Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“Can you think of another one, Mr. Gold? Any breakthroughs?”

“Not a thing,” said Gold, from nine feet straight down.

“Anyone else? Chandler, you have anything?”

“I think we’ve got it covered,” she said.

“Okay,” said Nick. “So now we are going to run these attributes against the locations of appearances of high-level officials over the next three weeks, as recorded on the highly classified Secret Service master schedule. We begin with the Cabinet and the Executive. We assume any Cabinet or Executive officer to be the high-value target that would incite a plot. But we will move on to talk-show hosts, movie directors, star athletes, best-selling authors — whatever — anyone whose prominence might incite elimination with grievous consequences, not merely to morale but, really, to everything. We’ll come up with—”

“It occurs to me,” said Mr. Gold suddenly, “shouldn’t time be a consideration?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we first became aware of this possibility upon acquisition of Juba’s south Syrian location, courtesy of Mrs. McDowell, where, after our raid, the intelligence indicated he was preparing a shot in America with an ultra-long-range rifle. That was fifty-four days ago. Since he was in preparation for the shot for some time before then, it means that their plans were suppositioned on something that had to be on the schedule and immovable for at least fifty-four days, and almost certainly longer. So does it not make sense to limit the inquiries by focusing on those few dates that were in place early enough for them to be planned against?”

“Excellent,” said Nick.

“Got it,” said Neill. He sent an email to his staff of programmers and analysts in the bay who were the actual mechanics of the cyberoperation.

“I hope that cuts down on the possibilities,” said Mr. Gold.

“Absolutely,” said Neill. “The name of the game is winnowing. Winnow, winnow, winnow. When we are down to what cannot be winnowed, we ought to have something.”

The time passed— tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . In the big computer bay, people did what they had to do, lights blinked, strange whirring noises were raised by hard-drive fairies beating their wings furiously, a giant cleared his throat, printers yawned and printed in vacuum-cleaner-like hum, and the inquiry proceeded.

“Our program will examine all the potential sites for the shot attributes, as observed from the national satellite recon database. They’ll bring the matches to us — that is, satellite recon images of potential shooting sites where the target will be accessible that fit the attributes. That’s when sniper genius Swagger puts his brain to work, and let’s hope he’s still not cuckoo from the kick in the head Brother Juba laid on him, or the fall out of the tree.”

“No problem, Bill,” said Swagger to Jeff.

Nick laughed.

“The program can only do so much,” Neill continued. “That’s where human intelligence comes into play. The computers are as literal as a German schoolmaster. They don’t do ambivalence. But when we look at the results, maybe we’ll see ways in which something the computer is not impressed with might nevertheless be in play.”

A young woman came over from Machine City.

“You’d be surprised at how much stuff we’re getting,” she said, “but here is the initial output.”

She put a stack of heavy printout paper in front of them.

Nick looked. “Wow,” he said. “Well over a hundred.”

“The field is too large,” said Neill. “We’ve got to find a way to trim it down. The more attributes, the fewer the possibilities.”

“We’ll start with these, though,” Nick said. “Meanwhile, somebody smart thinks up some new attributes. I see long-set appearances by the big guy nine times, the secretary of state five, the secretary of transportation — why would anyone target the secretary of transportation? Swagger, who is he?”

“No idea,” said Swagger.

“A she ,” said Chandler. “And extremely unlikely.”

Nick resumed: “The secretary of the treasury four times, and on and on—”

“It’s pretty obvious we should go straight to President Tr—” started Bob.

“Stop right there,” said Nick. “We’ve moved on to target possibilities, but I don’t want to hear any names. Names carry connotations — history, backstory, political biases — all of which we must put out of our process. Thus, the gentleman you were about to call by name shall henceforth be known by his Secret Service code name, which is Mogul. To us, he is not a man, he is a cipher standing for an office only incidentally occupied by a human being. We are protecting the office, that is all. Is that understood?”

“Since you brought it up,” said Bob, “it seems like I ought to ask something everybody’s been thinking.”

“Been waiting for this,” said Nick.

“If you read the papers, or breathe, you know in some quarters Mogul is not popular. What if in all our digging and probing and chasing, we come upon some evidence of Americ—”

“Again, stop,” said Nick. “I don’t want to hear that. It is groundless speculation, and in this part of the forest, groundless speculation is poison gas. That is why we are proceeding on this one totally as a criminal investigation, not as some kind of coup. That is why I have tried to keep the Agency out of it and stay as low-key as possible with the Secret Service. That is why I have not made overtures to the White House. We need clarity, not a drunken-monkey orgy. If — and I say ‘if’—you come across any such thing, it is only to be discussed with me, not among yourselves. I will make a determination whether to take it to the Director. But if it gets out — if even the possibility gets out — that, using foreign assets, someone, somewhere, with influence and connex here in D.C. has set up the elimination of Mogul, you know as well as I do that a drunken-monkey orgy is definitely in the cards. Not good for anybody except the drunken monkeys. So, barring hard evidence of that scenario, noses down, eyes locked in, small picture, not big. Understood?”

The lack of comment and response meant yes.

“Okay, handing these out, look hard and see what you’re getting. Sorry, Mr. Gold, can’t show ’em to you.”

This was the real work of the day. Swagger ran his eyes over the photos, which were hazy, blurry sky-down views of unknowable zones, each with a circle centered on the executive’s appearance location, the circle being 3,694 yards in diameter, putting anyone on the circle the required 1,847 yards from the center — that is, the target. That meant the shooter could be hiding anywhere on the circle.

He tracked directions and angles without regard to identified targets. The best shot clearly would have been on the secretary of transportation, where Juba could have perched atop what looked like an oil storage tank in Illinois and gotten a bullet across the Mississippi into Busch Stadium, where she was slated to throw the first pitch at a Cardinals game. But it just made no sense.

The Mogul sites were less promising, but not without a whisper of possibility. Of course, Mogul was so improvisational in his day-to-day, the long-term aspects seemed problematic. He might take off for golf in Florida that morning. He could do anything he wanted. He was the president!

The best shot would have been at an appearance in Baltimore, where he was more or less slated to appear at a luncheon at The Center Club — prominent, big-money businessmen — in the USF&G Building. He might be accessible from a mile-plus out from the Exelon Building across Baltimore Harbor, but that would involve shooting through glass, which hadn’t been in the specs. Could there be another shooter who could fire at a raking angle from closer and shatter the glass, and in that frozen moment, Juba could take his long shot on the target? Well, theoretically, but … so many moving parts.