Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“If I’m not mistaken, that’s the world-famous apple with a bite taken out of it. The corporate pictogram for the world’s largest computer outfit.”

Bob squinted. Yep, there it was: a bitten apple, a little leaf up top.

“That’s the package the iPhone comes in. I would know because I’ve just picked up my X and spent an hour or so programming it.”

Swagger carried an iPhone 3, or something Cro-Magnon like that, and wouldn’t have noted such a thing in a million years.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m with you. But where is this going?”

“Well, it fits, doesn’t it? A tech and engineering guy like this, he’d have the latest variation of iPhone, just as, upstairs, he’s got the latest variation of desktop system — he’s always upgrading everything. He’s probably got an X on order, it just hasn’t come in yet.”

“So?”

“We got into his desktop system and found nothing much of interest, other than that after a certain date, when he told his few friends he was going hunting, it hadn’t been accessed.”

“Okay.”

“So he’s got the 8. Now they’ve got the 8. They’d have to take it, because he’d no doubt downloaded his ballistic app into it, I’m guessing FirstShot. Anyone smart enough to use the rifle at highest capacity would know that that’s the best. Anyone taking the rifle would take the iPhone and use it to set up his really long shots. Juba would have to have it.”

Bob nodded. Seemed right so far.

“Here’s the issue. The later iPhones — the 8 and the X — are really a bitch to crack if you don’t have the code. Those fuckers at Apple are smart, you can bet on it. One of the things they’re selling is security. When one comes up in a case — say, recovered in a drug raid — we can’t even crack it. It has to go off to one of three or four high-tech computer labs, where the engineers can diddle with it for weeks before they can finally get in. And I’m guessing next that Waters was the kind of guy who shut down every night before he went to bed. So if they plugged him and they need to get in, how do they do it?”

“You don’t think they’d take him?”

“No, because if he’s alive, all sorts of complexities are added to what is already too complex. Security, support, interrogation, the fact that they would assume someone like this tough-ass, high-IQ Texas oil engineer wasn’t going to give up his secrets easily, which generates another major headache and more drama for them. No, they’d probably cap him and trust they could crack it by their own devices.”

“Could they?”

“As I said, there’s a handful of labs that could do the work. But they’re not going to a lab.”

“Of course not.”

“So they’d go into crime world. And, as it turns out, there are about three guys in that world capable of cracking a late-gen iPhone. They don’t hang out in small towns like Toad Lick, Mississippi. One’s in Boston; one’s in Seattle, obviously; and one’s in Dallas. We know all of ’em, have for years. Sometimes they help us so that we will leave them alone. Putting them in the slammer is of no use at all. Plus, we get tips from them on stuff they hear.”

“You’re guessing it was the Dallas guy.”

“I’m guessing he was paid a pretty penny for his work. So we bust him, work him over hard. We leverage him. He can tell us who paid him, what he did, what was on there, whatever. Again, I’d do it real low-profile, bust him on another charge, never move him out of Dallas, maybe just pick him up privately and take him to a parking garage, someplace anonymous, no drama, nothing to cause any ripples in the water. Maybe he leads us to whoever’s funding this thing, and we can track them to the source.”

“It’s two things,” said Bob. “It’s our best lead and it’s our only lead. Let’s go to Nick.”

The range

Much was known now. He’d finally settled on 91.5 grains of Hodgdon H1000, once-fired Hornady brass, Federal 215M big-rifle Magnum primers, overall length 3.73 inches, a Wheddle bullet die-sharpened Sierra 250-grain MatchKing hollow-point boattail bullet, as loaded by an L.E. Wilson bullet seater, with a .367 neck bushing. Fired, it delivered a muzzle velocity 2,755, plus or minus, and of course each individual round he made was tested in a Hornady concentricity gauge for circular perfection. The result was a brilliant chord of power and accuracy, the MatchKing bullets being the most accurate in his ambitious testing program. He also rolled them — the bullets themselves — before seating them, for consistency, on the Hornady gauge, making certain that they were perfect.

They produced a thousand pounds of energy at twenty-one hundred yards, enough to splatter any living target, human or animal, save perhaps the great thick-skinned and heavy-boned beasts of Africa. They could pulverize the thoracic cavity of a man at that range. It would be a wound there’d be no walking away from.

Now he sat at the bench, constructed by Menendez’s clever carpenters seven feet off the ground in a solid beech tree. Before him, though edged by pines that led to mountains — lofty, green, snow-covered or not — was more than a mile of heavy grass. It was yellowish, full enough to wave in the breeze. Three hundred yards out, water — too big to be a pond, too small to be a lake — gleamed in the sun. It spread for a couple of hundred yards, a kind of swampy stew under the tufts of grass, before yielding to more solid land. Finally, 1,847 yards away and sixty-seven feet lower, at the edge of the meadow, was his target. The range was perfect, the height difference too, exactly to his specifications and verified many times over by range finder.

He peeked through his spotting scope, a Swarovski 60×. In the circle of that magnification, he saw what he had to see. The image at 60× was one hundred and thirty feet wide, more than enough to make out the scene. A post had been driven deep into the earth. It had a medieval look to it, something the great Saladin would have erected as a site for execution by fire of cowards and traitors. Moored to the post, though hanging limply unconscious from it, was a man.

He stirred, shook, then twitched hard, as if gripped in the talons of a nightmare. Juba had no interest in what those nightmares might be. What he saw was only a target, something to be hit solidly with one 1,847-yard shot. He knew that the Mexicans sat a few feet to the left, their Land Rover not far from the scene of the action, which promised to amuse them greatly. They had brought a cooler of Diet Cokes and Tecates, and some lawn furniture.

The phone on the bench buzzed. Juba picked it up.

“My friend,” said Jorge, in Arabic, “we think he will awaken soon. You won’t have to wait long, although these drugs are tricky.”

“It’s fine,” said Juba. “I have no rush. Besides, I have some calculations yet to make.”

“Excellent. We have bets going on how many shots it will take you to hit him. I bet two.”

“Probably too few,” said Juba. “The program never works perfectly the first time. We must learn its refinements.”

“Ah, well, it’s only for a bottle of tequila.”

Juba put the phone down, pulled on surgical rubber gloves, and picked up the iPhone 8. Always with the gloves so that not only would his fingerprints be protected, so would any oily excretions, any flakes of dead skin, any strands of hair that might adhere, all of which would reveal that the DNA was not that of Brian Waters. Of course, on the great day itself, the thing would be carefully scrubbed with acetone and seeded with some souvenirs of the late Mr. Waters — saliva, mucus, oil from his fingers, hair — which were the key part of the deception.