life anymore. So, he then thinks of this FBI agent the DEA guy told him about. So he takes off. But now they know he’s gone. So he cools his heels somewhere, just to throw them off the track. But somehow they know he’s headed toward New Orleans, so that gets them time to get the unit up here and set up a surveillance at the airport. Where they spot him. They follow him. They’ve got the goddamn thing in play. They find the room; they penetrate it electronically, these Salvadorans. They get my name, they pop the room and turn poor Eduardo inside out.

Tommy looked at him.

“Nick, you look like you just had a religious experience. The Virgin, did she talk to you?”

“Somebody did,” Nick said. Not normally religious, he had a brief impulse to make the sign of the cross for Eduardo, who opened the door expecting to see dull old Nick but instead caught three bad hitters in the face and died the death only a Mandarin torturer could have invented…and yet who cared so much that even after the executioners had left and his guts were like dirty socks in the bed and the shock had worn off enough for the pain to be the fifth act of every opera ever written, this guy still had the machismo to crawl to the linoleum and pass on the message.

ROM DO.

ROM DO?

What did it mean? What was this clue, so tantalizing, so goddamn cute?

“I got another weird one for you. This guy, he left a message written in his own blood. ROM DO, in caps. What’s the words Rom, Do mean to you, Tommy. Anything? I spent thirteen hours in the library the other day, just going through books on crime and espionage, looking for something. I asked the big smart guys at Quantico in the Behavioral Science Department, you know, our intellectuals. They came up with nothing. Any idea?”

“Rom Do? Could be anything, man.” Then he laughed. “Funny, it reminds me of something.”

“Okay,” said Nick, “so sing. Tell me.”

“Oh, it’s crazy.”

“Crazier the better, my friend, that’s where I’m at.”

“You know I was on the island in sixty-one? Bahia de Cochinos , huh, my friend? The Bay with the Piggies?”