Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

What is wrong with this picture, he asked himself.

He studied it for a second.

No, nothing. The man is unaware. The man is lost. The man is unprepared. The man is defenseless. The man is the ultimate soft target.

He nodded.

“Okay,” he whispered.

One of the men opened the door and he walked in.

Bob looked up to see them as their lights flashed on him.

“Howdy,” he said.

“Lights,” said Bonson.

One of the men walked away, found an electrical junction and the place leaped into light, which showed the rawness of industrial space, a gravel floor, the air filled with dust and agricultural vapors.

“Hello, Swagger,” said Bonson. “My, my, what’s that?”

“It’s the last sketches from Trig Carter’s book. Real damn interesting,” said Bob, loudly.

“How’d you find it?”

“What?”

What was wrong with his ears?

“I said, ‘How did you find it?’”

“When I thought about his last painting, I figured it, pretty close. The reason the painting was so different was his clue: his way of saying to those who came after him, ‘Look this over.’ But no one ever came. Not until me.”

“Nice work,” said Bonson. “What’s in it?”

“What?”

What was wrong with his ears?

“I said, ‘ What’s in it?’ ”

“Oh. Just what you’d expect,” said Bob, still a bit loud. “People, places, things he ran into as he began to prepare his symbolic explosion of the math building. A couple of nice drawings of Donny.”

“Trig Carter was a traitor,” said Bonson.

“Yeah?” said Bob mildly. “Do tell.”

“Give it over here,” said Bonson.

“You don’t want to see the drawings, Bonson? They’re pretty damned interesting.”

“We’ll look at them. That’s enough.”

“Oh, it gits better. There’s a nice drawing of this Fitzpatrick. Damn, that boy could draw. It’s Pashin; everybody will be able to tell. That’s quite a find, eh? That’s proof , cold, solid dead-on proof the peace movement was infiltrated by elements of Soviet intelligence.”

“So what?” said Bonson. “That’s all gone and forgotten. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, no?” said Bob. “See, there’s someone else in the drawing. Poor Trig must have grown extremely suspicious, so one day, late, right after the big May Day mess, he followed Fitzpatrick. He watched him meet somebody. He did. He watched them deep in conversation. And he recorded it.”

Bob held it up, a folded piece of paper, the lines that were Pashin brilliantly clear.

Bob unfolded the rest of the drawing.

“See, Bonson, here’s the funny part,” said Bob, loudly. “There’s someone else here. It’s you.”

There was a moment of silence. Bonson’s eyes narrowed tightly, and then he relaxed, turned to his team and smiled. He almost had to laugh.

“Who are you, Bonson?” Swagger asked, more quietly now. “Really, I’d like to know. I had some ideas. I just couldn’t make no sense of them. But just tell me. Who are you? What are you? Are you a traitor? Are you a professional Soviet agent masquerading as an American? Are you some kind of cynic playing the sides against each other? Are you in it for the money? Who are you, Bonson?”

“Kill him?” asked one of the men on the team, holding up a suppressed Beretta.

“No,” said Bonson. “No, not yet. I want to see how far he’s gotten.”

“Finally it makes sense,” Bob said. “The great CIA mole. The big one they’ve been hunting all these years. Who makes a better mole than the head mole hunter? Pretty goddamned smart. But what’s the deal? Why did no one ever suspect you?”

He could sense that Bonson wanted to tell him. He had probably never told anyone, had repressed his reality so deep and imposed such discipline on himself that it was almost not real to him, except when it needed to be. But now at last, he had a chance to explain.

“The reason I was never suspected,” he said finally, “was because they recruited me. I never went to them. They offered me a job when I left the Navy, but I said no. I went to law school, I spent three years on Wall Street, they came after me three more times, and I always said no. Finally — God, it took some discipline — finally I said yes.”

“Why did they want you so much?”

“Because of the NIS prosecutions. That was the plan. I sent fifty-seven young men to Vietnam, Marines, naval seaman, even a couple of junior officers. I reported on dozens more that I turned up in the other services, and many of them went, too. There was never a better secret policeman anywhere, one with less mercy and more ambition. They could see how fierce I was. I was so good. I was astonishing. They wanted me so bad it almost killed them, and I played so hard to get it still amazes me. But that was our plan from the beginning.”

His face gleamed with vanity and pride. This was his great triumph, the core of his life, what made him better than other men, his work of art.

“Who are you, Bonson? Who the fuck are you?”

“The only time I ever came out on a wet operation was that one night when that idiot Pashin showed up without a driver’s license. You needed a driver’s license to buy that much ammonium nitrate, even in Virginia! That idiot. GRU begged the committee for help, and I had the best identity running, so I drove down to Leesburg and bought it. I met him in the restaurant to tell him where it was secured. He was a brilliant operator, but in little practical things like that he was stupid.”

“And you were unlucky. Trig the human camera had followed him.”

“I always worried about that. That was my one moment of vulnerability. But now, you’ve taken care of that for me.”

“Who are you?” said Bob. “You have to tell me that.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything. I can kill you and I’m forever secure.”

“In seventy-one, you were the source of deployment intelligence, weren’t you?”

“You bet I was,” said Bonson. “I invented chaos. It was the best professional penetration in history, the way I orchestrated it.”

“You killed the little girl on the bridge, right? Amy Rosenzweig, seventeen. I looked it up. I saw how much trouble it caused.”

“Oh, Swagger, goddamn, you are smart. We picked her up, shot her up and dropped her into the crowd. It was a massive dose of LSD. She never knew what hit her. My friend Bill here” — he indicated a man on his team — “did it. She freaked and went over. God, what a stink it caused; it almost wrecked the credibility of the U.S. government in that one thing. The pressure it caused.”

“Those are your boys, aren’t they, your security team? Which of ’em killed poor Peter Farris?”

The five men in suits arrayed around Bonson glowered at him. They had hard eyes, glittering with pure aggression, and taut, professional faces. Their pistols were in their hands.

“That was Nick.”

“Who got the picture of Donny and my wife?”

“That was Michael. You’d like them, Swagger. They’re all ex-NCOs in the Black Sea Marines and SPETSNAZ. They’ve been with me for a long time.”

“Who blew the building in Wisconsin?”

“That was a team job.”

“And when you were running the mission against Solaratov, you were really running it against PAMYAT. Against Pashin, who was now a nationalist, and if he wins the presidency it sets you guys back even farther. You always knew Pashin was Fitzpatrick, but you had to find a way to get that information to us without compromising your position. You turned everything inside out, so that in the end, the American government was working in the interests of the communist party. The Cold War never ended for you, right?”