Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“I wouldn’t know about that, ma’am. They were very happy, the intelligence people, that they were able to stop this fellow Pashin. He was their real target. My wife was his, but he was ours, and we got him first.”

“Well, anyway: you’ve provided a measure of serenity to my life. My son wasn’t a fool; he was overmatched by professionals, who’ve been punished. Justice isn’t much, but it helps the nights go easier.”

“Yes, ma’am. I agree.”

“Sometimes you don’t even get that, so one must be very grateful for what one does get.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now … I know you weren’t working for me, you were never my employee. But the one power I still have in the world is to satisfy myself through my checkbook. I would very much enjoy getting it out now and writing a nice big, fat one.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s not necessary.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Soon there’ll be college expenses.”

“Not for a while. We’re doing fine.”

“Oh, I hope I haven’t spoiled things by bringing up money.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, then—”

“There is one thing, though.”

“Name it.”

“The painting.”

“The painting?”

“The eagle after the fight. I don’t know a thing about art and I don’t know a thing about birds, but I’d be honored to have that. It has some meaning to me.”

“You felt your breast stir when you saw it?”

“Well, something like that.”

“Then you shall have it. Come with me, Sergeant Swagger.”

She led him forthrightly out of the room, commanded the old butler to get a “torch” — a flashlight — and led Bob in the butler’s uncertain illumination to the studio. Their breaths plumed in the frosty air. She opened the door, found a switch and the birds flashed to life, still and majestic.

“These are worth quite a lot of money to connoisseurs of the macabre, I expect,” she said. “But the eagle … it’s so atypical, and also unsigned. Would you want a certificate of authenticity? It might seem pointless now, but when your daughter goes to school, it could mean the difference between buying one year at Radcliffe or four years.”

“No, ma’am,” he said, walking to the painting. “I just want it for what it is.”

He stood before it, and felt its pain, its distraught, logy mind, its survivor’s despair.

“I wonder how he got so much into it,” she said.

He unscrewed the painting from the easel, where it had been clamped since May of 1971. It was unframed, but the canvas was tacked stoutly to a wood backing.

“I hope you’ll let me pay for the framing,” said the old woman. “That at least I can do.”

“I’ll send you the bill,” he said.

He wrapped the painting carefully in some rags, making certain not to disturb the elegant depth of the crusted pigment, and put the whole package delicately under an arm.

“All set,” he said.

“Sergeant Swagger, again, I can’t thank you enough. You’ve made my dotage appreciably better, to no real gain of your own.”

“Oh, I gained, Mrs. Carter. I gained.”

The team watched him from far off, through night-vision binoculars. It had been a long stakeout until he showed, longer still since he was in there. Where had he been all afternoon? Still, it didn’t matter. Now it was going to happen.

Swagger turned his truck around, pulled out, drove down the lane, and by the time he got back to Falls Road, the number-one van had moved into position, not behind his turn, as amateurs will do, but before it, letting him overtake them, and falling into position from behind that way, without attracting notice.

Swagger pulled around the van, scooted ahead and settled into an unhurried pace.

“Blue One, this is Blue Two,” said the observer into his microphone. “Ah, we have him picked up very nicely, no problems. I have Blue Three behind me, you want to run this by management?”

“Blue Two, management just got here.”

“You stay on him, Blue Two, but don’t rush it,” came the impatient voice any of them knew as Bonson’s. “Play in the other van if you think you’re in danger of being burned. Don’t be too aggressive. Give me an update—”

“Whoa, isn’t this interesting, Blue One. He didn’t do the beltway. He just stayed on Falls Road on the way into Baltimore.”

“Doesn’t that become Eighty-three?” asked Bonson.

“Yes, sir, it does. Goes straight downtown.”

“But his motel is out at B-W.”

“That’s the credit card data. He had something with him, some kind of package. Maybe he’s going to do something with it.”

“Got you, Blue Two, you just stay on him.”

They watched as Bob drove unconsciously into downtown Baltimore on the limited access highway that plunges into that city’s heart. He passed Television Hill with its giant antennae, and the train station, then the Sun , and finally the road drifted off its abutments to street level and became a lesser boulevard called President Street just east of downtown.

“He’s turning left,” said Blue Two. “It’s, uh, Fleet Street.”

“The map says he’s headed towards Fells Point.”

“What the hell is he doing there? Is he starring in a John Waters movie?”

“Cut the joking on the net,” said Bonson. “You stay with him. I’m coming in; be in town very shortly.”

The men knew Bonson and his radio team were in a hangar at B-W Airport, less than twenty minutes south of town this time of night, assuming there was no backup at the tunnel.

Bob turned up Fleet, and the traffic grew a bit thicker. He did not look around. He did not notice either the white or the black vans that had been on him since the country.

He passed through Fells Point, jammed with cars, kids, scum and bars, presumably the shady night town of the city, and kept on driving. Another mile or two and he turned on the diagonal down a beat-up street called Boston.

“Blue One, this is Blue Two. The traffic is thinning out. He’s headed out Boston toward the docks. I’m going to stay on Fleet, run a parallel, and let Blue Three close on him, just to be safe.”

“Read you, Two,” said the observer in the second van.

There was no way Swagger could tell, now that the van which had been closest to him sped away down another road and the unseen secondary vehicle closed the gap, that he was under surveillance. More important, he exhibited nothing in his driving that demonstrated the signature of a surveillee who’d burned his trackers: he didn’t dart in and out of traffic, he didn’t signal right, then turn left, he didn’t turn without signaling. He just drove blandly ahead, intent on his destination.

But once he passed two large apartment buildings on the right, at the harbor’s edge, he began to slow down, as if he were looking for something.

It was a kind of post-industrial zone, with ruined, deserted factories everywhere; oil-holding facilities for offloading by tankers; huge, weedy fields that served no apparent purpose at all but were nevertheless Cyclone-fenced. There was little traffic and almost no pedestrian activity; it was a blasted zone, where humans may have worked during the day, but deserted almost totally at night.

The number-two van was a good three hundred feet behind him when he turned right, down another street — it was called South Clinton Street — that seemed to veer closer to the docks. The van didn’t turn; it went straight, after its observer notified the first vehicle, which had run parallel down Boston, and itself turned right on the street Bob had turned down.

“Two, I have him,” said the observer.

“Cool. I’ll roam a bit, then take up a tail position.”