Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Would you care for a drink, Mr. Swagger?”

“A soda. Nothing else.”

“Oh, I see.”

She poured him the soda.

“Well, Sergeant Swagger. What do you think?”

“He was a wonderful artist,” Bob said. “Can’t ask for more, can you?”

“No, you can’t. I made a mistake just then, didn’t I?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I called you sergeant. You never told me your rank.”

“No, ma’am.”

“I still know a fool or two in State. After you called me, I called a man. Just before you arrived, he called back. You were a hero. You were a great warrior. You were everything that my son could never understand.”

“I did my job, somehow.”

“No, you did more than your job. I heard about it. You stopped a battalion. One man. They say it may never have been done in history, what you did. Amazing.”

“There was another Marine there. Everybody forgets that. I couldn’t have done it without him. It was his fight as much as mine.”

“Still, it was your aggressiveness, your bravery, your willingness to kill, to take on the mantel of the killer for your country. Is it difficult to live with?”

“I killed a boy that day with a knife. Now and then I think of that with sorrow.”

“I’m so sorry. Your heroism aside, nothing good came of that war, did it?”

“My heroism included, nothing good came of that war.”

“So tell me; why did my son die? You of all men might know.”

“I’m no expert in these matters. It ain’t my department. But it looks to me like he was picked up by a pro. Someone who knew his weaknesses, had studied him, who knew of his troubles with his father and played on them. He’s in the drawings as a heroic rower. I can feel Trig’s love for him. He may be this Fitzpatrick. Trig was different , you said. When he came back?”

“Yes. Excited, committed, energetic. Troubled.”

“He had to finish that painting?”

“Yes. Is there a message in the painting?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand it either.”

“But you think he was innocent of murder? That would be so important to me.”

“Innocent of first-degree murder, yes, I do. The death of that man may have been unintended. If so, it would have been second-degree murder, or some form of manslaughter. I won’t lie to you. He may be guilty of that.”

“I appreciate the honesty. Trig will have to face his own consequences. But at least someone believes he wasn’t a murderer and an idiot.”

“I don’t know what was really going on yet. I can’t figure what it was about, why it happened, what the point was. It seemed to have no point, not then, not now, and what’s happening to me would then have no point. Maybe I’m completely wrong about all this and am just off on a wild goose chase, because I’m under a lot of pressure. But tell me … are you aware that the last few pages in the sketchbook are missing? The American pages?”

“No. I had no idea.”

“Do you have any idea where they might be?”

“No.”

“Is it possible they’re here?”

“You’re free to look. But if they were here, I think I would have found them.”

“Possibly. Did he have a place, a favorite spot around here?”

“He loved to bird-watch at a spot in Harford County. Out near Havre de Grace, overlooking the Susquehanna. I could show you on a map. For some reason that was a spot especially alive with birds, even the occasional Baltimore oriole.”

“Could you show me on the map?”

“Yes. Do you think the pages are there?”

“I think I’d better look, that’s all I know.”

Bob drove through the failing light across Baltimore County, then north up 1-95 until he passed into Harford County and turned off on a road that led him to Havre de Grace, a little town on the great river that eventually formed the Chesapeake Bay.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, but there was always a chance. If Trig ripped those sketches out, he probably wanted to destroy them. But there was just a shred of the other possibility: that he learned something that scared him, that he saw something he didn’t understand, that he had begun to see through Robert Fitzpatrick. He was frightened, he didn’t know what to do. He came here to paint; because of some passionate psychological, stress-induced oddness or other, he had to finish the painting of a bird. He did, then he decided to remove the late sketches and hide them. He could have hid them anywhere, sure — but his mind worked a certain way, it was organized, pure, concise, it dealt frontally with problems and came up with frontal solutions. So: hide the sketches. Hide them in a place away from the house, for surely investigators will come to the house. Hide them where I will never forget and where someone tracking me sympathetically could find them. Yes, my “spot.” My place. Where I go to relax, to chill, to cool down, to watch the birds gliding in and out across the flat, silent water. It made a species of sense: he could have driven to this upcoming spot, wrapped the sketches in plastic or screwed them into a jar, hid them somehow, buried them, planted them under a rock, in a cave.

Trig, after all, had traveled the wilderness on his birding quests. He’d been to South America, to Africa, all across the remote parts of the United States, its deserts, its mountains. So he knew field craft; he was adroit in the out-of-doors, not some helpless idiot. His mother even said so: he was competent , he got things done, he handled them.

So what am I looking for?

A mark, a possible triangulation of marks, something. Bob tried to think it through, and reminded himself that such a sign, if it had been cut into the bark of a tree, say, would have been distorted horizontally in twenty-odd years’ growth. It would be wide, not high, as trees grow from the top.

He drove for a time along the river’s edge. It was a huge flat pan of water here, though back beyond the town the land rose to form bluffs and he could see huge bridges spanning them. A train crossed one, an orange bullet headed toward New York. Beyond that was a superhighway.

At last he came to the site Trig’s mother had designated on the map, and he knew immediately he would have no luck. He saw not geese and ducks but golden arches, and where a glade by the river had once been, uniquely attractive to birds the region over, now a McDonald’s stood. A clown waved at him from behind the bright bands of glass that marked the restaurant. He was hungry, he parked, walked around a few minutes, and realized it was hopeless. That site was forever gone, and whatever secrets it may or may not have concealed, they had been plowed under in the process of making the world safe for beef.

He went in, had a couple of burgers and an order of fries and a Coke, then went back to his car to begin the long drive to his motel room near the airport, during which time he hoped to settle the puzzlement of his next move.

It was here that he noticed the same black Pathfinder that had preceded him up 1-95. But it peeled off, to be replaced by a Chevy Nova, teal and rusty, and then, three exits down, when it disappeared, by a FedEx truck.

He was being followed, full-press, by a damned good team.

Bonson financed the operation out of a black fund he and three other senior executives had access to, because he didn’t want it going through regular departmental vetting procedures, not until he knew where it was leading and what it might uncover. He operated this way frequently; it was always better to begin low-profile and let the thing develop slowly, undistored by the pressures of expectation.

He picked his team with great care too, drawing on a tempo manpower pool of extremely experienced people who were kept on retainer for just such ad hoc, high-deniability missions. He ended up with three ex-FBI agents, two former state policemen, a former Baltimore policewoman and a surprisingly good surveillance expert cashiered by the Internal Revenue Service.