Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

He called Trig’s mother and got her right away.

“Have you learned anything, Sergeant Swagger?”

“Well, maybe. It turns out the fellow’s name is Robert Fitzpatrick. The rower.”

“Yes. The Irishman.”

“Yeah, him. The British think he was a Russian agent, but not the sort that would be interested in the peace movement or anything like that. They think his mission would have been nuclear warfare, missiles, that sort of thing. Is there anything in Trig’s life that would touch on that?”

“Good heavens, no. I mean, I assume the conventional peace movement wisdom on strategic warfare was simply ‘Let’s ban the bomb and everything will be peachy,’ but it wasn’t an issue, not at all. They were fighting to stop the war that was going on, the war they saw on television, the war that threatened them.”

“Your husband was in the State Department. Did he have any connection with any of this?”

“Not at all. He was in the counselor service. We served in a number of embassies abroad representing American interests but never had a thing to do with the missiles or that sort of thing. He finished up his career managing an economic research project.”

“A brother, a sister?”

“My brother is the famous Yale ornithologist; two of Jack’s are dead, one a doctor, the other a lawyer in New York; the third, a survivor, manages the family money; my sister is three times divorced and lives in New York, spending money and trying to look younger.”

“All right.”

“You’ll get it. Eventually, Sergeant Swagger, you’ll figure it out.”

“I think I’m out of my league this time, ma’am. I will keep working on it, though.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

He hung up, stumped. He opened the phone book, found a commercial shooting range called On Target over near the airport. There, he rented a stock .45 and spent an hour shooting holes in a target at twenty-five yards while his campers cooled their heels outside in the parking lot.

When he emerged, the food choices weren’t great: Popeyes Fried Chicken, a Pizza Hut, a Subway and, down the road a bit, a Hardee’s. He decided on Subway, and was walking toward it when he realized what it had to be and where he had to go next.

Bonson was flagged down after the 3 P.M. meeting by his secretary, who said there was an urgent call from Team Cowboy. He took it in his office.

“He burned us.”

“Shit.”

“He knew we were there all along.”

“Where did he go?”

“He slipped us so easily it was pathetic. Went into a Subway bathroom, never came out.”

“Subway, where, in DC or Baltimore?”

“No, the sandwich shop. On Route 175 near Fort Meade. Went in, never came out. We waited and finally checked it out. He was long gone. His rental car was still there in the parking lot, but he was long gone.”

“Shit,” said Bonson.

Where has the cowboy gone? What does he know?

Solaratov knew the one sound rule that held true the world over: to catch a professional, hire a professional.

This meant that in his time he had worked with criminals of all stripe and shape, including mujahideen skyjackers, Parisian strong-arm men, Angolese poachers and Russian mafioso. But never a seventeen-year-old boy, with dreadlocks, a baseball cap backward on his head and a pair of trousers so baggy they could contain three or four editions of his thin, wiry body. He wore a T-shirt that said: JUST DO IT.

They met in an alley in the dockside section of New Orleans. And why New Orleans? Because the origin of “Sally M’s” flight on the Post-It slip was that city.

The boy sashayed toward him with an abundance of style in his bopping walk that was astounding: he pulsed with rhythm and attitude, contrapuntal and primary, his eyes blank behind a pair of mirror-finish glasses.

“Yo, man, you got the change?”

“Yes,” said Solaratov. “You can do this?”

“Like fly, Jack,” said the boy, taking the envelope, which contained $10,000. “You come this way, my man.”

They walked down sweltering alleys, where the garbage, uncollected, stank. They passed sleeping men wrapped around bottles and now and then other crews of tough-looking youths dressed almost identically to Solaratov’s host, but with this young gangster in command, nobody assaulted them. Then they turned into a backyard and made their way into a decrepit slum dwelling, went up dark, urine-soaked stairs and reached a door. It was locked; the boy’s quick hands flew to his pockets and came out with a key. The lock was sprung; Solaratov followed him into a decrepit room, then through another door to an inner office where possibly a million dollars’ worth of computer equipment blinked and hummed.

“Yo, Jimmy,” said another boy who was watching a bank of TV monitors that commanded all approaches to the computer room. He had a shorty CAR-15 with a thirty-round mag and a suppressor.

“Yo,” responded Jimmy, and the sentry moved aside, making room for the master.

Jimmy seated himself at a keyboard.

“Okay,” he said. “M. You said M, from New Orleans, receiving phone calls from Idaho, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Cool. Now what we do, see, we got to get into the phone company’s billing computer. All that takes is a code.”

“I have no code.”

“Not a problem. Not a problem,” said Jimmy. He called up a directory, and learned the code.

“How do you know?”

“My peoples regularly be going Dumpster diving, man. We hit the Dumpsters behind the phone company three times a week. A week don’t go by we don’t git their code memos. Yeah, here it is, a simple dial-in.”

The computer produced the mechanized tones of dialing, then announced LINKED and produced what Solaratov took to be the index of its billing system, with a blinking cursor requesting an order.

“This is the FAC,” said the boy, “Southern Bell’s facilities computer. Gitting into this one is easy. No problem. Kiddie shit.”

He asked the computer to search for calls received in the greater New Orleans area from Idaho’s 208 area code, and the machine obediently rifled its files and presented a list of several hundred possibilities over the past week.

“Memphis,” said Solaratov. “Our information says the husband once had a friendship with a New Orleans-area federal agent named Memphis. My guess is ‘Sally M.’ is this agent’s wife, come up to Idaho to take care of the woman. She would call home from wherever she’s hiding. That is my thinking. She—”

“Don’t tell me too much, man. Don’t want to know too much. Just want to find you your buddy. Okay, Memphis.”

“Memphis,” said Solaratov, but by that time the boy had it up. A Nicholas C. Memphis, 2132 Terry Drive, Metarie, Louisiana, telephone 504-555-2389.

“Now we cooking,” said the boy. “I’ll just ask Mr. FACS to locate and—”

He did so; a new set of numbers popped onto the screen.

“—there’s your billing address and service records. Now let’s see.”

He looked.

“Yes, yes, yes. Your friend Mr. Memphis, he got calls from outside Boise beginning late afternoon May fourth—”

Solaratov knew this as the date of the shooting.

“Three, four calls from—”

“That number is not important. That is the ranch house number.”

“Hey, man, I done told you, I don’t want to know nothing.”

“Go on, go on.”

“Then nothing, then the last three days, one call a night from 208-555-5430.”

“Can you locate the source of that call?”

“Well, let’s see, we can git the F-1, which is the primary distribution point and that turns out to be…”