Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

“Would you come in here, please?”

“Sure.”

Nick left the bull pen and headed into the little office out of which Howard was running the operation.

“Nick – ”

Howard did not ask him to sit down, not a good sign.

“Nick, just what is it you’ve been doing?”

“Ah, well, you know, mainly monitoring the reports on Bob’s movements as they’re routed here from Washington, and coordinating with the local officers and keeping contact with our surveillance teams sited in the area, and monitoring the readiness of our quick-react teams, you know, Howard, trying to stay alert and keep our readiness high and – ”

“I’ve just had a very irate call from Ben Prine in D.C. The head of Cointelpro.”

“Yes.”

“He says a request originated from this office concerning access to Bureau files on a private security firm called RamDyne over my authorization. I didn’t authorize anything . Do you know about this?”

Nick wasn’t an adept liar. A tide of phlegm rose in his throat and he was stunned at his own sudden loss of confidence and clarity of thought.

“It was only to save you time, Howard. I know you’ve got your big picture to worry about, so I just routed the request through your office with your name…uh, it’s just a kind of…”

He ran out of words.

Howard glowered at him.

“What do you think you’re doing, Nick? What game are you playing?”

Nick bumbled into a confused account of his investigation of the Eduardo Lanzman affair, the source who’d told him Lanzman was Salvadoran, his idea that a high-tech electronic eavesdropping van may have been used, his clumsy discovery of the mysterious RamDyne firm that seemed to have a line on such expensive equipment. He rambled on semicoherently about the coincidence of a Salvadoran agent maybe being killed by the Salvadoran secret police only weeks immediately before the suspiciously “accidental” murder of a Salvadoran archbishop despised by certain elements of his own regime. But he saw that he wasn’t making much progress with Howard.

“I tried all the usual channels and came up with nothing. Like, nothing. So I tried to show some initiative and…” He trailed off lamely.

“Nick,” said Howard, a deep sadness coming over his bland face, “I’m very disappointed in you. Why didn’t you come to me with all this?”

“Well, Howard, actually, um, I did and you said – ”

“Nick, we have an open-and-shut case on Bob Lee Swagger. We have means, motive and opportunity. We have some circumstantial ballistics evidence. We have witnesses, including, I might add, yourself. Nick, what on earth are you doing? Whose side are you on?”

“Howard, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about the ballistics. I’m wondering if it’s technically possible to – ”

“All right, Nick, this is how things fall apart. Junior agents running around on their own, not reporting to authority. Unauthorized leaks to the press. It’s the beginning of the end of Bureau discipline, which is the beginning of the end of the Bureau.”

“Howard, I – ”

“RamDyne, you’re right, is very connected. To our cousins in Langley, among half a dozen other secret agencies. They do a lot of things we can’t afford to do officially. Sometimes these things don’t look so good; sometimes they’re ambiguous; sometimes they do little bad things to prevent big bad things. Their secrets are very closely held. If you pick at them, or uncover something out of context, it can lead you exactly where you shouldn’t go, and cause all kinds of problems for all kinds of people. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nick, you’re not supposed to see the big picture. Other people do that. You’re supposed to do the jobs we give and do them well. Let us connect the dots. You catch the crooks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nick, it pains me to do this. I’d thought perhaps after your screwups in the past, you’d turned over a new leaf, and I might have been tempted to forego your suspension. But you haven’t. I’m removing you from this detail. You’re to fly back to New Orleans immediately and begin your suspension. Sorry, it has to be this way. Some years ago you messed up. I thought you’d worked hard and overcome that mistake. But you keep messing up, Nick. You’re a loose cannon. You’re not a team player. You want too much, you want it too fast.”

Nick realized he’d just gotten blindsided. It hit him with a force he hadn’t felt since Myra died.

“All the way through, Nick, you insist on doing things your way. If you’d bumped Swagger up to the Alpha category, if you’d taken him prisoner, if – oh, Nick, you’ve done so poorly . We’ve tried so desperately to help you. And now you pull this on us.”

“I’m sorry, Howard,” blurted Nick, stunned. “I didn’t know it was so serious. I was trying to do a thorough job and I – ”

“Nick, that’s all I have for you. I want you – ”

“Nick?”

It was Hap Fencl leaning in.

“Excuse me, Howard,” he said, “but I have a woman on the line who swears she knows where Bob Swagger is, and insists on talking to Nick.”

“For Christ’s sake, Fencl,” blurted Howard, “she’s probably just another – ”

“She says he had an arm wound. We hadn’t released that information.”

There was a long pause.

Finally, disgustedly, Howard gestured to Nick to pick up the phone.

“It’s line fourteen,” said Hap.

“Nick Memphis, FBI, can I help you?”

“Mr. Memphis,” came the voice like a bad country-western song, though somehow theatrical and a bit phony, “Mr. Memphis, Bob Lee was with me and he was my man fer a time, but he’s gone now.”

“Who is this?” Nick said.

“This ain’t nobody,” she said. “But I seen your pitcher in the magazine and if you’re the johnny what’s got to catch Bob Lee, then git yourself ready, ’cause he’s a coming.”

“When?”

“He left here today. Should be there in three days of hard driving. He’s gone a little crazy, you know. I begged him not to go.”

“How do I – ”

“Because he said his dog’s name was Mike, not Pat, like it said in the newspapers.”

Another trap to weed out loony callers.

Nick took a deep breath, made a signal to Hap to indicate it was time to get going on the trace.

“He says he’s coming home to bury his dog,” said the woman. “Gonna bury his dog, don’t care who he’s got to kill to do it.”

“I – ”

“Don’t hurt him, Mr. Memphis. He ain’t hurt nobody.”

Then she hung up.

The secure phone rang.

Shreck looked up at the men in his office.

“Get out,” he said.

After they left, he picked it up.

“Shreck.”

“Hello, Raymond,” the old man’s voice sang. “How are you today?”

“Mr. Meachum, you don’t care how I am. What do you want?”

“I wanted you to be the first to hear the good news. I’ve heard from a friend that the Justice Department has just alerted the State Department to inform the Salvadorans that it has formally decided against reopening its inquiry into the Panther Battalion atrocity. The archbishop is gone, and there’s nobody to pay any attention to it at all.”

This did cheer Shreck.

“Well, that’s something.”

“Yes, it is. Of course General de Rujijo and his colleagues and peers will be delighted. Certain people in certain agencies in this town will breathe a good deal more easily. The past will be allowed to die; we can go on from here. It’s the first day of the rest of our lives. You’re to be congratulated once again, Colonel. You made the impossible happen. Extraordinary.”