Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

“And then…”

“And then we reel him in. Slowly. Ever so slowly, trusting our instincts and our reading of Swagger’s character. We reel him in and destroy him. It’s like hunting a predator with bait. The bait is the research…or it’s his illusion that he can get out of this and somehow clear himself.”

Shreck nodded.

“It is clever,” he conceded.

Dobbler looked at Shreck and realized that for the first time, he wasn’t frightened of him.

For almost a week there were so many times they were close that it made them almost half-crazy. They spent the days on the phone in the Syracuse loft, and after the close of business hours in the last of the western states, they’d come out and go for a walk, get something to eat, just stretch and decompress. They made an odd couple: the tall, thin middle-aged man who had a way of holding himself in; the thicker, friendlier younger man, hair blond and thatchy, eyes brown and warm, whose gentle bulk hid considerable strength. They almost never talked as they walked and ate. They seemed comfortable in the silence.

Then one night, Bob asked about the chair.

“What’s it do to a person? The chair.”

At first Nick thought he was asking about the electric chair, and thought somehow in his FBI career Nick had seen an execution or two. But then he realized Bob meant to touch on something he’d said at Colonel O’Brien’s. Chair. Wheelchair.

“Ah. It sucks. I think I hated it more than she did. Because it was my damn failure, my damn guilt. Sometimes at night, I’d lie there listening to her breathe. You could see the damn thing in the moonlight. It was like it was laughing at you.”

“Suppose you were in it? Suppose your own daddy had put you there, and then blown the top of his head off in grief. What would that do to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Nick.

“Well, dammit, think about it. Give me an answer. I have to know why this bird did what he did.”

“Hell, bitterness, I suppose. It could cripple you so bad you’d hate the world. That didn’t happen to her, of course; she was too special and decent. But to someone else? I suppose it could easily lead you to guns, to feel the power in them that your body was deprived of. The gun could complete a paraplegic. It could make him very, very dangerous. But there are so many killers in this world who aren’t crippled. What’s so special about one that is?”

Bob just looked at him, rather sadly.

“You still don’t get it, do you, Pork?”

“Get what?”

“Come on, we’d best be heading back. More phone calls tomorrow.”

But as the time passed, the chance of the great breakthrough seemed to recede. All the calls had been made, sometimes two and three times. In ever widening circles, they’d tried to match death certificates against the seven names, patiently hunting through counties and then states. Somehow, however, the connection seemed to evaporate as they drew near to it.

“Suppose we’ll just have to drive out and find each of these damn guys and eyeball ’em and go from there,” Bob said. He was looking at the current issue of The Shotgun News , which he’d just picked up on a newsstand, as he did every other week, irritating Nick no end. It was such a dirty little rag, full of close print and murky black and white pictures of surplus guns. “The rag,” Bob called it with a snort of joyful contempt. It didn’t even have stories – just pages and pages of gun deals.

“You know, I’m really beginning to wonder if pursuing Annex B might not be a more reasonable course at this point. Working with Sally Ellion, there still might be a way to get into the Bureau’s computer bank. She’s very smart. She likes me. I think – ”

“You just want to nail that nice young gal, Pork, why don’t you admit it?”

“No, she’s a nice girl, I just – ”

The phone rang.

“Agent Memphis.”

“Mr. Memphis. I’m Susan Jeremiah, in the Clark County, North Carolina, registrar’s office?”

“Oh, yes, right, I remember. I talked to you some days ago. About the seven names – ”

“That’s right.”

“And you couldn’t help?”

“No sir. But I got to thinking on it. One of those names on that list was a James Thomas Albright. And there was no James Thomas Albright on my list of deaths for the years 1935 through 1945.”

“No. That’s what you told me – ”

“But I got to thinking there was an Albright. A Robert Parrish Albright, who died when he was two in 1938, right here in Clark County.”

“I see,” said Nick.

“The names being so similar. I just got curious and couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I went and checked our names registration. You know, with a valid birth certificate, you can petition the court to change your name legally.”

“Of course.”

“And I was stunned to discover that in June of 1963, a Robert Parrish Albright of this county petitioned the court to change his name to James Thomas Albright. The request was granted, and nobody had ever bothered to check the changed name against the death certificates. No one knew that the real Robert Parrish Albright had died in 1938.”

Nick swallowed. He felt as if he’d just looked behind a veil someone had very carefully put in place years back. For him it was one of those queer, powerful moments when an investigation, out of so many loose threads and blind paths and false leads, suddenly connected into something. A small, powerful jolt blasted through him.

“Thank you, Mrs. Jeremiah. Thank you so much.” And then he turned to Bob, trying to seem laconic.

“I found him,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” said Bob, yawning. “James T. Albright of North Carolina. Hey, I found him too.” He held up The Shotgun News . “The dumb bastard wrote a book!”

The suspense was murderous: all those phone calls from all over the United States. It shouldn’t have amazed Dobbler that there were so many of them but it did.

“Hello, my name is Walter Murbach of Sherman Oaks, California. I am very interested in the book about the Tenth Black King. My Visa card number is…”

There were dozens like that, and in a week or two the dozens permutated into hundreds. Over 350 calls were received, all of them earnest, none of them, according to vocal signature, Bob or Nick Memphis.

“I don’t think it’s working,” said Shreck.

“It will work,” said Dobbler. “I know Bob. Bob has been my project for close to a year. I know him. This is the only way.”

Shreck grunted, displeased.

And so they waited. And so another day passed and another, and Dobbler was at home in his apartment, paging through back issues of The American Rifleman , when the phone call came.

“Dobbler.”

“Dr. Dobbler, it’s the phone watch operations officer. We think we’ve got a positive ID on a phone call we received approximately seven minutes ago. The computer analysis makes it an almost perfect match to Memphis.”

“What name did he leave?”

“Ah…he left the name Special Agent Nicholas Memphis, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Yes, this is Special Agent Nicholas Memphis, Federal Bureau of Investigation, calling for Mr. Albright. We have reason to seek an interview with Lon Scott, who was the son of Art Scott, and wonder if Mr. Albright has any information pertaining to his whereabouts. The number is four-four-two, three-one-two, three-oh-eight-oh. I should add that refusal to cooperate could be actionable under federal statute .

Nick’s voice spun itself out of the tape recorder.

“Congratulations,” said Shreck. “Now give me some sense of how we play it.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Dobbler said, secretly very pleased. “Now, um, as to operating principles. There’s only one, and I can’t press it too forcefully. At no point until the ultimate moment must we seem aggressive. Bob is abnormally attuned to aggression; he lives in Condition Yellow, never completely at rest, always scanning the horizon for clues. His radar never goes down. And when he senses threat, it sets his bells off; nothing must be forced. No one must stare. Nothing must be elongated. No hints of trap must be given. We must operate totally without self-consciousness. Now. Who’s going to call him?”