Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

“More bullshit. Bob Lee Swagger would never do anything to hurt his country. He fought and bled for it for three long tours in Vietnam. He was wounded terribly for his country. He was in a hospital for over a year for his country. He loves his country.”

The man waited patiently for her to finish.

“He became an assassin and a spy, bent on destruction. He must be stopped. We’ll use you to stop him. It’s our duty to this country.”

“I don’t know who you are, or why you think you can do this to me, but when I hear the words ‘duty’ and ‘this country’ in your mouth, I want to puke. I think you’re just a mob of gangsters and what you’re trying to save isn’t the country but your own asses.”

“You’re here to help us stop him. That’s all we care about at this point. I’m telling you this on good faith, because I don’t want you to hate me. I want you to be willing to cooperate with me and with your country.”

“You’re not my country.”

“I am your country,” he said. “I’m the part of your country that’s willing to stand up for what must be done, for what is necessary.”

“Mister, if you think you can get the best of Bob Lee Swagger, then you’re just another fool who’ll end up in the ground.”

It was sheer bravado, of course, and even as she said it, she wished it were true and prayed that it were true and knew that it couldn’t be. There were so many of them: this horrible leader, the little creep Payne, with his tattoos and beady, scary eyes, and all the robotlike Latinos, and some white trash, all with guns, all with attitudes. It was a mob, a manhunt, a posse. Who was Bob Lee Swagger to stand up to all this anger? He was just a man, she knew, and she knew what happened to men.

They were going to take him from her.

“How did you – ”

“I still have some friends in this place, mister. They told me some Eastern cookie-boy was asking questions.” Then he lapsed into barren silence.

They drove for what seemed hours. Bob pushed the white pickup far into the mountains. They drove ruthlessly up dirt roads, slithered through puddles and blew through fog banks, and crawled along the edges of cliffs. Now and then they passed a run-down old trailer or some dilapidated cabin. Once a shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom and Dobbler had a sense of vista: he looked, and saw a roiling green wilderness of mountain, forest, and ravine. He shivered. A terrible place.

Dobbler at last said, “You – you killed a lot of men a few days ago.”

“Well, they were fixing to do the same to me.”

“I know all about you. I’ve been studying you for months.”

“I remember you,” Bob suddenly said, “from that scene in Maryland. You just looked at me, mister. I could tell what a specimen you thought I was. You thought I was some kind of special wild bear or something.”

“You are an amazing man. You’ve been pursued by one of the most ruthlessly efficient intelligence organizations in the world, comprised mainly of ex-CIA people and ex-military. You’ve destroyed them. They may kill you yet, but effectively, you’ve already won. And they know it, too. You’ve beaten them.”

Bob spat out the window.

“Mister,” he said, “it’s not over till I put your Colonel Shreck in a goddamned body bag and his pal Payne, too. And get my girl back. And clear my name. Now why the hell are you here?”

“Two reasons, really. Because they have to be stopped. And because you’re the only one who can stop them.”

“You been cashing their checks for a mighty long time. A little late to come up on the right side of the game.”

Dobbler held out his briefcase.

“What I’ve got in here is a tape that shows what they do. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was all spy plots, greater good calculations, trying to work to save the country. And I guess I was into denial. Do you know what that is?”

“I know more than you think.”

“Yes, you do. Of course you do. And yes, you would know denial. Anyway, I – I looked at the tape. That was the end of the denial.”

“What’s on the tape?”

The doctor paused.

“Auschwitz in the jungle.”

At 10:12 she said the dinner part was over.

“You’re really trying, I’ll give you that. And it was a very nice dinner. You’re a very decent guy. I always knew that. But you want your numbers, don’t you? You’ll make me pay for a couple of hours with you. I’ve got to do you the favor, right.”

“Ah – have I been pushing it? I mean, did I bring it up?”

“Well, we got through your year of law school and my broken engagement to Jack Fellows and why I quit the Kappa house at Ole Miss the same week I broke up with Jack, and how long it’s been since you’ve been out with a girl – we got through all that just fine. But about six minutes ago – I think it was my crush on Sam Hawks, the high school fullback?”

“Yeah – ”

“That’s when the meter was up and you had paid me all the attention you were going to pay me. Now it’s AB Nick, All Business Nick, that’s what the women call you. All those years with a crippled wife and you never even looked at any of us. Men like you don’t grow on trees, I’ll tell you that. Now let’s go and get your numbers, all right, AB Nick?”

“Sure.”

He paid the check and they drove down to the Federal Building.

“Now, what is it I’m looking for?”

“Okay. I want you to run municipal taxi drivers’ licenses two ways. First, by numbers. I’m looking for numbers with a sequence of R, O, one, one, one, space, D, O, something like that…”

“Wow, that’s not much.”

“Okay, and then I want names. From the licenses. I want all the names that start with either ROM or DO and all the names that start DO and end ROM. And variations on ROMDO or DOROM?”

“Nick?”

“What?”

“Nick, what on earth -?”

“I think a guy trying to reach me with something left me a clue. I first thought it was the name of an organization. But now I see that’s all wrong. He was trying to tell me how he hid what he hid for me. And the only place he could have stashed it was in the cab that brought him to his death. So he either memorized the driver’s name from the hack license over the right half of the windshield on the visor, or the license plate number as the cab drove away. See, he had to have a way to ID the cab. So I – ”

“Okay. Okay. I’ll try. I can’t promise anything.”

She leaned over abruptly and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“What was that for?” he said.

“For being a pain in the ass,” she said. Then she got out and went into the building.

Nick waited and waited. Twice, a cop car prowled along the street and flashed a beam onto him, but his bland white face and coat and tie spoke the Esperanto of class to the cops, and they let him be. The streets were otherwise deserted. He knew up there in the office the skeleton crew was on – the FBI never sleeps, all that stuff – and he could visualize her hunched at her terminal, the low buzz of the office at quarter-staff, the sense of restfulness and ease that comes on the graveyard shift. He’d worked it himself his first year in the office and was aware how lulling it could be.

At last, she emerged but he could tell by the tentativeness in her body language that her luck hadn’t been good.

“No home runs?” he said when she got in.

“Nick, I tried and tried. There’s not much to go on.”

“Yeah. Well, you’re right. Did you get anything?”

“Well, first off, the license number idea doesn’t pan out at all. It seems that cab plates are all numerical – there aren’t any letters in them. Don’t ask me why. So there aren’t any license numbers beginning with an R .”