Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“If we can we get into their mail-order systems and determine if anyone has made a big purchase of this stuff recently. If we come up with something odd, we could check his name against the lists of competitors at various competitions and see if he’s legitimate. If he checks out, okay. If not, if it’s a sophisticated order from an unusual person — say, a city address, an address next to a mosque, something like that — then that would be worth looking into.”

“You didn’t come up with a question.”

“Sorry, too tangled up in my own thoughts. The question — two of ’em, actually: Can we get into those records from here and is it legal? And if it’s not legal, can we get away with doing it anyhow?”

“It’s legal,” said Neill. “We can put it before the FISA court for a ruling. FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed in ’78 but punched up after nine-eleven to give us some latitude in our pursuits. Juba is clearly a representative of a foreign intelligence agency, no matter who he’s working for now. The Israeli documents prove that. So you’d work with Legal — Chandler’ll set it up for you — and you’ll draw up a request. It has to be tight, limited in scope, not a fishing license.”

“I can live with that.”

“It’ll be limited in time, so you’d better have your team ready to hop in and ride hard. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. The act is designed to help you hunt for one thing and one thing alone, not as a general scouting expedition.”

“I’ve got that.”

“It’s so much easier the Mossad way,” sighed Mr. Gold. “We just do it and sleep well at night.”

“You have an advantage,” said Neill. “You’re at war. We’re playing a party game called Don’t Make Anybody Mad.”

The paperwork was expedited, the FISA ruling achieved, and at that point the Director of the Cyber Division ruled that Gershon Gold, of Mossad, was not cleared to assist in the search, being a representative of a foreign intelligence service, even though a friendly one.

Bob immediately resigned.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nick said.

“Who’s being ridiculous? He’s the best cyberguy in the world. A legend. That’s why he’s here. And now you’re telling me he can’t take an elevator down a story and sit at a monitor just like the one he has in Tel Aviv.”

“That’s what I’m telling you. It’s federal law, and, in their way, the Cyber Division is right. If anything goes wrong and it is later revealed that we illegally let an Israeli national highly educated in cyberwar into our nerve center, that could be used against us by the usual sources. Different agendas here: you are trying to catch Juba, the Cyber Division is trying to ensure the Bureau’s integrity and invulnerability to partisan or press attacks.”

“Maybe Gold is the only guy in the world who can break this thing. Would you want them partisan jerks to know that he was sitting upstairs drinking bad coffee while we were fucking up downstairs, thirty feet, as the crow flies, from his instrument of war?”

“Cyber Division is playing the odds. It’s the smart move, bureaucratically. Our smart move has to be to figure out how to get around it. Nothing personal against either man, it’s just another obstacle we have to get over.”

“Can we bring Ward Taylor in on this one?”

“Sure, but he’ll tell you the same thing. He has to. He has no choice.”

It was Gold who ended the contretemps.

“Sergeant Swagger, this battle is fought each day in every intelligence or law enforcement entity in the world. I have seen it at play in Mossad as well. We even have a nickname for it. We call it the Gray Foolishness. It can’t be defeated, it can only be outsmarted. I would counsel you to waste no energy on this, and we will work out a way to get around it. The important thing, for both of us, is not what makes sense in this building but to catch or kill Juba before he brings yet more chaos and death to the world.”

“That’s what a grown-up sounds like,” said Nick.

“So it’s on me,” said Swagger, “and I don’t even know where to start.”

So Gold gave Bob and Chandler a rough tutorial in the investigation they would have to run by themselves.

“You also must be skilled in pattern recognition, knowing that the little bit you learn here may seem meaningless, but it must not be discarded, as it might fit into some larger scheme and its importance become paramount.”

“In other words,” said Swagger, “I have to become a lot smarter than I am, and really fast.”

That afternoon, Swagger passed into a top secret computer center, and then into a special room, where he and Chandler — she did the keyboard stuff, being younger and faster — went hunting in cyberspace.

Their targets were the mail-order customer lists of EuroOptic Limited in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, Mile High Shooting Accessories in Erie, Colorado, and Sinclair International in Montezuma, Iowa, all purveyors of high-quality and high-cost equipment for the sport of long-range shooting, the first two the only FFL dealers of Accuracy International rifles in the United States.

“There are other marks,” said Chandler. “Surgeon Rifles, JP Rifles, Cadex, Sako, MHSA. Savage is in the game, so too is Ruger, at a much lower price point. How do you know he didn’t do one of those?”

“Well, I don’t,” said Swagger. “But my thinking is, AI was the first and the most famous. It’s also hard combat tested, the others not so much. It was, most importantly, the weapon system used by the British Corporal of Horse Craig Harrison in his mile-and-a-half shot in Afghanistan in 2009. Juba would know that, he would have heard of that, and, in the way his mind works, he wants to duplicate that. Thus, he’s going to put together a kit identical, or nearly identical, to Harrison’s ’09 hit. That’s part of the intellectual appeal.”

“What did Gold say?”

“He thinks it fits the personality — that is, the bastard’s methodical way of thinking and doing. He ain’t no experimenter. He will very slowly and precisely follow exactly what happened before, to get the same result, with the when/where at his choosing.”

“How about Mrs. McDowell? She’s the world Juba expert.”

“You know, I didn’t think to ask her,” said Swagger. “She was so worried that she hadn’t done well in her little undercover thing that I couldn’t get it into the conversation. Want me to call her?”

“No, let’s save her for when we’re in a real jam.”

“Makes sense.”

“Gold is enough, I guess,” said Chandler. “But one of the things we might look at is a history of sales, or specials, or something, from these outlets. The reason I say that is, maybe Juba didn’t himself place the order but had some minion of whoever is working with him do it. And his agenda might be different. Maybe one of these places had a real good buy on Steiner Optics, and the guy decided to save five hundred bucks by going Steiner instead of Schmidt and Bender.”

“Good point, Chandler. Damn, you’re smart. Ever make a mistake?”

“Only once. I married a guy who thought I actually cared about sex.”

“We fall for that one every damned time, don’t we?”

“It was nothing a divorce couldn’t solve.”

A few minutes later, out of nothing but his cogitations, it happened: a palpable thought.

“Oh, and this,” said Bob. “The rifle Juba’s using, I’m betting, was stolen from somebody here in the U.S. It was probably a high-ranking competitive shooter. Now, that guy would also want the Harrison rig duplicated for exactly the same reason. Yeah, the other stuff might work, but Juba’d know the AI rig works. And so would the theoretical original guy. He’s probably got some sniper buzz going on using the right stuff too, though he’d never admit it. So we have to look for a listing of stolen guns.”