Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Why is this of interest to you? Who cares?”

“I care. Maybe your father wasn’t the poor guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, like everybody says. Maybe he was more important than people think. That’s a possibility I’m looking at. And maybe the folks who pulled the strings are still around. And maybe I’m interested in looking into this and maybe I’m the only man who cares about your dad—”

“My mother was a saint, by the way. She taught, tutored, worked like hell to give me the chances I had. She died my freshman year at Harvard.”

“I’m very sorry. You were a lucky young man, though, who had parents who cared and sacrificed.”

“Yes, I was. So you think — you have some conspiracy theory about my father? Do you have a radio show or something?”

“No, sir. I’m not in this for the money. I’m just a Marine trying to get some old business straightened out. Believe it or not, it connects with the death of still another member of that generation, a boy who died in Vietnam. That was another great loss for his family and our country.”

“Who are you?”

“I was with that boy when he died. May seventh, 1972. He bled out in my arms. This is something I been working on a long time.”

“Urn,” said the boy.

“Look, I know you’re busy. You must be. But I was hoping you’d have a cup of coffee with me. I’d like to talk about your dad. I want to know about him.”

“He was quite a guy,” the boy said. “Or so I hear.” He looked at his watch. “Hell, why not? I have nothing else to do.”

Bonson was debriefing the team in the Rossyln safe house. It was not a happy time.

“I warned you he was good. You people were supposed to be the best. What the hell went on?”

“He was good. He was professional. He read us, burned us and turned us when it suited him,” came the answer. “Sometimes people are just too good and they can do that to you. That’s all.”

“All right, let’s go through it again, very carefully.”

For what seemed the tenth time, the team narrated their one day of adventures with Bob Lee Swagger, where he’d been, what they’d learned, how indifferent to them he seemed, how swiftly and effectively he had slipped them.

Bonson listened carefully.

“Usually there’s a moment,” one of the ex-FBI agents said, “when you can tell you’ve been burned. There was nothing like that this time. He just disappeared.”

“I figure he made it out back, cut through the neighborhood behind us and called a cab from another little shopping center about a mile away. Or maybe he went up to the roof and waited until nightfall and slipped away.”

“You didn’t see him interact with anybody?”

“Nobody.”

“He had no contacts?”

“He made those phone calls.”

“We did get that, sir.”

The agents had written down the numbers of the phone booths and through them tracked the destinations of the calls, which turned out to be the American embassy in London, first the general number, and the next day the office of the Marine NCOIC of the embassy guard.

“We could have inquiries made.”

“No, no, I know what he was asking about. He’s very smart, this guy. He looks like Clint Eastwood and talks like Gomer Pyle and yet he’s got a natural gift for this sort of thing. He’s very—”

It was at this time an earnest young man entered the room.

“Commander Bonson,” he said, “Sierra-Bravo-Four is on the phone.”

Bonson looked about himself, stunned, then took the phone and waited for the switchboard to route it to him.

“Bonson.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four here,” he heard Swagger’s voice.

“Where the hell are you?”

“You didn’t tell me about the baby-sitters.”

“It’s for your own good.”

“I work alone. I made that clear, Bonson.”

“We don’t do it that way anymore. You have to come in. You have to come under control. It’s the only way I can help you.”

“I need some questions answered.”

“Where are you? I can have you picked up in an hour.”

There was a pause.

“I’m outside, asshole.”

“What?”

“I said, I’m outside, with a cellular I picked up at the Kmart a few minutes ago.”

“How did—”

There was a clang as something hit the window.

“I just threw a rock at your window, asshole. Good thing it wasn’t an RPG; you wouldn’t last long in a war, asshole. I rented another car and followed the baby-sitters you had staking out my car back to your place. Now, let me in and let’s start talking.”

Swagger came in, past the team whom he had so adroitly outmanaged.

“All right, people, get out of here. I’ll talk to him.”

“Do you need security, Commander?” said an ex-state cop, correctly reading the anger in Bob’s body.

“No. He’ll see reason. He knows this isn’t a pissing contest between him and this team, right, Swagger?”

“You just answer my questions and we’ll see what’s what.”

The men and women he had vanquished slid out of the room and then Bonson took him into another one, neatly set up as an operational HQ with computer terminals and phone banks. A few technicians worked the consoles.

“Okay, everybody on break,” Bonson called.

They too left. Bob and Bonson sat down on a beat-up sofa.

“I got the name of your Russian.”

“All right,” said Bonson.

“His name was Robert Fitzpatrick; he was affiliated with GRU, according to the Brits. But they don’t have nothing on him, what he was up to.”

“Swagger, good. Damn, you are an operator. I’m impressed. So what did you do with this? Where did you go?”

“You’ll find out when I put it all together, which I ain’t done yet, but I have some ideas. What have y’all got on this guy? I need to find out who he was or is, what became of him, what this is all about. He had the Brits buffaloed. They only found out he was operating in their country after he was long gone.”

“Fitzpatrick,” said Bonson. “Fitzpatrick was a recruiter. That was his specialty. He was one of those seductive, smooth presences who just gulled people into doing what he wanted, and they never, ever knew he was persuading them. You see, that’s what’s interesting about him. I don’t think Trig was his only project. I think he may have recruited others, and whatever his business with Trig was, it wasn’t the main reason he came to the United States.”

“What was he doing?”

“He was recruiting a mole.”

“Man,” said Bob, “this shit is getting fucked up. Secret-agent crap, like some paperback novel. I do not want to be a part of this shit. My mind don’t work that way.”

“Nevertheless, that was his great gift, his special talent. We know a little more about him than the Brits — and the timing works out right.”

“What do you mean?”

“For the past twenty years, the Agency has been in a curious down cycle. It seems to have had an enormous fund of bad luck. Every once in a while we smoke somebody out. In the early eighties, there was a guy named Yost Ver Steeg. A little later there was Robert Howard. Early in the nineties, we finally caught onto Aldrich Ames. And we think, well, that’s it, we’re clean at last. But somehow it never quite pans out that way. It never does. We’re always a little behind, a little slow, a little off. They’re always a little ahead of us. Even after the breakup, they’ve stayed strangely ahead of us. I’m convinced he’s here. I can feel him. I can smell him. He’s someone you’d never believe, someone totally secure. He’s not in it for the money; he’s not so active he’s obvious. But he’s here, I know it, goddammit, and I will catch him. And I know this goddamn ‘Fitzpatrick’ recruited him in the year 1971 when he was in this country. And, goddammit, I just missed him that year. I was a couple of hours slow, because your pal Fenn wouldn’t roll over for me.”